José Guadalupe Posada drew a female skeleton, the Calavera Garbancera. According to Excélsior, the figure mocked people who “buscaban aparentar una posición social superior y renegaban de sus orígenes” (tried to appear to have a higher social position and denied their origins). Today she is known as La Catrina.
Posada died on January 20, 1913. According to the same report, the first documented printing of the image dates from October 1913, in a broadsheet of the Vanegas Arroyo workshop.
In the 1960s, the cartoonist Rius drew Los Supermachos, a political comic set in San Garabato, an invented Mexican village. How he lost it is told in two ways. A 2002 article in Universo, the newspaper of the University of Veracruz, says: “El editor de la revista, presionado por el gobierno, le quitó los personajes a Rius” (The magazine’s editor, under pressure from the government, took the characters away from Rius).
The comics encyclopedia Lambiek says instead that Rius left the series in 1967 after a dispute with his publisher over editorial censorship.
Mandar indirectas, “to send indirect remarks,” is everyday Mexican usage, also in politics. On December 27, 2021, SDP Noticias reported: “Aseguran que AMLO mandó indirectas en la mañanera a ‘lambiscones’ y ‘aduladores'” (They say AMLO sent hints at his morning press conference to “bootlickers” and “flatterers”).
Calladito te ves más bonito, “you look prettier quiet.” In 2015, Matador Network in Spanish described it as “una cordial invitación mexicana a abandonar una discusión antes de que el tono suba demasiado” (a cordial Mexican invitation to leave an argument before the tone rises too far). The feminine form, calladita te ves más bonita, appears in a TV Azteca list of Mexican sayings.
A buen entendedor, pocas palabras. “For one who understands well, few words.” A study of sayings in Decires, a journal of UNAM, notes that refranes are often expressed “parcialmente por razones de un estilo sugerente” (only in part, for the sake of a suggestive style). Their sense “se da siempre por sentado” (is always taken for granted).