The Mexican illustrator José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) is best known today for his popularization of calaveras — fully-dressed, grinning skeletons posed as if in the full flush of life. Calaveras have come to symbolize the Mexican Day of the Dead, or Día de los Muertos, and, in some sense, Mexico itself. But they are just part of Posada’s prolific output. Over the course of a career estimated to have produced over 20,000 individual engravings, Posada developed a reputation for his biting political satire. He extended his iconic graphic style in all directions: capturing national events and everyday life, designing chapbook covers, and illustrating stories, advertisements, and more. But Posada also applied himself to the gruesome and the sensational: natural disasters and crimes, kidnapping and executions, floods and fires. One corner of his oeuvre is monsters, demons, and reports of so-called “freak births”.

Like the calaveras, Posada’s “monster” images teeter between morbidity and lightheartedness. Some balance shock value and sensitivity. In A Girl with Two Faces, Posada seems to have focused his attention on rendering the child’s cool, direct gaze. Others are more crude, even cruel. In one engraving dated around 1894, a woman lies shrouded on a table as two onlookers react with cartoonish shock: “¡Caso Raro!”, announces the broadsheet, “a woman who gave birth to three children and four animals.” The woman and infants, laid out side by side, look to be in a grave state. The creatures cavorting under the table, on the other hand, are full of life. They are described in ghastly detail: “the father . . . affirms that the animals have well-defined shapes, round eyes like a rooster and curved nails like a scorpion.”

This broadsheet is a tabloid with pretensions to medical case study, relishing in the particulars and full of journalistic specificity. No information is left out: birthday, town, and state are recorded, along with the hometown of the informant, and the exasperation of a judge who unsuccessfully “ordered that the animals be presented to this Court.” Documented, too, are the length of the “animals” (nine inches) and the names of the children (Melchor, Baltazar, and Gaspar: the three kings), who are reported to have lived to reach their baptisms. Less lucky were the four animals, buried alive, and the “poor woman”, who is said to have died soon after giving birth.

While the particulars of this case were new, accounts of “freak births” would have been a familiar genre for Posada’s readers. In her book Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico, Latin Americanist Nora E. Jaffary writes of the popularity of monstrous birth reports. In a twenty-year period almost a century before Posada’s prints, Jaffary counts at least fifty notices of unusual births (multiple births and that of progeny deemed “monstrous”) in the Gazeta de México, the country’s first newspaper. These reports, unlike those of the Old World, did not just betray “loathing or freak show curiosity” (although there was certainly some of that too), but also “wonder, affection, and pride.” Pride, that is, in the colonial state’s scientific productions (unusual births were opportunities for medical study) and in “New Spain’s prodigious fertility”.

By Posada’s time, this preoccupation with monstrous birth had only intensified, becoming altogether less nuanced. The predominant attitude toward “unusual births” by the end of the eighteen hundreds was one of “revulsion and horror”, and a new popular press projected sensational, low-brow stories to an ever-growing public. Given that only about twenty percent of the population was literate at the time, Posada’s images would have helped to disseminate these stories to wider audiences.

But to say that Posada was simply catering to “the taste for the lurid and novel” would be writing off the artist too quickly. The visual language Posada developed was a key inspiration for later generations of Mexican artists, including Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco — so too was his political activism. Historians agree that Posada was not necessarily the revolutionary that Rivera and his milieu would have him remembered as, but he was in all ways an artist of the people. His art taps into a popular consciousness: but popular consciousness does not always mean progressive social critique.

As the cultural critic Ilan Stavans writes, “equally enjoyable, and most attractive to me, is the Posada who transports us to a universe of gothic, at times grotesque, magical, and bizarre incidents, or Posada the anarchist, dwelling on catastrophe, satire, and death. Death, in fact, is his primary preoccupation, as far as I am concerned — not an existential, painful death, but one that is irrevocable, social, and egalitarian.” Posada’s “universe is full of bats, griffins, skeletons, animal hybrids, snakes, explosions, pistols, demons, ghosts, and deformities.” Perhaps these gruesome characters should be taken seriously in their own right, rather than viewed merely as a side chapter in Posada's portfolio.

For another unusual birth, see our essay on Mary Toff and her extraordinary delivery of rabbits.