Career Mom Goes Rogue

Visiting Day of the Dead with ‘Las Catrinas’ and @elchadsantos

To discover more Catrinas and Mexican portraits, follow @elchadsantos on Instagram.

(This interview was conducted in Spanish.)

Day of the Dead found Mexican photojournalist Iván “Chad” Santos (@elchadsantos) at a very early age. “When I was four or five years old, I was told that on the 1st and 2nd of November the souls of the dead would come to my house,” he says.

Iván’s initial shock turned into a passion over the years, and now he annually documents the “Catrinaje,” a word he uses to describe those who are disguised or painted as “La Calavera Catrina,” an early 20th-century illustration by Mexican painter José Guadalupe Posada that depicts death.

Iván captures representations of La Catrina because he considers them ephemeral: “Sugar skulls, pan de muerto [bread of the dead] and papel picado [perforated paper] haven’t changed that much since I was a child, but the makeup and characterizations of people last just one day,” he says.