A Chickpea Seller, a 1947 Mural and a Bond Film: How the Day of the Dead Reached Muertos Multiplier Megaways

Some time in the years before his death in 1913, the Mexico City printmaker José Guadalupe Posada etched a grinning female skeleton wearing a wide hat loaded with feathers. He called her La Calavera Garbancera. She was a joke at the expense of people who dressed up as Europeans and looked down on their own roots. More than a century later, a version of her face, painted white with flowers around the eyes, is one of the most recognised images on Day of the Dead themed slots, including Pragmatic Play's Muertos Multiplier Megaways. Very little of how she got there is what most people assume.

A satire, not an ancient goddess

The most common myth about the elegant skeleton now called La Catrina is that she is an Aztec deity carried forward intact. She is not. She is a twentieth century cartoon.

Posada worked for the popular presses of Mexico City, producing cheap broadsheets with verses and images for ordinary readers. His calaveras, skeletons doing the things living people do, were social commentary. The Garbancera targeted a specific type: the garbanceras were sellers of chickpeas, and the word came to describe people of Indigenous origin who hid that origin behind European fashion and powder. The joke was that under the hat, everyone is the same skeleton.

The name La Catrina and the fame both came later. In 1947 Diego Rivera painted the mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central). At its centre stands a full length skeleton in an elegant dress, with Posada himself on one side and a young Rivera on the other. Rivera gave the figure a full body and an elegant dress. The name she now carries comes from catrín, a word for a well dressed dandy, and the title Calavera Catrina was already attached to Posada's print when it appeared in a book in 1930. It is the mural, not the original print, that turned a newspaper satire into a national symbol.

There is an older story underneath. Historians do connect parts of today's festival to pre Hispanic rites for the dead, including observances in the Aztec world associated with Mictecacihuatl, a goddess of the underworld. But a link between a goddess and a twentieth century print is an interpretation offered after the fact. Where people present the Catrina as a direct portrait of Mictecacihuatl, that is a modern reading, and it is best labelled as one.

Not Mexican Halloween either

The second myth is calendar based. Because Halloween falls on 31 October and the main days of the Day of the Dead fall on 1 and 2 November, the two are often treated as versions of the same holiday. They are not.

The November dates match the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls. What happens on them in much of Mexico draws on Indigenous practice: families build ofrendas, home altars carrying photographs of the dead, candles, marigolds, food and drink the person enjoyed. Graves are cleaned and decorated, and families keep vigil. The tone is remembrance and welcome. The dead are expected as guests.

In 2008 UNESCO inscribed the "Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead" on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, after first proclaiming it in 2003. The recognition is for the Indigenous community practice, the altars and the vigils, not for skeleton costumes.

The parade that came from a film

The third myth is the newest. Many visitors now assume the large Day of the Dead parade through central Mexico City is an old tradition. It began in 2016.

The opening sequence of the James Bond film Spectre, released in 2015, shows a huge costumed procession through the city's historic centre. No such parade existed at the time; it was staged for the film. After the film came out, Mexico City organised a real one, and it has since become a regular event that draws large crowds. It is a clear case of fiction feeding back into practice, and of tradition being younger than it looks.

None of this makes the parade less real. It does show how quickly an image can harden into something people believe has always been there.

What survives on the reels

Pragmatic Play released Muertos Multiplier Megaways in October 2022. It is a straightforward example of how slot themes borrow: the game's art draws on painted skulls and Mexican motifs, and its Bonus scatter is a chilli pepper. The theme is decoration laid over a mathematical engine that has nothing to do with Mexico.

That engine is worth stating plainly, because it is the part a theme cannot change. The game runs on a 6 reel Megaways layout with up to 117,649 ways to win. Its published RTP is 96.03%, its volatility is rated high, and its maximum win is 10,000x the stake. Wild symbols carry a 2x or 3x multiplier, and the game's identity rests on how those multipliers combine during free spins.

Here the borrowing turns awkward. The Day of the Dead is a festival about memory and loss. Its central idea, that the dead return briefly to families who remember them, has no relationship to winning anything. A slot theme takes the look of the altars and the painted faces and attaches it to a product whose long run return is below what is staked. That is not unique to this game; slot themes have borrowed from Egyptian burial rites, Norse myth and Irish folklore in the same way. But it is worth noticing that the imagery on the reels began as satire about social pretension, was turned into a national emblem by a muralist, and only then became decoration.

The Catrina on a slot screen is, in that sense, three steps removed from Posada's chickpea seller. The original joke was that wealth and fine clothes cannot change what lies underneath. It still applies.

Sources

  • UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, entry 00054: Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead (inscribed 2008, proclaimed 2003). ich.unesco.org
  • Reuters footage archive, 2016: Mexico City holds its first Day of the Dead parade.
  • El Universal (Mexico), Cultura: "¿Quién inventó la Catrina?", on Posada's Calavera Garbancera and Rivera's 1947 mural.
  • European Gaming, 13 October 2022: Pragmatic Play's release announcement for Muertos Multiplier Megaways.
  • Game figures (RTP, volatility, maximum win, layout) are the provider's published figures.

Responsible gambling

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