Luis Fitch started asking U.S. postal authorities if he could design a postage stamp when he was a teenager. Fitch was born in Tijuana but moved to San Diego when he was 18.
“Every two days, I would go to the post office downtown and ask, ‘how do you design a stamp?’ Fitch wrote in the 2021 fourth quarter of the Philatelic catalog from the U.S. Postal Service. “They finally gave me a pamphlet stating the rules, which are that you have to submit a portfolio and that was the end of it.”
Fitch, a stamp collector as a youngster who started designing logos at the age of 14, went on to study art and start his own design firm, UNO Branding, of Minneapolis, a firm that specializes in cross-cultural Latino branding.
Thirty-seven years later – now an accomplished artist and designer with a portfolio, from art exhibits to diverse commercial clients such as Bungalow Flooring, Hallmark Cards and Thermo-Serv LTD. – Fitch got the call.
U.S. Postal Service Art Director Antonio Alcalá discovered his work while visiting an exhibition at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. “Luis had a few large, graphic, bold prints on display within this show. I noted his name and looked him up later.”
The result: When Alcala was assigned to create a stamp commemorating the Day of the Dead – Día de los Muertos, in Spanish – he knew who to call. Fitch finally got to design a U.S. postage stamp and the mailing public has its first-ever tribute to a traditional Mexican holiday that has a growing following in the U.S. If you take a look at Fitch’s “Drawing Blood” series of artworks you can see why he was a natural fit for these stamps.
An estimated 36.6 million Hispanics of Mexican origin lived in the United States in 2017, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Mexicans are the largest population of Hispanic origin living in the United States, accounting for 62 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population in 2017. Since 2000, the Mexican-origin population has increased 76 percent.
The pane of 20 Forever stamps has five identical rows of four stamps featuring several iconic elements of a traditional Day of the Dead offering (Figure 11). Stylized, decorated “sugar skulls” are personalized as family members — a child with a hair bow, a father sporting a hat and mustache, a mother with curled hair, and another child. The vibrant colors of marigold flowers and other embellishments, along with the white of the sugar skulls, stand out brightly from the stamps’ black background.
Figure 11. Technical details and purchasing information for the Day of the Dead stamps are available here.
The stamps were issued September 30 in a ceremony at the El Paso Museum of Art in El Paso, Texas.
The annual Mexican Day of the Dead celebration on November 1 and 2 “is a time when families gather to honor and remember deceased loved ones,” according to the Day of the Dead Festival website. “It is believed that the souls of the dead return to visit the living families in homes, businesses and cemeteries. The Aztec honored their dead with fiestas and rituals during the harvest season. They viewed death as the beginning of the cycle of seasons and life.”
For those of us still uncertain about the concept behind these stamps, I recommend a fun way to catch up would be to watch Coco (2017), the animated flick from Disney.
“Día de Muertos has begun!” Abuelita Elena, a character in Coco, explains. “It’s the one night of the year our ancestors can come visit us. Tonight is about family!”
Often, remembrance altars – filled with symbolic items – are created to honor the departed. Among the items placed are sugar skulls, candles, drinks of various types and marigolds. Music in honor of departed is played at home and in ceremonies.
The skulls are often made of granulated sugar, meringue powder and water, noted an October 2019 article in Smithsonian magazine about the Day of the Dead. The mixture is molded into the shape of a skull and decorated with brightly colored ornamentation. “The skulls represent the people who have passed and who are receiving offerings at the altar,” says Silvia Natalia Islas, promotional director of La Casa del Artesano, a consortium of artisans located in historic Tlaquepaque, a municipality of Guadalajara, whose members created a massive outdoor altar in remembrance of other artisans who have died. “The sugar symbolizes the sweetness of life.”
It is believed that the scent of the marigolds’ bright orange blooms help attract souls to the altar. Favorite drinks of deceased honored individuals are included on the altar, as are salt (to help quench the thirst of souls), photographs (to draw souls to the altar to help them cross over) and special bread (to feed the soul) shaped like skull and crossbones.
The Day of the Dead stamps certainly have a jarring presence to those who might not be familiar with the holiday. The U.S. has a couple of other stamps showing a skeleton; one is a 19th century revenue stamp and the other a modern postage stamp based on the design of the revenue stamp (Figure 12).
Figure 12. The 15 stamps in the 1900s Celebrate the Century set issued in 1998 includes a design that recreates a 19th-century medicine revenue stamp showing a deathly skeleton battling a man holding a bottle of a cure-all drug.
The Smithsonian National Postal Museum website offers the following on the original stamp: “From 1872 to 1881, William E. Clarke of Providence, Rhode Island manufactured and sold Hunt’s Remedy, a cure-all wonder drug known in New York and New England since at least 1850. He used colorful, dramatic trade cards to advertise his product, including one that inspired a match and medicine stamp long popular among revenue collectors.
“The image on the front of the card shows a hale and hearty male patient wielding a bottle of Hunt’s Remedy against death, personified as a skeleton with a scythe and hourglass. The reverse lists no end of ailments against which the wonder drug has “never been known to fail,” including back pain, kidney problems, and “female diseases.”
“It was Clarke himself who first translated this masterpiece of Victorian trade imagery into philately. In 1879 or 1880, he commissioned the National Bank Note Company to engrave and print 9,000 copies of the 3-cent private die medicine stamp. It paid the federal excise tax on a 75-cent¢ bottle of his miracle cure and, like all private die stamps, afforded a terrific opportunity to advertise at the same time.”
More than a century later, Postal Service art director Carl T. Herrman created another stamp from the image. It commemorates the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, passed in the wake of a public outcry caused by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), as part of the 1900s set in the Celebrate the Century series issued in 1998.
Mexico started issuing Day of the Day stamps with a pair in 2009 (Figure 13) and have issued such stamps annually since.
Figure 13. Mexico started issuing Day of the Dead stamps annually in 2009. It wasn’t long before sugar skulls became prominent on the stamps, such as this one issued in 2012.
The year 2009 did not mark the first time Mexico issued a stamp with skeletons (Figure 14). On Nov. 9, 1963, Mexico issued a 1.20-peso airmail stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of illustrator José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913). The stamp shows a rendition of a skeletal Don Quixote astride his skeletal horse with several other skeletons being tossed about in their wake.
Figure 14. Skeletons – part of a work by Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada – appeared on this 1963 stamp from Mexico.
The ATA lists 100 stamps (Figure 15) showing skulls and skeletons worldwide. These include Canada, with two in its Haunted Canada series – Hotel Caribou (2015) and Fort George Soldiers (2016); Portugal and Belgium joint issue (2014) of a stamp honoring anatomy research by Andreas Vesalius; and Bophuthatswana, an enclave within South Africa, with a safe-driving stamp (1978).
Figure 15. Many countries other than Mexico have shown skeletons on stamps. These three – from Canada, Portugal and Bophuthatswana, an enclave of South Africa – all present different subject matter.
I know these aren’t the first marigolds on U.S. stamps – check out the 1994 Summer Garden Flowers stamps (Figure 16) and the third stamp in the 2014 Farmers Market strip – but these flowers are not common on U.S. stamps, nor anywhere. The latest list from the American Topical Association lists only 92 marigolds stamps worldwide.
Figure 16. The strip of five 1994 U.S. Garden Flowers stamps includes a tribute to marigolds.
“Across the world the marigold flower holds powerful symbolism, and it has become a part of many cultural celebrations throughout its painted history,” says the Buchanan’s Native Plants website. “They are used to make natural dyes, as a poor man’s saffron, to make garlands and eaten as an edible flower in cakes and other dishes. Their seeds were spread around the world by the Spanish and Portuguese explorers and thus, hybrids have naturalized in other countries.”
“Known (in Mexico) as the Flower of the Dead or Flor de Muerto, the marigold is said to attract the souls of the dead,” Buchanan’s goes on to say. “During this important celebration, grave sites are decorated with marigolds and the flowers are used to decorate private altars, or ofrendas, constructed in honor of those passed. … The marigold flowers guide the spirits to these alters by following the flowers scent and vibrant colors. ”
Antonio Alcalá – art director
When did you start working on these stamps?
October 2018
I read a quote from the artist that he doesn’t consider these images as “death,” but as “living persons.” Any idea if he thought of anyone specific as he designed these stamps?
I don’t know but I would be surprised if he did.
Is there any significance to the colors in the stamps – such as each character’s eyes are a different color – or was this simply the artist’s creativity?
Orange marigolds are commonly associated with the commemorations. Beyond that I am unaware of any specific color “meaning” to the characters’ eyes. I’m assuming they are aesthetic choices.
Since I’m ignorant to Day of the Dead art, is there any significance to colors in Day of the Dead iconography?
No “special” significance other than the marigold flowers. But this color palette consists of colors found often in Mexican culture. White sugar skulls or calaveras are often part of the ofrendas or commemorative tableaus central to the holiday. And they are often decorated with bright colored icing and decorations.
The flowers are marigolds. How do marigolds relate to the Day of the Dead?
The scent and bright color of the flower is meant to help entice dead relatives to come back for a visit during the celebration.
Did you consider a single stamp or was this planned as a group of four? How did you reach the end design of showing a member of a family on each stamp?
The earliest concepts all included four different stamps. It was the illustrator who proposed designs representing four family members, as honoring and commemorating family is at the core of the Day of the Dead celebrations.
Can you explain the process that the artist and you used to create these stamps?
The process was fairly easy as the artist is Mexican-American and familiar with Day of the Dead. We mostly spoke about how this would be the first time USPS issued stamps commemorating Day of the Dead. The movie Coco really did a wonderful job creating a positive understanding of the celebration across the United States. We wanted to tap into that same, positive, happy experience.
A nice element is that the stamps are interconnected at each margin by the flowers at the perforation. Did you come up with that after you saw the artist’s designs or did you ask him to make that an element of the design?
Luis Fitch had this as part of one of his initial proposals.
Are the green leafy elements a specific plant?
Not that I know of.