Figure Item Number: 3462/11 from the MOA: University of British Columbia
Day of the Dead figure. Figure depicts a skeleton seated in a red racecar. The car's body is thin, long, and T-shaped. It has two headlights and an exhaust pipe. Four tires and two side mirrors are attached to the body via metal rods. The steering wheel is shaped from a thin metal rod, and has been painted black. Details have been drawn on the car with black paint, including two doors, three horizontal, curved lines on the front of the body, and two vertical, wavy lines on the back. Small impressions have been made along the circumference of all four tires.
Figures like these, made by local artisans, have commonly been sold in indigenous markets throughout Mexico, especially for Day of the Dead celebrations. The figures are used as domestic decorations and presents for children. In 2019 Shelton noted that both the large Oaxaca market and the Sonora market in Mexico City had far fewer stalls selling this type of figure than there had been twenty years earlier. One maker in Oaxaca said domestic demand had declined, and that there were fewer artisans as many of the older makers had died and their children hadn't taken-up the craft. Some of the artisans make skeletal figures encased in glass, to sell to tourists through folk art shops.
Purchased directly from the maker in Oaxaca in 2019. Sra. Elipidia Chacon Ruiz told Shelton that her parents had also been potters in Oaxaca. She is in her 80s, and has taught her daughters and their children how to make the figures. She also told him it was the younger members of her family that came up with the idea of making skeletons in cars and racing cars.