Style combination · Pairs well
Chicano Screenprint Poster × Lotería Card Imagery
Chicano artists from Carmen Lomas Garza's 1972 tablas onward redraw the lotería card as a sign of Mexican-American home life; frame a screenprinted slogan or portrait as a numbered, named card to borrow that recognition.
Mix them and make something Chicano Screenprint Poster Lotería Card Imagery
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Chicano Screenprint Poster Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)
- Type from Lotería Card Imagery
- Colour from Chicano Screenprint Poster
- Form from Chicano Screenprint Poster
- Composition from Lotería Card Imagery
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Chicano Screenprint Poster avoids modular grid: this is where the two pull against each other.
- Surface from Chicano Screenprint Poster
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Lotería Card Imagery
Together
Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-drawn capitals on homemade tablas and artists' redrawn decks
Text · Chicano Screenprint Poster
The screenprinted poster of the Chicano Movement and its heirs, made from the mid-1960s in community workshops across California and the Southwest for farmworker strikes and boycotts, teatro, dances, anti-war marches and immigrant rights. Flat opaque inks, posterised portraits and bilingual slogans recast Mexican icons (the UFW eagle, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Posada's calaveras, Mexica glyphs) for the US barrio, often by parodying American packaging.
Archivo; Chicano Screenprint Poster used Hand-cut screen-stencil lettering and Bold sans and hand-drawn capitals for bilingual strike and boycott slogans
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Chicano Screenprint Poster, with a counter-accent from Lotería Card Imagery. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Chicano Screenprint Poster Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)
-
#f2eadbground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#f4a11caccent · 18% -
#c62f2aaccent · 14% -
#86c8e6accent · 10% -
#7a2d8caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2eadb;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #f4a11c;
--accent-2: #c62f2a;
--accent-3: #86c8e6;
--accent-4: #7a2d8c;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Chicano Screenprint Poster: The Virgin of Guadalupe is a devotional image for many Mexicans and Chicanos, and Chicana feminist reworkings of her have met protest. Mexica glyphs and calendar imagery carry Indigenous meaning, and the UFW black eagle is the union's own emblem, not a free motif. Use them with community context, credit the movement, and commission Chicanx printmakers rather than lifting the look for marketing.
Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería): Lotería is a living family game, played across Mexico and much of the United States and in parts of Central America, and a marker of Mexican and Mexican-American identity, so do not use it as generic 'Mexican' party decoration for products with no tie to those communities, and commission and credit Mexican, Central American and Chicanx artists when you redraw it. The standard deck's nine human figures are all stereotypes of Indigenous people, upper-class white people and Afro-Latinos (TIME, citing Gloria Arjona), most plainly El Negrito (No. 26) and El Apache (No. 38), stock figures of a Black man and a Native American, and other decks carry the same kind of figure (the feathered Indio with bow and arrow on Lomas Garza's 1972 tablas): do not reproduce them as period charm; replace them, as new decks freely do. The owners of Don Clemente Gallo (Pasatiempos Gallo) hold the registered trademark of the original images, so draw new emblems rather than tracing them, and write card names in correct Spanish instead of mock-Spanish.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Chicano Screenprint Poster
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Chicano parody works by quoting the clean corporate mark and corrupting it; study the brand's grammar before you subvert it.
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Pairs well · Both are solidarity screenprints; borrow OSPAAAL's single bold image and add Chicano bilingual wordplay and barrio iconography.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · Posada's calaveras are a shared ancestor; mix his relief skeletons with flat screen colour for Día de Muertos work with a political edge.
- Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting Pairs well · Chicano screenprinters reclaimed Mexica glyphs and calendar imagery for the movement; when contour-and-flat-colour glyphs meet a modern poster, follow their example of community context and credit. Mexica (Aztec) glyphs are a different source from these Mixtec and Borgia Group books: credit a codex source as such rather than folding it into 'Aztec'.
- AfriCOBRA Pairs well · Movement screenprints of the same years, made in and for their own communities: Chicano posters set one emblematic figure on flat colour, often parodying American packaging; AfriCOBRA packs the figure into a lettered, many-coloured field and stays sincere. Pair them, as both pair with the Panthers, for coalition work.
- Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves Pairs well · Another US Latino graphic voice; borrow its community iconography.
- Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP) Pairs well · Two Spanish-language screenprint traditions of the Americas; add Chicano bilingual slogans and posterised portraits to Puerto Rican letrismo for community event posters.
- Chilean Unidad Popular & Nueva Canción Graphics Pairs well · Both tie community walls to cheap posters for a movement; combine a black-contoured Ramona Parra frieze with Chicano bilingual screenprints for coalition street graphics.
With Lotería Card Imagery
- Kanga (Swahili Message Cloth) Contrasts · Both centre one motif in a frame above a line of capitals, but a kanga is a cloth whose printed Swahili saying is its message, while a lotería card prints only the emblem's name and leaves the verse to the caller's voice.
- West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs Contrasts · Both lay out named, numbered pictures in rows and columns, but a barbershop sign is one hand-painted menu of heads that differ only in their hairstyle, under the shop's boast, while a lotería tabla is a printed board of unrelated emblems, one of a set of boards that each hold a different selection from the same deck.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Contrasts · Both set picture signs on a grid, but Isotype's pictograms are reduced, uniform and repeated to count quantities, while every lotería emblem is a different, fully drawn picture with its own name, matched by chance and read aloud.
- Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen Contrasts · Both are cheap coloured popular prints of stock figures in ruled frames under capital captions, but an Épinal sheet tells a story or musters a row of soldiers across many cases, while a lotería card holds one emblem and the tabla's cells have no order: the caller draws them by chance.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · Posada himself printed a Juego de lotería; pair the lotería card's single framed emblem and name with his black relief calaveras and shouting broadside type for a Mexican popular-print voice that is both orderly and satirical.
- Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards Contrasts · Lotería also gives each card one figure with its name at the foot, but in letterspaced sans capitals and soft offset colour; borrow the tarot's carved roman title band, ruled frame and stencil drift to make a lotería-type card set look older and graver.
- Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Contrasts · Both are popular Mexican colour prints for everyday use, but the lotería sets one flat, outlined emblem figure per numbered card in a ruled frame, named in capitals at the foot, for a game, while the chromo paints one modelled scene in deep landscape to hang for a year.