Stylogeny combining Chicano Screenprint Poster × Mexican Calendar Chromo

Try

Style combination · Contrasts

Chicano Screenprint Poster × Mexican Calendar Chromo

Many Chicanos grew up with these give-away calendars hanging at home, and Chicano workshops took up the calendar as a fundraising print (Méchicano Art Center's 1977 Calendario), but, in Terezita Romo's words, revised its single image format, offset medium and commercial objective: screenprinted flat colour and political and cultural messages in place of a brand's modelled oil scene.

From the research on Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Mix them and make something Chicano Screenprint Poster Mexican Calendar Chromo

SQUAREChicano Screenprint × Mexican Calendar
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Chicano Screenprint Poster, their arrangement from Mexican Calendar Chromo, the finish from Mexican Calendar Chromo. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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 Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Type from Chicano Screenprint Poster
Colour from Chicano Screenprint Poster
Form from Chicano Screenprint Poster
Composition from Mexican Calendar Chromo
Surface from Mexican Calendar Chromo

02

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Chicano Screenprint Poster

Square

Londrina Solid, standing in for Bold sans and hand-drawn capitals for bilingual strike and boycott slogans ('¡Huelga!', 'Boycott Grapes')

Text · Mexican Calendar Chromo

Mexico's give-away advertising calendars, at their height from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Printers led by Galas de México kept studios of painters, among them Jesús Helguera, Eduardo Cataño, Jorge González Camarena and Josep Renau, whose large oil paintings were printed by offset above a sponsor's name and a small calendar pad. In an idealising academic realism touched by Hollywood glamour they staged Aztec legends as melodrama, charros and chinas poblanas, saints, film stars and pin-ups, and hung all year in homes, shops and workshops.

Archivo; Mexican Calendar Chromo used The sponsor's name and address overprinted in the band left blank below the picture and Brand logotypes painted into the picture or carried on the product

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Chicano Screenprint Poster, with a counter-accent from Mexican Calendar Chromo. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Chicano Screenprint Poster Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

  • #f2eadb ground · 36%
  • #141414 ink · 14%
  • #f4a11c accent · 18%
  • #d7262e accent · 14%
  • #7a2d8c accent · 10%
  • #1f6f4a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2eadb;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #f4a11c;
  --accent-2: #d7262e;
  --accent-3: #7a2d8c;
  --accent-4: #1f6f4a;
  --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.

Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos): The Aztec scenes are a nationalist fantasy of the pre-Hispanic past painted by academically trained artists, several of them born or raised in Spain, not Indigenous art: do not present them as Nahua or Mexica tradition or copy their feathered costumes as if they were ethnography. The saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe are devotional images that many owners pray before, so do not parody them, and the pin-ups were painted, as a UNAM study of the Galas archive puts it, to satisfy male longing and promote the sponsors' brands, carrying old and new stereotypes of women. The paintings are still in copyright (Helguera died in 1971) and Grupo Carso holds the rights to the Galas archive, while Alta reported in 2023 that Calendarios Landin owns the rights to Helguera, so paint new pictures in the manner rather than retouching old chromos.

04

The two styles

A bold illustrated screen reads “PLANTA JUNTOS” above a braided woman and a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, framed by corn plants and a rising sun. A seedling and red agricultural rows fill the foreground, with four circular navigation icons along the bottom. 1965–present · North America 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. A painted-style poster shows a smiling woman in a floral embroidered blouse and blue skirt seated beside wicker baskets of harvested agave hearts. Agave plants, a town with a domed church, and distant mountains fill the background beneath the red and gold word “Agave.” 1930–1970 · Latin America & Caribbean Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Mexico's give-away advertising calendars, at their height from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Printers led by Galas de México kept studios of painters, among them Jesús Helguera, Eduardo Cataño, Jorge González Camarena and Josep Renau, whose large oil paintings were printed by offset above a sponsor's name and a small calendar pad. In an idealising academic realism touched by Hollywood glamour they staged Aztec legends as melodrama, charros and chinas poblanas, saints, film stars and pin-ups, and hung all year in homes, shops and workshops.

05

More combinations

With Chicano Screenprint Poster

All 11 combinations with Chicano Screenprint Poster

With Mexican Calendar Chromo

All 13 combinations with Mexican Calendar Chromo

Every style combination