Mexican Calendar Girls
the golden age of calendar art: 1930-1960

by Angela Villalba
forward by Carlos Monsiváis

A truly popular art form, the glamorous paintings of Mexican calendar girls have a long and fascinating history—as advertisements, promotional gifts, and emblems of Mexican cultural heritage and pride. The result of years of research, this exciting and informative book shares more than 150 vibrantly colorful calendar images, plus archival photographs and other materials that illuminate their creation. A fully bilingual text gives an overview of the calendars' social and cultural history, along with biographies of the unknown talented artists who painted them. Also including a foreword by the renowned Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis, Mexican Calendar Girls presents this popular and delightful art for the first time.

Día Internacional de la Mujer article

Angela Villalba's contribution to hispanic LA's 2010 special series, Día Internacional de la Mujer
Women and the Golden Age of Calendar Art

Mexican calendar art was a unique, ephemeral art form, often dismissed by the cultural elite as mere advertising. But to the Mexican public, the images of the calendar girls were embraced as the nostalgic emblems of Mexican culture and pride.

The calendars are painted snapshots of a distinctly Mexican world: a world that is perpetually beautiful, eternally in love, rife with revolutionary passion, provocatively sexy, relentlessly patriotic and ever poised for a fiesta!

The advertising art that was popularized after the Mexican Revolution reflected the changing image Mexicans had about themselves as well as the image of women. Women were glorified as soldaderas in the Mexican Revolution and painted as the sexy, confident, equals of men. Read the full story >>>