Calavera Baseball Cards: Fusing Ethnicity with the National Pastime

By Anthony Salazar

Take Fernando Valenzuela, Sammy Sosa, Luis Tiant along with Eric Chávez, Hideki Matsui, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, throw in some muerto pop art and what do you get?

Baseball cards with a calavera flair.

This is pure fusion, the merry confluence of Mesoamerican and pre-Columbian art with Mexican iconography and the singular American hobby of card collecting.

While the idea of creating art out of baseball cards is not a new concept, integrating the calavera is. Calavera is an artistic rendering of the human skull popular in Mexican art, especially graphic art dating to the Mexican Revolution. Combining calaveras within the format of a baseball card creates a unique and powerful connection between ethnicity and the national pastime, allowing for the appreciation of something important to our Mexican heritage.

It moved me so much that this summer I presented the work of Joaquín Alejandro Newman — an Oakland-based artist of Yaqui, Mexican and European heritage — during a lecture entitled, “The Integration of Baseball Cards and Chicano Pop Art,” at the annual convention for the Society for American Baseball Research. As chair of the SABR Latino Baseball Committee, it was for me a neat triple play, an event combining three of the organization’s areas of research: Latino baseball, baseball cards and baseball in the arts.

Newman’s work had been commissioned in 2006 to complement concurrent events sponsored by the Oakland Museum of California. That year the annual Mexican holiday, Día de los Muertos — or the Day of the Dead — coincided with a traveling exhibit called “Baseball as America,” put together by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

For his subjects, Newman selected baseball cards depicting El Toro, Sosa, Chávez, Bonds and McGwire. He made his choices based on the way they made him feel as he looked at baseball card collections at trade shows or comic conventions.

While he had very few cards of his own, most of the nostalgia that emerged in his art was based on recollections from his grandfather, father and uncles, all of whom were fans of these players. He was inspired because of the memories they evoked, including good times with his family. By creating baseball cards with calavera iconography using oils on 18-by-24-inch canvas, Newman discovered a new way to combine his heritage and the sport.

From his artistic interpretations, he gives us the following:

Sammy Sosa

Newman created a hybrid of the Sosa card using a 1990 Score and a 1990 Topps, which to me looks much better. He says, “It’s funny, I can’t find the references I used for these paintings, back in 2006, but I had the concept of ‘mashup’ and ‘sampling’ in my head and on my brush with many of my cultural fusion paintings.”

Eric Chávez

I told Newman that I tried in vain to figure out the Chávez picture and what baseball card might have been the inspiration. Newman remembers not loving the background of one of the Chávez cards and wanted something more dynamic. He and other artists saw all Latino cultural assets as ideal for experimenting, much like rearranging colors and shapes in a cover of a “standard” makes an artwork your own, which he compares to a musical riff on an already great established piece of music.

Fernando Valenzuela

Newman’s image is a great interpretation of Valenzuela’s 1984 Topps card. In Calavera Fernando, Valenzuela is pictured as the skeleton icon in two images, while the Dodgers become the “Deaders.”

Mark McGwire

Muerto McGwire portrays the 1986 Donruss Mark McGwire rookie card. The “Rated Rookie” text on the card becomes Muerto Rookie, while “Donruss” becomes “Dead.” According to Newman, while McGwire was a family favorite, the painting also pays homage to the outstanding play of the Oakland A’s during that era, a young team on the rise that won the World Series in 1989.

Barry Bonds

The calavera version of the Barry Bonds 1987 Topps card shows the future home run king as “Barry Bones” — fitting for a Pirate. The Pittsburgh logo is treated to a makeover as well. Newman adds that his father was a diehard Giants fan, especially during the years Bonds spent with them. This painting pays homage to his father.

Luis Tiant

These next two cards were not part of Newman’s 2006 set, but were created at my prompting for the 2017 SABR conference. El Tiante’s 1975 Topps card has a colorful red and yellow background with a great action photo of the Cuban pitcher. El Muerto Tiante depicts Tiant with elongated and powerful arms and bones. And here, the “Red Sox” become the “Dead Sox.”

Hideki Matsui

Newman remembers appreciating the look of Matsui, the Japanese left-handed hitter who played with the New York Yankees. He also had an affinity for the player, after spending a couple of years as a teen in a town 20 miles north of Tokyo. He recalls the experience of being a foreigner in a new land, and wondered whether the two had shared any experiences. To celebrate the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants’ expat, Newman painted “Calavera Godzilla” from a combination of the 1993 BBM Yomiuri Giants Rookie Card and a 2002 Calbee “Be Excited” subset (EX-9) showing him hitting home run 300.

Featured Image: Jessica Tennant

Inset Images: Joaquín Alejandro Newman