2024 holiday postage stamps bring artistic and cultural diversity to yuletide season

As a youngster, Los Angeles-area artist Michelle Muñoz loved communicating with her cousins via cards and letters sent through the mail before the family members adapted to social media.

The approaching holidays offer a way to revive that tradition. Snail mail, Muñoz said, “is a nice thing. It reminds me of growing up. It’s like, when is the letter going to arrive? When you write a letter, it takes time and it’s more personal.”

The holiday cards she and countless others across the country will mail this year will bear the U.S. Postal Service’s 2024 “Holiday Joy” series, a set of four stamps featuring flowers and ornaments. For Muñoz, this year’s series is more special than most, not only because they echo her Mexican American upbringing – but because she herself helped design them.

Reflections of underrepresented communities have become a regular feature of postage stamps, such as the postal service’s Black Heritage and Lunar New Year collections. Artists like Muñoz and Antonio Alcalá, the U.S. Postal Service art director who recruited her to help create the holiday stamp, are another way the agency indirectly promotes such efforts.

“It’s important to me to try to bring in a more diverse representation of artists,” said Alcalá, a graphic designer in Washington, D.C., who joined the agency part-time after serving on its citizens’ stamp advisory committee, which recommends subjects for future consideration as stamp images.

For example, Alcalá worked with Alaskan Native and Native American artists to create images for last year’s Art of the Skateboard series and with Mississippi State University art professor Alex Bostic to produce a 2022 postage stamp honoring Edmonia Lewis, a late 19th-century sculptor of Black and Native American background. He also created this year's Hanukkah stamp.

Muñoz, whose family is from Jalisco, Mexico, grew up in Southern California, where she majored in studio art at California State University, San Bernardino, despite discouragement from her high school teachers about art as a career path.

Her freelance artwork, inspired by her Mexican American culture and love for nature, picked up during the pandemic, she said, and she’s collaborated with brands like Target and Amazon Music.

One day a random email appeared in her inbox. It was from Alcalá, who said he had seen her work on Instagram and thought she’d be a great fit for an upcoming holiday stamp series.

“It was such a big and important project,” said Muñoz, 29. “I wasn’t sure it was real. But it was very easy to say yes.”

Postage stamps reflect a country's national narrative

Laura Goldblatt, an assistant professor of English who studies state messaging and propaganda at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said postage stamps are a way to understand a country’s chosen narrative for its citizens, an index of historical moments.

Early U.S. stamps sported symbols such as flags and landmark figures like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin before the introduction of special-issue and larger-parcel stamps opened the doors to greater representation. In 1893, in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the postal service issued its first commemorative series noting the event.

Those stamps were the first U.S. postage stamps to feature a woman, Queen Isabella of Spain. In 1902, Martha Washington became the first American woman to be depicted on a stamp; five years later, Pocahontas became the first Native American to be honored.

“You started to see increasing diversity,” said Goldblatt, co-author of "The American Stamp: Postal Iconography, Democratic Citizenship and Consumerism in the United States." “The government was wrestling with the fact that the body politic was shifting and that those people were representative of the nation.”

Richard Handler, a professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia and Goldblatt's co-author, said the postal service in the 1940s began to recognize that its images of Americans could be drawn from fields other than politics or the military such as science, education, medicine or the arts.

"After World War II, this diversification of imagery grew exponentially," Handler said, as various constituencies pressured the postal service to honor people representing their communities. That would eventually lead to creation in 1957 of the agency's citizens' stamp advisory committee, he said, to both bring order to the process and shield the postal service from lobbying from interest groups.

Jared Bahir Browsh, a cultural historian at the University of Colorado Boulder, said the postal service has generally shied away from figures or themes deemed more controversial. For instance, the first Black American to be featured on a stamp was educator Booker T. Washington in 1940, but nearly six decades would pass before Washington’s contemporary, sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Dubois, would be so recognized in 1998.

“He was considered more radical,” Browsh said.

The postal service issued its first Kwanzaa stamp in 1997 and its first Diwali stamp in 2016. In more recent years it has honored Harvey Milk, one of the nation's first openly gay elected officials before he was assassinated in 1978 as well as deaf studies pioneer Robert Panara. Some communities are reflected through their culture, such as the postal service's Delicioso series, which featured images of tamales, ceviche and other Latino foods that have become part of the American fabric.

“The Postal Service’s goal is to create stamps that resonate with people from all walks of life,” Roderick Sallay, USPS' director of legislative policy and strategy development, said in a news release announcing the agency's 2024 Kwanzaa stamp earlier this year.

That mission has thrived even as DEI and diversity education efforts have come under attack from political conservatives. Incoming President Donald Trump even campaigned on the issue, claiming discrimination against white Americans and threatening to undo federal racial equity efforts.

Goldblatt, of the University of Virginia, said that while she doubts diversity in postage stamps would be seriously threatened given the income that such stamps produce for the postal service, "I could see someone saying we should just have flags, or presidents."

For the often underrepresented communities represented, recognition on postage stamps can offer a sense of validation.

“They are a material object universally used and seen by all Americans and even people internationally,” said historian and policy analyst Christopher Shaw, author of “First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy and the Corporate Threat.” “They’re a shared representation of the nation. If something is on a postage stamp, that shows it’s being acknowledged as being part of the American story.”

Alcalá agreed.

“Stamps are a way that the government says, this is who we are, this is who we represent and what we think is important for everyone to know about,” he said. “It’s exciting when someone sees something on a stamp that reflects them.”

How Muñoz' stamp designs came to be

While the 2024 Holiday Joy series isn’t explicitly Latino, the designs evoke Mexican folk art and artist Muñoz’s unique style and influences.

The process of bringing stamp designs from concept to fruition takes two to three years, Alcalá said. Committee recommendations are submitted for approval, then assigned to one of the agency’s four art directors. Directors then create the designs, often in collaboration with an outside illustrator or photographer.

Final designs are submitted to the Postmaster General for approval and reviewed for cultural insensitivity or potential legal liability. If a stamp honors a particular individual, for instance, “there’s legal review that needs to be done with the person’s estate,” Alcalá said. “Or – if the person is wearing a certain hat, we need to make sure it’s OK with the manufacturer.”

Once Muñoz agreed to take on the project, the two went back and forth – Muñoz submitting her designs, Alcalá recommending color changes or adjustments such as enlarging or removing details that would be too small to be visible in stamp size.

Muñoz said that while she wanted the project to reflect her Latina roots, she wanted the work to resonate with everyone, driven by ideals of family and table gatherings.

“There’s little elements I incorporated indirectly,” she said. For instance, her image of a poinsettia – a flower associated with Christmas and native to Southern Mexico – for her brought to mind visions of her childhood, when her mother would place poinsettias around the house and hang poinsettia ornaments on the family Christmas tree.

“I wanted to make it so that whenever someone sees it they feel happiness and joy,” Muñoz said. “But growing up in a Mexican household, I also wanted Mexican people to feel that connection and pride, that there’s a Latina representing stamps that will be used nationwide.”

When the designs were complete, Alcalá added typography – including the words, “Forever” and “USA” – that he felt would complement her artwork.

“I’m absolutely in love with how they turned out,” Muñoz said. “I never expected to have this opportunity. And especially during the holidays, when you’re sending cards and photos to loved ones, to know that I’m indirectly part of that makes me feel super happy.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How USPS' 2024 holiday stamps foster diversity: The backstory