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Coco, the highest-grossing film in Mexican history, was playing on multiple screens at the local multiplex here in Oaxaca during Day of the Dead week in October, with show times from morning til night.
My oldest daughter saw the Spanish-language version of the Disney/Pixar cartoon twice—once with her high school friends, and again with us—both times crammed into a theater full of Mexican families.
Coco’s gorgeous animation captures the eerie beauty of the Day of the Dead. The warm glow of candlelight and marigolds in the cemetery at night, and the antique Mexican musical soundtrack, reminded us of our own recent Day of the Dead experience—gathering with our neighbors in the local graveyard, where a brass band played and people ate, drank, and danced among the flower-bedecked tombs.
My daughters’ friends here in Mexico loved the movie.
“I think it’s accurate,” said Luis, her friend from high school. He liked the fact that a U.S.-made movie depicts Mexicans without all the old stereotypes (“big hats, mustaches, eating tacos”). The movie’s portrayal of strong Mexican women also struck him as apt. “In Mexico, family is the most important thing,” Luis said. “And usually there is a grandmother or a mom who is the most important person in the family.”
It’s hard to say how American audiences will react when Coco hits theaters in the United States this week.
It doesn’t seem quite right that the film opened on Thanksgiving Day. Halloween might have been a better fit. The cartoon’s walking, singing, capering skeletons will likely strike some U.S. audiences as creepy and macabre.
After all, death is not a big family holiday theme in the United States, the way it is in Mexico.
We Americans are fervent practitioners of denial when it comes to death. Not only that, we are pretty resistant, as a culture, to Coco’s central message: that our families help define who we are, and that we owe it to our ancestors to remember them.
America’s foundational myth is that each of us makes our own destiny. And we Americans are so practiced at overlooking our own past that we can sit down on Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the ridiculous, ahistorical idea that the United States is “traditionally” a white, English-speaking country.
Especially now, in the era of Donald Trump, we could gain something from contemplating another way of looking at life, culture, and our place in the world.
That’s why my husband and I are spending the year here in Mexico with our kids. It has been good for them, and for us, to get away from the United States, and to get a fresh perspective.
The good news is that, Donald Trump’s toxic anti-Mexican ranting aside, our polyglot country, however boorish and blind, is also adept at integrating the art and culture of peoples around the world. No wall, real or imagined, is going to reverse the growing popularity of Latin music and culture in the United States, or our country’s general demographic trends.
The Spanish-speaking cast of Coco made a point of calling out Trump and bolstering young people with Latin American roots at the release parties for Coco.
No wall, real or imagined, is going to reverse the growing popularity of Latin music and culture in the United States, or our country’s general demographic trends.
“Coco celebrates our uniqueness, celebrates the fact that we’re a community of love and family ties, artistic expression, beautiful language, and wonderful traditions,” Coco star Benjamin Bratt, who is half-Peruvian, told People magazine.
“I want to dedicate this film to all the children who have ancestors from Mexico and Latin America,” Gael Garcia Bernal, who plays one of the main characters, Hector, declared at the Variety premier. “In this moment, these kids are growing up with a lot of fear,” because of claims by Trump and others that they “come from families that come from rapists, murderers, and drug traffickers.”
Latin American kids surely deserve to see a better picture of themselves reflected in American pop culture than the hateful stereotypes promoted by Trump. But white Americans could let go of some of their fear and isolation, too.
The truth is, it’s high time we acknowledged our connections to and dependence on other people and countries around the world. Our anxious repetition that we are “the greatest nation on earth” leaves us alone and frightened—a big, bully nation that doesn’t have anyone to help it figure out how to live in an uncertain world, in which American dominance is on the wane.
It seems clear that part of the creeping anxiety we Americans are experiencing, and which has turned our domestic politics so toxic, is our inability to acknowledge our country’s obvious political and economic decline. What if we are not number-one anymore? Like death itself, we seem culturally incapable of facing this concept.
Like the United States, Mexico carries a heavy legacy of colonial oppression, genocide, and also tremendous cultural richness created by a mix of peoples. The Day of the Dead—a holiday with indigenous roots that has precious little to do with Western, Christian notions of life and death—is all about how each of us is defined by the people who went before us.
None of us invents a new identity on our own. Rather, we are all shaped by a long, imperfect history. As the word changes around us, we Americans can find some comfort in the way other cultures confront these facts of life. In the midst of struggle, pain, and even tragedy, there is also beauty and even fun.
This Thanksgiving, we gringos could gain a lot from contemplating those very Mexican themes.