“Representation matters” has become a clarion call from marginalized groups who have historically been excluded from the entertainment industry, and particularly from film. Hollywood has answered that call, at least to a degree, with films like Marvel’s Black Panther, which featured a majority Black cast and crew, and Pixar’s Coco, which folded Latinx influence into every facet of its production from voice actors to writers to cultural consultants.
As we approach Coco’s one year anniversary (and El Día de Los Muertos, the Mexican holiday on which Coco is based), I revisited the sumptuous film, looking, just as I did when I saw it the first time, for answers. I wanted to see if, as “representation” promises, I could find refuge in works of art in our increasingly brutal social climate. Perhaps I was influenced by Elizabeth Warren’s controversial DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry, or maybe yet another year under Trump’s presidency has simply narrowed my options for escapism (everywhere, in everything, I see a context of cruelty). But what I found instead in Coco was a reminder of the importance of looking to our ancestors in times of struggle.
When we ask for a character who “represents” us onscreen, I wonder if what we’re more accurately asking for is a conjuring trick; a successful mirage. To request that our lived experiences be channeled through fictional characters, in my mind, at least approaches the mystical. I encountered one such character in Coco, a film in which I found a lot to love, and a lot to critique — and in which I found my abuela as well, her spirit taking avatar in the titular character, Coco: brown, ancient, stoic.
My Abuela died two years ago. Her funeral was held days before my family and I made our way to Mexico to celebrate El Día de Los Muertos, and days before the 2016 election results came in. Her death, in my mind, is part and parcel to all that. When she was alive, things were better. When she died, things were worse.
I confess, I teared up at the very beginning of the film, when I first set eyes on Coco sitting in a wheelchair, wrinkled, in a state of forgetting. My abuela suffered from dementia before her death, and as with any successful magic trick, I believed I could reach out and touch Coco’s hand, which would surely feel like my abuela’s, and ask her if she knew me.
I understand the time we live in as a time of dying. Our institutions, our relative sense of comfort, our notions of kindness, our optimism — I feel they are all dying, and I feel all attempts to portray it otherwise are artifice; are desperate and untrue. For queer people and Latinx people, an urgency colors everything, saturates existence, and can’t be ignored no matter where one retreats. Daily experience is reduced to a binary of rage and exhaustion.
But here is where the Mexican concept of death brings comfort. I’ve always thought that if El Día de Los Muertos weren’t so visually appealing — if it weren’t for the colorful calacas and calaveras, the marigold flowers — more non-Latinx white people would be aghast at it. It is not, as it is sometimes portrayed, a celebration of life in spite of death, a concept Western culture and its Christianity delights in. It is a celebration of death itself: death as God and creator, death as not just a part of life, but as indistinguishable from life at all.
The holiday is, as its core, macabre from a Western point of view, even if the Indigenous tradition has largely been absorbed and synthesized into Catholicism, thanks to colonial efforts by the Spanish. Mexican poet Octavio Paz said it well in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “To the people of New York, Paris, or London, ‘death’ is a word that is never pronounced because it burns the lips. The Mexican, however, frequents it, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and most steadfast love.”
In our perilous time, I hold this concept closer than ever. As I prepare to celebrate El Día de Los Muertos, and to mourn, I embrace the cyclical nature of reality as dictated in my ancestors’ living texts. I remind myself that there have been struggles before, and there will be struggles again, and it is my duty to bring every good thing I can into this life. One need not have familial ties with anyone to recognize that we exist in the context of living legacy; that what we leave behind will intimately impact the future.
I have my criticisms of Coco, which broadly reflect criticisms of the way Mexico as a nation has repackaged El Día de Los Muertos for popular consumption, placing a heavy emphasis on the holiday’s aesthetics and deemphasizing its Indigenous roots. Indigenous people and their demands continue to be erased in Mexico, and for an example of how Mexico has been eager to use the holiday as an economic boon, I direct you to the fact that it created an El Día de Los Muertos parade in response to a fictional one held in a James Bond film.
While Coco inspires pride in my Mexican heritage with how beautifully it portrays our cultural themes and lived experiences, I have to say I also felt pride with how the film struggled to incorporate the Mexican concept of death into the Disney Pixar format. The return of the dead into the land of the living through a friendly TSA checkpoint is a comedic, if cosmetic, remedy to an impossible conundrum: How do we negotiate this complicated, distinctly Mexican view of death with a wider audience?
That being said, I love Coco. My favorite part is the ofrenda, the ceremonial altar upon which we place pictures, favorite foods, and cherished objects of our loved ones to guide them on their way home. At a time when death is all around us — when we have so much to mourn — I find building my ofrenda cathartic.
We light our candles. We ask our ancestors to guide us. We promise to remember.
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