‘Coco’ Sings the Ache for the Loyal and the Ambitious

***Spoilers for the movie the Pixar film, COCO. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, come back and check this out after you have.*** Sometimes seeing a reflection of yourself makes you feel like unearthing a picture of an ancestor. I imagine that this is why my sisters and I would watch Selena obsessively, why her wave — that specific finger-to-palm dance — still sticks so clearly in my mind. In Coco, Miguel Rivera obsessively watches footage of Ernesto de La Cruz, a famous long-dead singer, for similar reasons. He says he feels a connection to him that he can’t explain. Because his family has banned music for generations, he has to escape into a little attic, his guitar in tow, and sits with his shrine to the dead star. He mimics de La Cruz’s hand movements to get the sound just right. When de La Cruz says “You have to seize your moment,” Miguel, with his eyes pressed up against the screen, feeling something ancient, says, “you have to make it come true!” Coco Meaning Family This movie, with it’s colorful skeleton fingers, held up a mirror for us. It showed us our petty mothers, our moaning music, our piles of tamales. It also reminded us that we all have to die. As a child of immigrants in the United States and a poet, and someone who also one day has to die, I have a complicated relationship with the American Dream and “seizing” my moment. I think am constantly negotiating between living for myself and living for my family. I felt a kinship in this with Miguel, whose family …