Coco

This year I decided to celebrate Día de Muertos for the first time in my life. Watching Coco brought back pieces of growing up in a Mexican household. Being fed until I couldn’t move. The grito at the start of a norteño song. The chancla, which nobody who grew up with it ever forgets.

Mostly, though, it brought back my family and my grandparents, and the warmth they kept in that house. Things were hard for them, harder than I understood back then. Still, they showed up, every day, and they gave us all those little things anyway. I hold on to every one of them.

That’s what Coco gets right. It knows that the people we love stay with us in the small things they left behind.