Crossing Cultures as a First-Generation Classicist
The Tears of Things on Coco’s Marigold Bridge
The dog’s name is Dante, I noted with satisfaction, sitting next to my mom in the South Hills Cinema 8. Growing up in Poughkeepsie, where a trip to the movies was an epic adventure, I had seen The Little Mermaid a dozen times in that same darkness. Now it’s a two-buck theater in a dying mall, floors sticky with the soda of ten thousand kids who grew up and got out of town.
I was back “home”—if that’s the right word for a place I haven’t lived since the 90s—to check on my mom. Her mother, my Naniji, had died a couple weeks earlier, of a blossoming brain tumor that rapidly overgrew her eighty-six years of self-care. I had gone back for the funeral, of course: ordered the flowers, helped wash the body that birthed the body that birthed my own, cried with my family as corpse met crematory flame. We’re OK when we’re busy, when old rites bear us away. But after all the years Naniji lived with my mom, after the sadness of her decline and the shock of her death, I worried that her absence would ache like an amputated limb.
So there we were, watching Coco. I’d suggested a movie to bridge the penultimate tension of every mother-daughter visit and forestall questions that still make my eyes roll beneath my (now greying) hair: when will I have a baby, when will I get tenure, why don’t I teach somewhere closer to “home”? I picked this movie because it seemed inoffensive, easy — my mother, a brilliant engineer, has no head for plots — plus they’d ditched that opening short. Little did I realize, in the underworldly darkness of that dilapidated memory palace, that I was on my way home.
“Sometimes I think I’m cursed, because of something that happened before I was even born,” twelve-year-old Miguel Rivera announces over Coco’s opening credits. His great-great-grandfather, family legend holds, was a musician who abandoned his family in search of fame. To support their young daughter, his wife began literally the most pedestrian of family businesses: shoemaking. She also banned music from the home and tore her husband’s face from the family photo that would later sit on the ofrenda during the Día de los Muertos, welcoming ancestral ghosts home.
It’s on the eve of this festival, many years later, that Miguel strikes out against his family’s damnatio memoriae musicaeque. Miguel’s inspiration (and the object of a candlelit altar he secretly tends in place of the ofrenda) is Ernesto de la Cruz, a local kid whose big voice and better looks gained him 1940s celluloid stardom. “I want to be just like him,” Miguel sighs, even after a flashback to the freak accident that killed his hero: a falling bell during the grand finale of his signature song, “Remember Me.”
This song and de la Cruz’s signature line, “Seize your moment,” ring out as both carpe diem and memento mori against the festively funereal backdrop of the Day of the Dead, drawing Miguel into a quest that trebles as katabasis, nostos, and self-discovery. (Spoilers ahead!) But they also, like classical poets’ exhortations toward intertextual remembrance, reached out across time to ring me like a bell. It wasn’t just that journeys to the Underworld are kind of my thing, and this one — in a tip of the sombrero to the epic tradition — features a canine psychopomp (in Coco’s parlance, an alebrije) named Dante. I loved this movie because Miguel’s rebellion mirrored my own transformation from a daughter of immigrants into a first-generation classicist. And his journey home made me retrace the threads of my family’s past and the pasts I study, all the way back to the knots in my throat where they tangle and tense. Coco’s sensitivity to the tears in mortal things also whispers, “Know thyself”: gnothi seauton. As Homer, Virgil, Augustine all knew, when we weep for others, we weep for ourselves.
Who are we without memory, in life and in death? Anyone who has watched a loved one linger on this earth long after her mind has receded has grappled with Coco’s central question. The baby girl in the photo, now reduplicated as the wheelchair-bound Mama Coco, “has trouble remembering things,” in Miguel’s words. But it’s really that her mind is forever stuck in the past, awaiting her papa’s return. Her daughter, now the matriarch of this multigenerational household, insists that the musician is “better off forgotten … I’m here for you now, mama.” Coco’s sweet reply: “Who are you?”
This scene plays for laughs, but its vision of senility as a sunlit, hazy second childhood (so distant from my grandmother’s thundering incomprehension) seeks to reassure. Though Coco’s body, memory, and sense of self are decaying, she’s still unconditionally loved and preserved: the up side of the family pietas that preserves the Riveras’ history and prohibition on music. Identity, in other words, is relational: not just about the “me” who is remembered, but the people who do the remembering. This theme counterbalances the essential egoism of de la Cruz’s romantic message:
The music — it’s not just in me, it is me. The rest of the world may follow the rules. But I must follow my heart.
In a culture that’s all about finding and actualizing our selves, Coco explores our converse responsibility to find and honor one another. Miguel’s outwardly defiant quest to “seize his moment” doubles as a detective story about his family’s shared past, boomeranging back toward mutual understanding.
Dante leads the way when he knocks Coco’s ancestral portrait from the ofrenda. Fishing it from its shattered frame, Miguel notices that his defaced great-great-grandfather holds a familiar guitar — the guitar of Ernesto de la Cruz, and the model for his own homemade instrument. Exultant to discover this blood relation with his hero, Miguel shouts the news from the rooftops — until his abuelita smashes his guitar. Desperate to play in a local competition, he breaks into de la Cruz’s mausoleum to borrow a replacement, rationalizing the theft as a genealogical entitlement.
He strikes a chord. The air shifts. As guards approach, Miguel runs away— and straight through the people outside. He sees his parents and tries to hug them, like Odysseus or Aeneas approach beloved ghosts:
Three times then I tried to put my arms around her neck;
three times her image, embraced in vain, eluded my grasp,
just like the wafting winds or a winged dream.
Here, though, it’s Miguel who’s been transformed into a shade, invisible to the living but swept up into the skeletal arms of family he recognizes from his ofrenda. In a magical sequence, they guide him to the city of the dead, across
The marigold petals that stream from this bridge regeneratively revise the autumn leaves to which Virgil, then Dante, compared the multitude of spirits waiting to cross over, “with love for the other side.” In Coco, though, this crossing is both joyous and reversible on the Day of the Dead, when spirits return to their living families after clearing a scan at immigration to ensure their photos are on an ofrenda. Miguel and his spectral hosts head to the Department of Family Reunions, where his great-great-grandmother Imelda has been detained, to send him back to the living with her blessing. But when she adds the condition that Miguel give up music, he strikes off to seek de la Cruz’s blessing instead. (“It’s my life,” he protests. “You already had yours!”)
Except for a few gags, Coco largely sidesteps the issue of immigration: a glaring omission, if savvy marketing choice, as our nation debates the future of DACA and the building of a border wall. This film metonymically collapses the complexity of Mexico into Miguel’s idyllic hometown, hermetically sealed in a picturesque past, with no visible emigration except to the land of the dead. The few musicians who strike out to see the world are viewed with envy by Miguel, but suspicion by his family, and the film ultimately concludes that where we are is right where we belong. But it’s precisely my immigrant background that led me on a quest like Miguel’s to breathe largior aether.
Growing up, books were my marigold bridge to a wider world. They were all the more a lifeline as the walls of my house began closing in, as my family’s differences from others loomed larger in my mind. All my parents’ friends looked like them. None of the kids at school looked like me. Teachers couldn’t say my name: I began mispronouncing it to make it easier (still do). The clothes my mom made, tokens of love, began to embarrass me. We never ate out: our house smelled like onions and spices. I hated our trips to the subcontinent: the squalor and crush of bodies, the squat toilets and head scarves, my own feeling of foreignness. I felt no less foreign at school. Other kids seemed so much more at home in the world, their world, than I felt.
My parents divorced. Half the time, my father never showed up for his visits; the other half, he took us to The Little Mermaid at the South Hills Mall. Finally he ran out of things to say and disappeared. My mom’s best friend Gus moved into our lives, bringing books and music and stories of growing up in Latvia and making his way westward through refugee camps after the war. We chased his fading memories on free-wheeling, low-budget summer gallivants through Europe, where people accepted “America” as an answer when they asked where we were from. (In my own country, “Poughkeepsie” never sufficed; they’d prod til I admitted where my parents were born.)
I was happy on what I thought of as The Continent, where difference seemed triangulated through tongue, not skin. Then my grandparents arrived from India, with their strange-smelling suitcases and unintelligible ways, displacing my brother from his room and me from this tenuous peace. Inside the house, they yelled at my mom for letting us grow up too American; outside, I never felt American enough. Books were the one place I belonged. Shakespeare, Austen, Wilde, Tolkien — they were my adoptive family. The family I chose.
So, like Miguel in search of Ernesto de la Cruz, I struck off in search of these illustrious forebears as soon as I could get away from “home.” Stephen Dedalus was my spirit guide. Incantatory phrases from Ulysses (“amor matris: subjective and objective genitive”) promised to yield their secrets if only I understood Latin — the mother tongue of the authors who birthed the authors I loved. To begin my first Latin class, my first day at Swarthmore, Gil Rose recited the first lines of the Aeneid. I fell into their welcoming arms and never looked back.
As far as rebellions go, a career in classics might seem pretty tame. But I’m only just realizing how far my exploration of one branch of literary genealogy was driven by a desire to escape my own — not to mention my family’s expectations that I’d follow them into some pragmatic career. (For us, it was engineering, not shoes.) I waved off their anxiety about my future financial prospects and announced that I cared more about life’s whys than its hows. I learned to like brie, pronounce “Islay,” use a fish fork. I seized my moment and climbed the beanstalk of Western culture right up to Olympus.
The only problem was that once I arrived I still had to show my passport. My mock interview committee for the Rhodes pressed me to justify what business I had in classics. When I got to Oxford, on a Keasbey, a famous don went out of his way to make me unwelcome in those hallowed hall (where nevertheless I persisted in having the time of my life). I still see this among condo boards, non-blind reviews, my own classrooms: no matter how much competence or charisma we show, we’re always performing for others. My fellow contributors to Eidolon have begun documenting the ways minorities’ citizenship in classics is questioned — a first step to rewriting the rubric. Yet all the time, I was drifting imperceptibly farther from my birth family in the way I think, the words I use, the stories I tell. Was classics a deep dive into someone else’s past at the expense of my own, an abnegation of the dual citizenship I’d hoped to hold?
So Miguel was retreading the cammin di nostra vita when he turns his back on his family and heads for de la Cruz’s ivory tower. Guiding his way are Dante and an outcast ghost named Hector, who asks Miguel to keep him alive by restoring his photograph to an ofrenda:
When there’s no one left in the living world who remembers you, you disappear from this world. We call it “the final death.” … Our memories, they have to be passed down by those who knew us in life, in the stories they tell about us.
By pinning the afterlife to memory rather than virtue, the movie’s metaphysics hew closer to Homer and Virgil than Dante. The Inferno and Purgatorio are populated by souls pursuing excessive or perverted loves. Hector and Miguel’s duet “Un Poco Loco” instead meditates on the way that amor — of family, lovers, or books? subjective or objective genitive? — inverts our values and perceptions. (Instead of telling us to “put shoes on our head,” my father would make us touch books to our lips: an obeisance that hinted at a paternal inheritance I’d never know, our cognominal link with the pandits who preserved Sanskrit texts.)
Miguel finally ditches even Hector to make his own way into de la Cruz’s tower. The Gatsbyesque gala that’s raging there satirizes the modern pursuit of fama at all costs, media culture’s exaltation of self(ie) and image over relationships and responsibilities. As a DJ drops beats and guests pluck hors-d’oeuvres from particolored porcupines, projectors loop de la Cruz’s silver-screen sententiae in an echo chamber of self-regard. (His tag line “seize your moment,” in its aggressive acquisitiveness, similarly perverts carpe diem’s original connotation of plucking a ripe fruit while time flies forever away.)
Miguel seizes the stage, and de la Cruz’s attention, by bursting into an old de la Cruz number — then tripping into the pool, allowing his hero a suitably theatrical opportunity to display his own heroism and acknowledge his great-great-grandpaternity. This song’s exuberant refrain, “music is my language and the world es mi familia,” sums up the hope and joy I’d vested in books, chasing classics from London to Rome to Berkeley, anywhere that wasn’t Poughkeepsie. It could have been the montage in which Miguel savors the polo and champagne and other vain delights of de la Cruz’ celebrity. But it all comes crashing down when Hector accuses de la Cruz of vaulting to fame on the wings of stolen words — songs plagiarized from Hector himself, a bandmate who died under mysterious circumstances the day he resolved to go home to his family.
Miguel solves the crime with philology. In his parting words to Hector, de la Cruz betrays himself intertextually; he ventriloquizes a movie villain’s false proclamation of loyalty as he poisons the “good guy,” played (of course) by de la Cruz himself. Miguel’s recognition of the ghost of words past recombines two Virgilian imagines: Hector’s dreamlike appearance to Aeneas, urging him to flee Troy for a new home, with the dead Deiphobus’ account of his betrayal and murder by Helen. But de la Cruz quickly lashes out to protect his public image from exposure, incarcerating Miguel and Hector in a subterranean cenote.
This underworld-within-an-underworld where Miguel falls from heaven doubles as a scene of rebirth and recognition. Rebaptized in the sinkhole’s clear waters, under the light of a Pantheonic oculus, Miguel learns to worship better gods than fame. Here, again, he attains anagnorisis by intertext as Hector abandons all hope of ever again seeing his beloved daughter — “Coco.” This redoubled name, a true recognition token, aligns these characters’ memories to fill the lacuna in Miguel’s family photograph. The musician who skipped out on his family all those years ago was Hector, a loving father still trying to come home.
I never saw my father again — unless you count his funeral. Hector’s ghost is pitifully defiled, not magically preserved by the gods, when he visits Aeneas; Creusa’s specter looms larger than he knew her in life. My father’s corpse, awaiting the flames in a flimsy coffin, was diminished, defused of the fear and awe with which my memory had cloaked him. After the divorce, he’d remarried; had two more kids; remembered us; withered, and died. It was the day after my thirty-fifth birthday: nel mezzo del cammin. His wife found my address online and emailed with the news.
Somehow, though he and I had been sundered for decades, it hadn’t occurred to me that we’d never meet again in this world. On the Day of the Dead, my brother and I met at LAX, queasy in the unfamiliar air, and worked up our nerves to cross the threshold of the stranger who’d given us life. When we did, the air shifted. There was a half-brother we’d never met, a half-sister who’d studied Latin; there were our gestures and intonations, refracted in novel form; there were stories that kept us up half the night, rapt, resurrecting a man we had no other way to know. I loved this new family immediately, irrationally, like the bells you hear when you’re drowning. When my brother walked in, they’d caught their breath — he looked so much like our father, but bigger.
That was the second time my father died. Five years before, my mom and I went to Mexico over winter break. We saw the ruins of Aztec pyramids, swam in cool cenotes under the sun’s bright eye, and snorkeled among wondrously-colored fishes — alebrijes that would eventually lead me, now that I’d seen the capitals of Europe, to dive down to worlds beneath the waves. Stopping back through Poughkeepsie, I performed a grandparental salutatio and gave Gus what would be one last hug: Gus, the unconditionally loving and beloved genitive that back-formed our pidgin family. I flew across the country, unlocked my door, got the terrible call, and went back to SFO. As the sun set and rose again, and my final flight climbed above the clouds, I wept with Gilgamesh for six days and seven nights, crossed the world and vast ocean to ask Utnapishtim how to overcome death.
Yes: the gods took Enkidu’s life.
But man’s life is short, at any moment
it can be snapped, like a reed in a canebrake.
The handsome young man, the lovely young woman —
in their prime, death comes and drags them away.
Though no one has seen death’s face or heard
death’s voice, suddenly, savagely, death
destroys us, all of us, old or young.
And yet we build houses, make contracts, brothers
divide their inheritance, conflicts occur —
as though this human life lasted forever.
The river rises, flows over its banks
and carries us all away, like mayflies
floating downstream: they stare at the sun,
then all at once there is nothing.
Coco, of course, has a happy ending. Miguel’s great-great-grandmama Imelda comes to the rescue on a winged panther named Pepita, falling back in love with the music (and musician) she’d renounced while exposing de la Cruz before his own fans and cameras. (In resounding ring structure with his prior demise, Pepita flings him against a giant bell.) Imelda gives Miguel her blessing, no conditions this time, and sends him back to the living. But Hector’s photo drifts away in the fray, consigning him to final death. Miguel rushes home to Mama Coco to try to spark her fading memory of her papa. All seems lost — until he sings “Remember Me,” resuscitating its original performance context as a simple father-daughter lullaby. This familial love is reciprocal, relational, and enduring: all these years, it turns out, Coco has preserved Hector’s picture, torn from the family photograph. He’s now returned to his rightful place on the Rivera ofrenda and in musical history: his letters home prove his authorship of the songs that made de la Cruz famous.
In a final scene, one year later, Coco’s ghost joins her parents to cross the marigold bridge; Miguel explains to his newborn sister why they honor their ancestors; and he and Hector’s ghost sing a duet across time.
Say that I’m crazy or call me a fool
But last night it seemed that I dreamed about you
When I opened my mouth what came out was a song
And you knew every word and we all sang alongTo a melody played on the strings of our souls
And a rhythm that rattled us down to the bone
Our love for each other will live on forever
In every beat of my proud corazón
I cried at this ending, with everyone else — because this joyous reunion between loved ones, living and dead, is both heartwarming and forever beyond our embrace. Who among us, in this nation of immigrants, shares the same language as our great-great-grandparents, much less the same songs, memories, or picnic sites? (When we had to make family trees in first grade, other kids claimed bloodlines back to the Norman Conquest: my mom — whose own birth went officially undocumented, who spent her youth continents away from extended family — couldn’t remember anyone’s names.)
As time erases the footsteps we leave on the sand, Coco offers the reassuring fantasy of continuity and comprehension. Long-lost relatives are only a holiday and a bridge away; old age and death, just another undiscovered country (with reciprocal visas). But Orpheus learned that you can’t look back at the past and keep it, too; Aeneas could never hold the people he loved. What happens when we compound time with distance, with long flights and lost records and the private nutshells of judgment that enclose our kingdoms of infinite space?
What happens is stories. Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex plays on the Homeric connection between weaving and storytelling as metaphors for the immigrant protagonists’ crisscrossing strands of DNA:
It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn’t remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze.
Before we seek freedom, or a moment to seize, all we want is a hand to hold, a thread to follow, a warm blanket knit from stories. My mom was my blanket until my little brother, my father’s temper, and my grandparents’ judgment took her away. Jealousy sharpened into an adolescent sense of injustice, subjective/objective anger at my family’s backward ways. I blamed my grandparents for carting my mom across countries, languages, and correspondence courses as a girl while her brothers got a more continuous education closer to home. When my mother was one of the first women to attend a prestigious engineering school in India, her disapproving grandfather simply deposited her with her bags outside the gates. Her parents never read to her as a child; she got her first book at age seven, a treasured gift from a family friend in Mombasa. (One reason, I think, she has trouble following plots.) Nobody knew any better back then, she reasons. She never learned the art I mastered: remembering rage.
So I never learned my grandparents’ language, never listened when they attempted mine. And now it’s too late: my grandparents will die their final death in me. I dropped the ball of yarn, I know now. But crisscrossing journeys and stories, my cousins’ better memories and Hindi, are slowly winding me back. To my grandfather, Shamsher Mundra, who (in family legend) ran away to be a movie star, then returned to tour the world in the Indian foreign service. To my grandmother, Sarjit, with her sharp tongue, keen eye, and fierce judgment — more like me, I suspect, than I like to admit.
I’m tied tighter than I thought even to their shortcomings. We classicists know that one empire must fall for another to rise; that the long arcs of history curve and cross over time. It was because she had no books, growing up, that my mother read to me every day, at my delighted command; that she loved me without obligations or conditions. She gifted me with an education she worked all her life to afford; an enduring love of travel; the privilege to follow my passion in choosing a career. And then she had the courage to throw me to the wind and trust stories to carry me home.
Classics can’t reunite my family. But classics gave me the marvelous journey and widened my nutshell to encompass worlds. Classics lets me hear, in the kirtan at Naniji’s funeral, the voices of generations before us lifted in these same harmonies, from sepia-toned Punjab to rust-belt Poughkeepsie. Classics makes me see, in the marigold petals of the Day of the Dead, the Halloween pumpkins and Diwali candles that mark my birth, the orange canopy of the gurdwara that sang my grandparents home, the jackets of books and records that light my path (“Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, / In thy most need to go by thy side”). Classics is the newborn niece cradled in my arms who won’t remember her first and final view of her great-grandmother, but will cut the locks of age. Classics is the feeling of time flowing through and around us all, separating and connecting, both a river and its bridge.
So watch Coco. Call your mom. Tell your story. And cross.
Nandini Pandey dedicates this one to her mom, and all our fellow travelers.
