Mexico’s Heritage through Pixar’s Film *Coco

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeology of media frames the analysis of the film *Coco, a 3D, animated, fictional movie inspired by Day of the Dead, or Día de Muertos, in Mexico, released by Pixar Animation Studios in 2017, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios. This paper analyzes the tensions and contradictions within Pixar’s most successful movie at the box office in taking a stand against Donald Trump’s calling Mexicans rapists and criminals who bring drugs across the border during his presidential campaign in 2015. This paper concludes this highly praised ”pro-Mexico” film by its audience and critics does not vindicate Mexico’s “good people.” Instead, the film promotes a nationalistic and institutionalized image of Mexico’s heritage and identity, in the works since the nineteenth century. “Disney” owning the largest market share in the film industry and *Coco’s director Lee Unkrich’s good intentions to make this film “right,” rather support the state in its reproduction of a community whose formation required the homogenization of Mexico’s culture, obscuring the non-dominant lifeways of a cultural rich and diverse country, and which is now filtered through his camera lens and consumed by worldwide audiences, which most certainly will remake it in a variety of ways.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32638