Casita

It is a familiar scene to someone living in Texas, to anyone who has lived through long years of borders, walls, separated families. A mother, father, and three infants cross from one place to the other in search of a better life. Water splashes around them. They are followed by violent men. The mother desperately cradles her babies. The father is apprehended, turned back, and disappears.  The mother looks backwards, keens, turns toward her original destination. In the stories we in the U.S. commonly tell about border crossing, she would be turning North. The water would be the Rio Grande, the story one of a journey from Mexico to the US. An American story.  

The film resists this geography, these politics, and this narrative in two opposite ways: first by refusing the specific and then by flamboyantly embracing it. In the story of Disney’s Encanto there are no directional signs, no maps, no points of the compass. In the confusion of the first first scene, we do not know where these refugees are coming from, or where they are going. It is a border crossing without borders. This does not, of course mean that the film does not have a sense of place: quite the contrary. It just means that the place is magic. The film borrows from the Latin American literary tradition of magical realism, committed to a description and honoring of everyday life that its unbounded by the probable.

Since I am a scholar of the Victorian novel, and thus of the realist novel, I am not used to magic. I am a literal-minded viewer, pedantic even,  at odds with the film from almost its first moment. Where I expect blood and gunshots there is a gentle swirling of water. Where I expect darkness, there is an enchanted candle. Where I expect border patrols, coyotes, police, there is magic. Where I expect families in cages there is the biggest and most beautiful house I have ever seen.

The Madrigal family, whose matriarch we see as a young mother in the initial story of crossing, lives in a place called Encanto, in an enchanted house. The house is hard to describe in almost any of the words I have for the word “house”—all of which bear some relation to architecture, real estate, comfort, rent and taxes, or home décor. It is after all, enchanted. To say the Madrigal house  is a large pink, two-story building with fantastic landscaping is too redolent of real estate listings. It is as big as it wants to be. It is covered—no, deluged—in tropical flowers. The flowers—root, stem, and blossom— entwine themselves around the wall of the house, get mirrored in the embroidery on the skirts of dancing women, appear on the rims of dancing plates, get stilled, temporarily, into enormous flower arrangements. It is a house with many doors behind which the children and grandchildren of the Madrigal family find— or in the case of the heroine do not find—their magical gifts.  The doors glow gold. So do the windows, in one of which we can glimpse the enchanted candle, still alight, that the young woman found on the ground as she watched her husband disappear.  Perhaps most importantly the house is alive: like everyone and everything else in this animate universe, it dances: tiles flap in time to music, walls sway.  The house responds to apostrophe—the invocation by humans of an inanimate thing. It has a name. When the family needs it, they call to it: “Casita.”

Casita, of course, is a diminutive, meaning “little house” in Spanish. A fairly recent secondary meaning, I learn from the internet, is “a luxurious bungalow in a resort hotel in the US and Mexico.” Whatever the house is, whatever shape it takes—and it takes many—it is never little. It is, also, not in the U.S. or Mexico, although many viewers will only place it by reading interviews with the directors, the produces, or the songwriters. The Casita is in Colombia, and the filmmakers have gone out of their way to reproduce with great accuracy the flora and fauna of the country, as well as its costumes, its foodstuffs, and its musical traditions. There are orchids and begonias and (I think) sugar flowers. There are birds of paradise (flowers) and capybaras and tapir (animals). Maribel’s mother heals with her trademark (dancing) arepas. The girls and women wear national costumes, notably indigenous backpacks and brightly colored skirts thick with embroidery. Lin Manuel Miranda incorporated traditional musical forms like vallenato and champeta into his scores.  Even once the place is identified, the temporal setting remains a little vague: some articles suggest that the film is pointing to the Thousand Days War that took place at the turn of the 20th century (this would mean that the action of the film, when the young mother has become the abuela of a multigenerational household takes place in the 1950s). Most reviews signal their approval of the choice to place political turmoil firmly in the film’s past, to avoid contemporary stereotypes about Colombia as a violent place. Both firmly rooted in place and transcending it, the film and the casita rely on transformative magic.

Encanto does obey one of the rules of realism, a rule that I have called the home/owner metonymy, though which we learn about people by looking closely at their houses. Indeed the “Familia Madrigal,” the subject and title of the first song, and the Casita are so closely entwined that the destruction of one signals the collapse of the other. Bodies are covered in fabric that mimics the landscape that enters the house that defines the family. Family members are also entwined, indeed entangled. The family’s gifts create roles for each of them, although we learn that not everyone wants the role defined by their gift. No one in this story, not even the heroine whose journey defines the film, gets to leave the house: the depressed and scapegoated “Uncle Bruno” about whom nobody talks, runs away but only makes it as far as a ruined wing of the casita where he has lived for many years on scraps and, possibly, impossibly cute rats.

It would be gauche, in viewing this celebratory story to try to achieve any distance from the casita—to ask, for example, how the Madrigals contained/built/created the house and—I am blushing here—how much it cost. It would be reading against the grain of the film’s enchantment to call the casita a mansion, to think about how unusual it is for refugees to find such a place to put down roots. Despite my flat-footed interest in home prices and Victorian (unmagical) realism, I was able, at least for a while although mostly in retrospect, to sympathize with, even to share the film’s enabling fantasy. I remember vividly a repeated dream I had sometime quite long ago, mostly while writing my dissertation and first book. In the dream I would stumble on an unfamiliar door in my apartment, and would open it to find a room I had never seen before, with a desk than ran along all four walls. Sometimes there were bookshelves and books, but it was the room and the desk that appeared in every version. My apartment, my house, my casita, had, like the magical room in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, responded to my requirements. I had called into being a place with enough room for all my notes, all my books. A place big enough to write in. My fantasy room was oddly spare, especially given what would now be called, politely, my “maximalism.” There were no flowers, or animals, or décor—just bare wood and sometimes a material that looked like Formica. Nonetheless the casita in Encanto and the room of my dreams share the fantasy that your house can be animate-- that it can grow in accordance with your needs and desires.

Although the film is insistently and fabulously domestic, I was over time to learn not to domesticate it too much. I have read articles that see the film as an allegory of the American dream—and, as I note above, it is hard for me to separate the film from contemporary US narratives. Encanto takes place in another America, another place in the vast and diverse array of Americas south of the border most of us have learned to fetishize. I cannot completely give myself to the fantasy it enacts—I will always wonder, for example, about the price of the casita-but I can almost get there, almost get to the place I would need to be.