What We Carry With Us

Remember Me 

When Disney-Pixar’s Coco arrived in theaters in 2017, audiences met Miguel, a 12-year-old Mexican boy who dreams of becoming a musician. On Día de los Muertos, he finds himself in the Land of the Dead, where his journey through his family’s past becomes a story about memory, belonging, and keeping those we love present in our lives.

Coco was deeply rooted in Mexican culture, from its music and family dynamics to its depiction of Día de los Muertos. “Unlike most, if not all, other Pixar films, this was a film based in real tradition and a real place and a whole set of people who exist,” co-director and co-screenwriter Adrian Molina explained. “That required us to be very thoughtful.”

And audiences responded. Coco became Mexico’s highest-grossing film of all time, a record it held until 2019, and eventually earned more than $800 million worldwide.

Coco’s extraordinary reception raises a question: How did a story so deeply rooted in one place and tradition become meaningful to so many people?

One answer lies beneath the marigolds, music, color, and humor. Coco tells a deeply human story about the desire to remember and be remembered. It asks what remains of the people we love when they are no longer physically beside us.

At Kino, that question takes on particular meaning. Every day, we accompany people whose lives have been shaped by migration and displacement. Moving from one place to another changes what a person can physically bring. It does not erase who they are.

Día de los Muertos, celebrated on November 1 and 2, invites us to remember and honor those who have died. Each year at Kino, migrant families, staff, and volunteers create an ofrenda together, filling it with photographs, food, flowers, candles, and objects connected to loved ones.

Sometimes what we carry can be held in our hands. Sometimes it cannot be seen at all.

People carry photographs and necklaces, but they also carry traditions, grief, faith, knowledge, memories of home, and lessons learned from the people who shaped them. For people who have experienced migration and displacement, these things can become a connection between where they have been and who they continue to be. When so much else changes, what we carry can remind us that our stories did not begin at the border.

The Traditions We Carry

Tradition gives memory a physical form. It allows people and places that may be far away to remain present through what we wear, cook, say, sing, pray, and practice. 

For Pedro, one expression of that connection is something he wears: a necklace depicting Our Lady of Guadalupe. Passed down through his family since his great-grandparents, the necklace carries a sense of protection and the faith his family has placed in it over generations. Pedro carried it throughout his journey from southern Mexico to the border, keeping close a tangible reminder of his family, his faith, and the people who came before him.

The necklace is small enough to carry with him, but what it represents reaches across generations. The same is true of so many of the traditions people carry with them. A photograph can preserve a face. A necklace can recall someone we love. But many of the things that connect us to home never need to be packed at all.

We carry recipes, prayers, songs, language, family rituals, and ways of gathering, worshiping, and caring for one another. Recipes, too, can travel through memory.

At Kino’s Community Shelter, one place this takes shape is around the table. On Sundays, families choose a meal connected to their culture and place of origin. Kino purchases the ingredients, and families prepare the food together, chopping ingredients, sharing stories, and talking about what the dish means to them.

Recently, the meal included handmade beef sopes and mole prepared in the Guerrero style. For one young woman cooking alongside Sister Gladys, preparing the meal brought back memories of making the same dish with her grandmother.

A familiar meal cannot transport someone home. But preparing it can bring something of home into a new place. A recipe becomes a way to preserve knowledge, remember the people who taught us, and share something of ourselves with a new community.

Sometimes, even when the physical reminders of home are lost, the traditions connected to them remain.

Last year, as Kino staff and families were creating an ofrenda, one mother wanted to honor her grandfather. During her journey, she had lost the phone that held his photograph. She could not place his image on the altar, but she remembered exactly how she would honor him at home.

“Siempre le ponía un trago de tequila,” she said. “I always poured him a shot of tequila.” 

One of the Sisters responded simply: they would get flowers for the altar and pour a shot of tequila for him. The woman had lost the photograph, but not the memory of how to honor her grandfather. Kino could not restore what had been lost, but the community could join her in carrying the tradition forward. 

The Talents We Carry: We Carry Who We Are

People carry more than memories and traditions. They carry knowledge, skills, creativity, aspirations, and ways of contributing to the world around them.

Displacement can interrupt the life someone was building. In the upheaval of leaving home, finding safety, and navigating an uncertain future, dreams and abilities that once shaped daily life can become harder to see. Holistic accompaniment creates space for people to reconnect with those parts of themselves.

One family from Michoacán staying at Kino’s Community Shelter offers a glimpse of what that can look like.

The husband is a painter. While staying at the shelter, he has put those skills to work painting around Kino. Victor, Kino’s Interim Executive Director, recalls how meaningful it was for him to contribute through work he already knew and took pride in.

The man’s wife brought her own expertise. Having worked in restaurants as a chef, she began helping in Kino’s kitchen, chopping vegetables and sharing techniques with staff and volunteers. 

When she had the opportunity to interview for a job, Kino accompanied her through the process. She got the job and recently began working. Kino could offer support as she pursued a new opportunity. But the knowledge, experience, and talent she brought to it were already hers. She carried them with her.

Another family has shared something of themselves with the broader Nogales community through pupusas. By making and selling the dish, they are not only carrying a food tradition forward. They are introducing neighbors to something they know and love, while contributing to the community they now find themselves part of.

These stories challenge us to see people experiencing displacement not only through the lens of what they need, but also through what they already know, create, and contribute. However, the ability to cook again does not undo displacement. Painting a wall does not restore a home. Sharing food with new neighbors does not erase the people missing from the table.

People carry what sustains them. They also carry what hurts.

The Grief We Carry With Us

We do not only carry the things we choose. Alongside traditions and talents, people may carry grief, trauma, interrupted dreams, separation from loved ones, and futures that did not unfold as they had hoped.

For some of the people Kino accompanies today, that grief comes from being deported after living in the United States for years. A person’s children, relationships, traditions, and sense of home may now stretch across both sides of the border.

For others, the future changed while they were waiting for it to begin. Families arrived in Nogales expecting their time there to be temporary as they pursued the possibility of entering the United States. On January 20, 2025, the U.S. government ended the CBP One function that allowed people in Mexico to schedule appointments at certain ports of entry and canceled existing appointments.

For people who had built their plans around those appointments, the change meant confronting a future different from the one they had imagined. Some families who expected to pass through Nogales have instead begun building lives there.

There can be hope in beginning again. There can also be grief for what did not happen, for the people who remain far away, and for the life someone thought they would be living. What does a person carry when the future they imagined changes?

What We Carry Together

At Kino, accompaniment does not mean pretending we can take away everything another person carries. We cannot undo displacement. We cannot erase trauma, restore every relationship, return what was lost, or make grief disappear. But we can make room for the whole person.

That means making space for grief and sorrow alongside joy, laughter, memory, and possibility. Through accompaniment, we encounter people not only through what they have experienced or what they need, but through the fullness of who they are.

A new community does not require someone to forget an old one. Joy does not require pretending grief is absent. Dignity does not require denying trauma. 

We can carry seemingly contradictory things at once: sorrow and laughter, trauma and talent, loss and love, memory and possibility. At Kino, accompaniment means making space for all of it, and choosing to carry it together.

Who Do You Carry With You?

Each year for Día de los Muertos, the Kino community creates an ofrenda to remember and honor loved ones who have died. This year, we invite you to become part of that tradition. Throughout this article, we have asked what people carry with them. Now, we invite you to consider a more personal question:

Who do you carry with you?

Perhaps it is someone whose recipe you still make. Someone whose favorite saying occasionally comes out of your own mouth. Someone who taught you to pray. Someone whose music you still play. Someone whose photograph has a special place in your home. Someone you wish you could speak with one more time.

The people we love remain present in countless ways, including in the traditions we continue, the lessons we pass along, and the ways we care for one another.

This Día de los Muertos, we invite you to take part in Kino’s tradition of remembrance. Send us a photograph of someone you carry with you, and we will place it on our ofrenda. We would be honored to remember them with you.