#coco headcanons

Heavily inspired by the story of how Ryo Fukui's album "My Favorite Tunes" was rediscovered through his widow, Yasuko in 2017.

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After the news broke out about de la Cruz's lies (and alleged murder) of his buried-by-time duet partner, musician, and songwriter Héctor Rivera, rumors of never-before-seen and extremely rare recordings of the latter performing either with de la Cruz or by himself circulated amongst certain circles, mostly fans of lost media and buried history.

Talks like this had been going around for ages, but it wasn't until mid-2018 when a shoe-maker family's son named Miguel Rivera came out with stories of how de la Cruz stole his great-great grandfather's songs and skull guitar complete with physical proof that the topic of lost recordings suddenly became one of the hottest topics in México. Miguel himself joined in on the hunt, which lasted for quite some time well past 2018 and was postponed due to the pandemic.

And then, in 2021. A miracle.

Either the previous matriarch known as Mamá Coco had completely forgotten about it or it had been a secret that she had purposely kept to herself for Miguel to discover, but there were some other things she had kept hidden from her mother... five 78 rpm records predating 1921, all sent by Héctor. Recordings of him singing by himself, with Ernesto, or just simple guitar arrangements of his other songs. Kept in secret by Mamá Coco somewhere in a corner of Miguel's hideout left unchecked after Imelda threw them out along with other objects related to music. Other 78s were later on discovered by a descendant of de la Cruz's inside the family estate and in various antique shops, all collecting dust. They were amongst the most important relics of Héctor's legacy, besides his red songbook containing the first composition for "Remember Me".

After efforts of digitizing came out successful (despite the damage done by age, the recordings were miraculously salvageable), "Recuérdame: The Lost Recordings of Héctor Rivera (1919-1921)" was released. Calling the album a sensation was an understatement. Rave reviews started coming out, stating that Héctor's warm voice reminded listeners of home and warm sunrays, and how one can feel the heartache and longing for his family from the way he strums his guitar alone, even if his voice is not as strong and commanding as de la Cruz's. His grito is oftentimes said to be addicting and infectious as well, with some claiming that they ended up doing it along. Others lamented over "what could have been" after listening to Rivera and de la Cruz's harmonizing and clear-as-day dynamic as a duet. Shortly after, the skeletal remains of Héctor Rivera were found in an unmarked grave in México City.

It not only solidified Héctor Rivera's legacy (thus directly affecting Héctor's overall health in the Land Of The Dead for the better), but it also largely improved the Riveras' overall economy with royalties from Héctor's never-before-seen music, in addition to the already booming shoe-making business and Miguel's own efforts as a musician. All because Miguel decided to steal a guitar that turned out to be rightfully his.

Miguel was thrilled when Socorro was born. He immediately volunteered to help his parents out with absolutely everything and anything they needed to take care of her. Well, maybe not changing her, but absolutely everything else. Rosa warned him that the novelty of babysitting her would probably wear off in a couple of months, but for Miguel, it never did.

Socorro is Miguel's favorite human on the planet (although, you know, his great-great-grandfather & Mama Coco are close seconds). He'll do anything for her. In his eyes, she's perfect. He's always getting her random treats and taking her on trips just because. He adores her.

Socorro, for her part, idolizes her older brother. She wants to be just like him. One time she asked her mother to make her a mariachi suit, complete with hat, so she could look just like Miguel did when he was performing. Five-year-old Socorro looked absolutely adorable in her little mariachi suit.

Most siblings fight when they're kids, which is a very normal sibling thing to do. But Miguel and Socorro rarely, if ever, did, possibly partially because they're far enough apart in age that most of the things siblings fight over didn't apply to them.

Anyone who's ever friends with Miguel knows about his little sister within the first 5 minutes of talking to him. They'll casually ask him about his family, and half his answer will be taken up by Coco, complete with photos.

You know how Miguel told Mamá Coco everything? Well, once Coco died, and he needed a new confidant to tell his secrets to, he turned to his new baby sister. When he's telling her about their family at the end of the movie - it sure looks like he talks to her a lot, no? And she's named after Coco anyway. So he tells her all about his day. 

Except that while Mamá Coco wouldn't, and later perhaps couldn't, tell people what Miguel had told her, and in the beginning baby Socorro, not understanding what Miguel was saying and not being able to talk anyway, couldn't tell anyone either.... Babies grow up. 

Miguel didn't quite register this, not even as Coco learned how to walk and talk. Until... 

"Miguel thinks Maria in his class is pretty," three-year-old Coco announced one day at breakfast, to Miguel's chagrin and everyone else's laughter.

He plans everything around her. He makes sure she's always happy; he never wants her to be unhappy. When he's older and a famous musician, he'll plan his performances around whether or not she wants to come, and if so, if she can easily get to wherever it is, down to what time it starts and ends. One time he cancelled some performances and postponed recording something and reschedules all his meetings and came home apropos of nothing just because in their last conversation Luisa happened to mention that Coco was missing him.

If it comes down to it, Socorro believes Miguel's story about going to the LotD. Whether or not he told the rest of his family, he told Socorro. I think this is canon. He tells it to her as a bedtime story. And at first, she believes him, because toddlers believe everything you tell them. As she gets older, she gets too old for bedtime stories, and she doesn't really think of the one Miguel used to tell her. But if she ever thinks about it, she'll conclude that he told her the truth. Why?

(No idea if anybody thought on this before, but, anyway...)

Santa Cecilia alternates between complete lock down and moderate lock down. Nobody knows anything. Some people act normally while others go paranoid.

The shoe store operates, but clients are required to wear masks and disinfect their hands.

The family are doing their best to craft shoes from outlines and measurements sent by the clients via text or mail.

Elena and Franco are forbidden from accessing the store (old age - high risk). Elena starts to carry a rug and a disinfectant instead of a chancla and cleans everything she can. 

Socorro is confined to the family compound (Protect the baby!).

Manny and Benny are confined to the family compound. The adults are taking turns home-schooling them.

Miguel and Rosa are taking online classes, to the extend it is possible. Rosa is freaking out about the possibility of having to graduate high school in the pandemic.

Abel was never going to study beyond high school, since he's inheriting the shoe shop, so he's done with the education system.

Gloria volunteered as the "contact with outside world person", and she gets things done outside the compound when needed.

More on extended family (my head canons):

Franco's older brother dies. Due to the pandemic, they can't even have a normal funeral. Riveras are devastated. Since then, Enrique, Berto and Gloria become extra vigilant with their parents. 

Franco becomes even more quiet than usual. Then, after a while, begins to write down letters for his children and grandchildren, so they'll have something to remember him by if he gets the virus. It makes him especially sad thinking Socorro is not going to have any memories of him, when all of his other grandchildren do.

Carmen is worried sick about her mother. Carmen's brother is constantly telling her he's got everything under control, but that does little to ease her worries. She wants to send Abel over to help. Abel himself is eager to go, since living with only two relatives is starting to seem like a leisure cruise in comparison to living in a house full of relatives.

Luisa is torn between the desperate need to protect her parents and the desperate need to protect her children. Her parents tell her to, by all means, keep Miguelito and Coquito in the Rivera compound, since it's already their safe zone with familiar germs and all, and not worry about them. ("It's the parents' job to worry about their children, Mija, not the other way round.").

Miguel volunteers to move in with his maternal grandparents. He can take his online classes from anywhere, and he is almost an adult, and he cannot stand to see so much of his family worried (and sharing a computer with Rosa while the Internet is less than reliable is becoming increasingly annoying). Also, in case the worst was to happen, he wants to create a detailed record of his maternal relatives (more detailed than he already has, anyway - one can never be too cautious.).

si amigo I have mANY :D

Her first word is “loco”. Or maybe it was “coco”. Many family feuds have begun over which one it was.

Miguel’s first reaction to holding baby Socorro was “TAKE HER BACK I HAVE TO USE BOTH HANDS TO SERENADE HER WITH MY GUITAR”

Socorro babble sang to Miguel’s music since the moment she learned she had control over her lil baby voice box

She is absolutely a climber. Climbs out of crib, climbs up shelves, climbs up walls, trees, barrels, stacks of leather.... stresses tf out of her whole familia

(Post first steps) She does happy dances to nonsensical tunes Miguel makes up. She just waves her little hands and stomps her little feet and turns in little circles and chitters little songs. Miguel imitates her dancing, and it just tickles her to death. She loves it

She occasionally grabs her Papa’s mustache and every time she does he just freezes and prays she won’t yank. She never does but he’s sure she knows how much power she has

Despite being very smol and not exactly the most coordinated bean around, she insists on helping in the kitchen and the shoe shop. They give her masa dough to mold and leather scraps to tie, and she proudly makes mini deformed tamales and ties strappy “sandals” around her own feet.

She and the two lil nugget babies we see running around at the beginning of the movie (pretty sure they were Miguel’s young cousins??) have a similar relationship to that of Rosa and Miguel. “Wow Socorro you got a horse tail on your head lol” “]:|”

Miguel talks to her like he talked to Mama Coco—they get close as thieves and tell each other everything.

Mama and Papa Rivera draw the line after Miguel dresses lil Socorro in a mini wrestlers outfit “dios mio, Miguel, wait till she’s older would you???”

Sure, she’s reserved with her emotions, even as a young woman, and it earns her quite the reputation around Santa Cecilia. 

But I promise you, there was a time, long ago, when she was open and warm and hopelessly in love with Héctor Rivera. And she probably told him so, too.

Words of affirmation are Héctor’s thing, definitely. He’s constantly singing, sighing, whispering, crooning, shouting from the rooftops his feelings for Imelda, so often that she sometimes desperately wishes for some silence, por favor! 

But when they’re together and alone and the moonlight is pooling at their feet and he looks at her like that, sometimes Imelda is just overwhelmed by it all. All of this incredible, indescribable intensity rises to the surface, burning through her bones and searing her skin until she can’t help but take Héctor by the hands and tell him just how incredible he is. 

Basically, I want to see Imelda sweet talk Héctor. Not all the time. Not even often. But occasionally. 

Sooo…

September has been an extremely busy month at work, and I could barely check tumblr, read/write fics, draw fanarts or freely embrace my Coco fangirlism in any form. But I had more free time this week, so I finally returned to my one-shots collection and kept writing the next one I wanna post.

This is meant to be a multi PoV one-shot about the bonding process between Héctor and the members of the family he doesn't properly know: Julio, Victoria and Rosita. I wrote Julio's part several weeks ago, and now I've been working on Victoria's. I finished it on Thursday. And… it's not exactly what I had planned. But I love it.

So let's talk a bit about Victoria, shall we?

There are two headcanons about Vic I love a lot. One is the ‘lesbian-Victoria’. The other one is the ‘ace/aro-Victoria’. My favorite (and the one I assume) is the later, because it's closer to my heart, and asexuality/aromanticism is something I think we should be writing/talking more about. So there I was, writing about an ace/aro Vic who's trying to bond with her long lost grandpa, and a shy Héctor who's secretly worried about why exactly his granddaughter never got married, never started her own family and seems to not even care about "love" at all. Because… what if it was his fault? What if Vic got so impressed by her grandma's love story that she didn't even try?

I got more involved than I had anticipated in writing this, but I regret nothing. It's been somehow cathartic, thinking about what kind of life Vic could've had as an ace/aro woman in the 50-60's. Rejecting suitors. Ignoring all the courtship thing. Not even thinking about anybody in a romantic way. The growing concern of Coco and Julio (what happens? Is she afraid? Is she 'traumatized'?). Being misunderstood by her own friends (don't you want to be with anyone? Really? How sad! That's quite depressing! Not having anyone to love! Why don't you give a try? What a meaningless life…). And the town's gossip (what's wrong with her? Does she even like men? Does she like women? Such a prude! How frigid! Perhaps no man ever tried, she's quite cold and cynical, not appealing at all…). And all because if you don't want a partner, you look like a heartless freak. If you're a woman and don't want to have children, it seems you've wasted your life. You will die alone, there will be nothing left behind to remember you. And it's tragic, because Vic actually died quite young, and I'm sure there were many people in Santa Cecilia who thought or said 'well, it could've been worse'. After all, she didn't leave behind a husband and children.

But of course Vic loves. She loved her family and her job. She loved her grandma and uncles, and her parents. She loved Elena. She loved her nephews. The 'loving tía Victoria' image is especially moving for me, because I'm there. I'm 'the auntie'. I have a lot of nieces and nephews, and I love them deeply. They're my kids, I've been taking care of them since I was 9, I would do anything for them. And I imagine Victoria being the same kind of aunt with Berto, Enrique and Gloria. Perhaps she's Berto's godmother; I can picture her standing so proud and happy in his christening, holding baby Berto fondly. Perhaps she used to help Enrique with his math homework or whatever. Perhaps she was Gloria's confident and took her to the cinema now and then. That kind of love is very powerful, too. Very strong. She didn't start a family, but she had a family. She had no children, but those kids were her children.

And then I imagine her in her first Día de Muertos as a deceased. Dead in her fifties (51 in my headcanon), when Berto's barely a young man, Enrique and Gloria were still teenagers, and her parents were elderly. She and Elena would be used to their little talks at night, about how old mamá and papá already are, about the business, about the future, sharing worries and supporting and comforting each other. But now she's left her little sister behind. She won't be there with her when they have to bury their parents. She won't be there when the kids get married and have their own children. She's going to miss everything she's loved the most. And she would stand before the ofrenda, knowing that, even so, there will be always people thinking 'it could've been worse'.

Romantic love can be something beautiful, of course. But there are many different kinds of love, and ways to love. The strong bond between siblings, between family or between friends needs to be more valued. It's not a second-hand love, and there are a lot of people unable to understand it. That's heartbreaking. But I'm very glad Coco gave me the opportunity to write about these things again.

Because, while I've seen a lot of fics that have them being neutral to each other, or even friends, Julio is Coco's husband.

He's got to know how much her father's leaving affected her— in fact he may know more about how it affected her as an adult than even Imelda and the twins know.

He knows how she kept singing that stupid song her father sang her— the one he later sold to Ernesto de la Cruz— each night after she thought everyone else was asleep.

He remembers when she stopped, shortly after Victoria was born, the night after she confessed to him that she couldn't understand how anyone could abandon their child if they loved them anything like as much as she loved hers.

He knows about the letters and the scrap of photo she saved, and caught her rereading them and crying to herself at least once.

On the last few, painful, Día de Muertoses of her life, after she started losing her memory completely, he heard her asking when her papá was coming home, snd he saw the pained expressions on the faces of the rest of the family, the living and the dead.

Plus, I have this other headcanon that Imelda put Julio through hell during the first couple years of his and Coco's marriage, because she was determined to make sure that her daughter never had to go through what she'd gone through, even if that meant making sure that Coco's husband was too terrified of his mother-in-law to ever dream of making a run for it.

And, of course, he's a father himself. So he knows what it's like and has spent a lot of time— particularly after Victoria died— wondering how any father could ever choose to be separated from his daughter and never see her again.

As a result of all this, Julio has secretly spent a lot of time fantasising abiut what exactly he'd say if he ever got the chance to give this complete and utter bastard a piece of his mind. And now he finally has that chance, and it's Héctor.

And Héctor just plainly doesn't deserve any of it. This isn't the selfish, fame seeking git of Julio's imagination, who abandonned his family for music and never gave Coco or Imelda a second thought. This is a guy who made a stupid mistake, regretted it almost immediately and has been trying to put things right ever since.

ernesto hadn’t intended to murder héctor, but to make him too sick to leave. héctor regularly struggled with stomach aches, therefore they both didn’t take it too seriously, and ernesto was really shocked when it actually killed him.