Bruce Springsteen at the Altar of Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1xDzgob1JI 
Bruce Springsteen and I grew up together. We lived and loved in different parts of the country during those same decades that defined us.  During the flight across the sky that is our era, we got knocked around in some of the same turbulence, and yet, both of us landed gently enough to look backward with gratitude.

In the tradition of his Irish and Italian ancestors, Springsteen is both a storyteller and a cultural high priest. The kind of priest who is comfortable in a pub filled with hard working hand laborers of all sorts. As he shepherds us through the early years of his life and career, Springsteen confesses to us that he’s never had a job like those who inhabit the working class lives of his songs.  He explains he wrote his stories of laborers in the voice of his father, a figure so important to Springsteen that it cannot be overstated. His father, "with the legs and ass of a rhinoceros,"  held numerous factory jobs when he was well but suffered from depression. It was fascinating to watch Springsteen credit both his parents, two opposites, while giving careful consideration to the resilience and optimism of his mother who informed the artist's lifetime of energy, drive and commitment to his work.

Springsteen's story has taken him around the world several times over only to return to live 10 minutes away from where he started, the town of Freehold, New Jersey. His hometown is a major character in his life: its bars, factories, the neighborhood full of his relatives where he grew up and the giant tree in front of his home that was the center of his life.

I found in the songs and storytelling such love, humanity and a surprising lack of ego for a troubadour who won over the world while staying rooted in his hometown.  

The transformation I witnessed as Springsteen presided at his stage and altar, as he took us from his childhood to manhood, surprised me as it corresponded with my own growing up and maturity as a woman of Mexican heritage living in the U.S. I stood beside him as he described, with an Apostle's Creed cadence and the precision of a surgeon, his family's geography and the impact their lives had on him. With each story's turn, I saw reflections of my own story growing up to the same songs, TV and movies 1,911 miles away in South Texas' Laredo.  Watching him on his Netflix special, I'll bet I'm not the only Baby Boomer to imagine myself standing behind Springsteen as he performs, not as a backup singer, but as someone who mines the same territories of memory to make sense of family, fortune, loss and perseverance.  

Toward the end of the performance, which is based on his Broadway show, I had the same overwhelmed feeling I often get after attending High Mass and standing for more than two hours in an overfilled church. I had been taken on a holy journey. I turned off the TV set and stood up from the sofa exhausted, my thoughts and images still gelling from the immersive music and words that Springsteen performed with fearless grace and candor.
 

Roma is Alfonso Cuaron's love song to his family and neighborhood in Mexico City.

I was so prepared to dislike Cuaron's entitled family in the film, Roma, but the unflinching honesty of his story-telling made me appreciate the possibilities that can arise after painful rebirth. Think of the many films the child whose story this is grew up to give the world.

Roma is Alfonso Cuaron's love song to his family's neighborhood in Mexico City. It's a stunningly visual film, of course, but its magic also draws from two other sources. The audio track and the many years elapsed since 1971 are as important as the images in this loving but open-eyed inspection of family, class, country and the shifting models of maternity and paternity that this movie shines a light upon.

The music of the era -- Juan Gabriel's classic, "No Tengo Dinero" enters and exits as you glide by street scenes of urban choreography, crowded with street vendors, traffic and pedestrians in purposeful and poetic pandemonium. The frenzy is balanced with thoughtful and carefully mined collections of day to day scenes that paint a detailed portrait of people persevering despite displacement, theft of lands and destructive tremors to supportive structures.

Cuaron re-opens the case against authoritarian abuse with his account of of the killings of hundreds of protesting college students by young men displaced from the countryside, trained by the U.S. CIA, and posing as students.

In Cuaron's middle-class family, the violence is no less. His medical doctor father's decision to leave the household of his wife, her mother, four children and household staff of three (only in post-colonial countries like Mexico with such low wages for domestic workers could this be possible) strikes like an earthquake leaving trembling walls that are no longer reliable. 

Upstairs and downstairs residents alike are adrift in this new landscape. The roomy Ford Galaxy the family used before Cuaron's dad's departure gets lodged between two cargo trucks and is smashed into the walls of the family's driveway by Cuaron's mother in a performance that merits its own recognition as metaphor for a marriage's inability to fit where once it did.

The story is a truthful telling of changing roles for mothers and fathers, emerging democracies' efforts (the city that gave us the first university in North America is also the site where at least three times in its history college students would be mowed down by the government) and class as seen through the lives of women who need each other in ways material and spiritual in order to make it through the upheavals of divorce, abandonment and ultimately, making the inner journey with each other's help and understanding, to reach new shores, new beginnings.