ABSTRACT
This essay is composed under the premise that an early 21st Century, Mexican-American family, sustainably living in and through art, is a miracle and a gift. Nestled in the heart of this surprising present, the Lucero-Sánchez family is now—in year 19 of its existence—standing at the precipice of a morphing vista: All the children are teenagers and the oldest is heading off to college. Although increasingly quotidian in the Mexican-American imagination, the milestone of sending a child away to school elicits nostalgia and melancholy in the mother and father of the family. The nostalgia has manifested itself in an urgent curating of the family archive (both artifacts and narratives) and the melancholy is being grappled with by attempting to figure out what is generatively possible within the dynamism of the family’s imminent reality.
