Breaking the Encanto

Millions worldwide cope with the vestiges of fleeing due to persecution, material and structural violence, and the impossibility of building a lasting life project. Many carry on in silence, constantly struggling with finding a place for themselves. Walt Disney’s Encanto depicts some of these conflicts attached to the stillness and invisibility produced amid forced displacement. It is a story of how silence serves as a tool of social discipline, which keeps personal traumas and political claims hidden, and of how in coping with them, we are left to our own devices. It invites a reflection on the need to break the silence that renders struggles in forced displacement invisible.