Turning off the phone and turning on the memory

Source abstract

This dramatized autobiographical narrative is based on the author’s family oral history and lived experience in San Isidro Labrador, Acapulco. It recounts the transformative week a teenage boy spends with his recently widowed grandmother. Initially reluctant, the boy gradually forms a profound emotional connection through his grandmother’s oral storytelling, which interweaves their family history with broader themes of ethno-racial ancestry, coastal urbanization, and socio-environmental vulnerability. The grandmother shares her migration from San Blas, Nayarit, her Afro-Indigenous partner’s past in Tecomate, Guerrero, and their journey of building a life through informal economies and community resilience. Her stories reveal the dramatic changes to the coastal landscape resulting from unregulated urban growth, the exposure of marginalized settlements to disaster risks, and the intergenerational impact of surviving hurricanes such as Pauline and Otis. Through this intimate intergenerational dialogue, memory becomes a living archive that preserves cultural identity while exposing the fragility and resilience of life on the socio-environmentally precarious urban periphery. San Isidro Labrador, located on the northwestern periphery of Acapulco, is a low-income settlement historically shaped by migration, informal land tenure, and vulnerability to flooding and landslides. Like many peripheral neighborhoods, it stands at the intersection of urban expansion and socio-environmental risk, where life unfolds between resilience and precarity.