Undone isn’t about escaping your past, but accepting it

polygon.com:

Undonewas made for me. Set in San Antonio, Texas, the series focuses on Alma, a Mexican American woman whose life is turned upside down, sideways, and inside out after an accident causes her to awaken with time-altering powers. It’s latinidad and science fiction, but more importantly, the series has maintained a sharp look at mental illness, trauma, and grief.

For those who have lived it (or some version of it), Alma’s life is extremely familiar. She was raised by a Mexican mother and white father, the former always focused on making sure her daughters fit in. This means Alma and her sister, Becca, don’t speak Spanish, and their mom, Camila, is extremely quick to stress that their ancestors were Spaniards, not Nahua. Beyond that, Alma is pushed to get a cochlear implant and put into a hearing school, ripped from her Deaf school and community in favor of being “normal.”

On the other side of life steered toward assimilation, I can see myself in Alma. My mom actively kept me from speaking Spanish, chose the “whitest”-sounding name she could think of, and taught me to hide my disability and mental health issues from those around me. It was for survival that I had to bury parts of my culture and myself, coming up with excuses to just be me. This is the core of Undone season 1, but that’s not where the story ends. Instead of choosing to just reject assimilation, the series looks at how to heal from it in season 2.

[Ed. note: This post goes into full detail about the end of Undone season 2.]

In the beginning, Alma was in pain, ripped apart by grief and dancing on the razor’s edge of manic episodes, terrified of seeing her mental illness for what it is. Her father saves her — he shows her that her mental illness isn’t a