Missing From the Table: On Bruno, Family Silence, and Estrangement
We don’t talk about Bruno — but I will. A personal reflection on Encanto, family secrets, and being the one who vanishes.
I’m not Colombian, but I’m South Asian, a refugee in Europe — and the themes of family, intergenerational trauma, silence, and hierarchy in Encanto spoke to me deeply. Especially through the character of Bruno.
I also realized something very early on in the film: my family wasn’t just watching Bruno’s story. My dad was Bruno. And later in life, I would become Bruno too.
A bit of personal context: I come from big families on both sides. My dad has ten siblings, and my mother was very close to her cousins. So growing up, I had a huge extended family — a network of voices and love. But also, eventually, a lot of distance. Some of it was geographic (most of them lived in India), but the rupture came when I was eight. My father had a major falling out with his siblings over my grandmother’s inheritance (classic). After that, my dad became estranged from the family — and by extension, so did I.
It was a sudden, devastating void for a child who had spent her first nine years talking every Sunday to her uncles, aunts, and cousins on a phone card. My foundest memory was going back to India in my grandmother's house with all of my cousins. It never happened again since.
In that sense, Bruno represented the family I had lost.
So when Mirabel tries to understand who Bruno was, I recognized that feeling — wanting to know someone who’s become a ghost in your own family.
When we're first introduced to him, it's through Mirabel's song The Family Madrigal. She knows almost nothing about him — just his gift, and that he left. He's surrounded by mystery.
Later, in We Don’t Talk About Bruno, we witness a collective silence — a patchwork of half-truths and projections. Each family member gives their version of him, their interpretation, their fear. But Bruno is not there to speak for himself. He becomes a screen onto which everyone projects what they don’t want to face.
To Mirabel, he’s an enigma.
To her mother, perhaps a pain too tender to touch.
To the family at large — a source of shame, danger, drama.
It’s not unusual: every family, especially in POC communities, has its ghosts. When someone disappears, we create stories to fill the gap. And often, those stories are shaped by fear. Bruno becomes a scapegoat — a figure onto whom the family displaces its unresolved pain.
The moment Mirabel steps into Bruno’s abandoned room gave me chills — because some rooms in my own family feel like that too. Full of things no one dares to say.
The room is still there because even when someone is erased, their place in the family never fully disappears. But it’s collapsed, fragmented, filled with crumbling paths and dangerous edges. This is the landscape of taboo. Still, Mirabel steps in. She dares to enter the ruins the previous generation left behind. Narratively, she's the child who descends into the buried memory — the one brave enough to look at what everyone tried to forget.
And then comes the twist: Bruno never actually left. He’s been living in the walls, present but invisible. He sees, hears, even quietly fixes things. But he's hidden — erased from the center of the story, yet never truly gone. It reminded me so much of what happens in families like mine. We don't always cut people off — we silence them. We leave them in the walls. They become the unresolved presence, the unacknowledged truth that still shapes the house.
In systemic family therapy, we often draw family trees — not just to show who’s alive, but to mark absences, deaths, secrets, affairs. Because every hidden thing in a family still lives in the structure. Bruno embodies that exactly: he’s both gone and still here. His presence whispers through every room, through every silence.
When Mirabel discovers that Bruno has carved himself a spot at the dinner table, I cried. Because moments of togetherness — birthdays, festivals, special occasions — are where you feel the separation the most. And I’ve felt it at every special occasion since childhood.
In many POC families — South Asian, Latinx, and others — cutting off family isn’t always an option. Instead, we dim them. We un-name them. We bury the conflict without resolution. Bruno becomes the weight of the unspoken — the thread that was never cleanly cut, just tangled and hidden.
And once again, it’s Mirabel — the younger generation — who breaks the cycle. She finds Bruno. She listens. She honors him. She doesn’t want him erased from the walls. She wants him back in the home. That act, as symbolic as it is simple, undoes years of silence.
As someone who grew up with bitter uncles and aunts, whispered conflicts, and family rifts that were never named… this hit hard. I’ve tried, many times, to repair family drift. Sometimes it worked — my cousins and I managed to build bridges. Other times, it didn’t. Some of our “Bruno-ed” uncles and aunts weren’t kind. They weren’t hiding in the walls waiting to be heard — they were bitter, toxic and petty. And I also realized: we, the children of the estranged sibling, became the “Bruno” of the new generation. A quiet curiosity. A mystery. A missing branch that the younger cousins wanted to meet, understand, recover.
A year ago, I had a major fallout with my parents. Even though our relationship was toxic, I never wanted to cut ties. I wanted confrontation and transformation, like Mirabel did. Instead, estrangement happened anyway. And when I became the one no one asked about, it hit me even harder: I wasn’t just watching Bruno. I was living in the walls too.
Thankfully, the rest of the family stayed in touch, even if they didn’t understand what had happened with my parents. Living through this has taught me: Bruno was never the problem. He just held up a mirror — and sometimes that shatters a system so much that it rejects you.
And like Bruno, what’s left for me is that quiet longing — for better times at each special occasion, for a table that feels whole again, even when I know it won’t.
Family healing is complex and never linear. In some families, it happens. In others, it doesn’t. In mine, some branches are slowly mending: I see my uncles and aunts transforming, challenged by my cousins. Some, like my parents, won’t change. And that’s okay. I still believe in intergenerational healing. If it won’t be with them, then it will start with me — for the next ones.
Stories like Encanto, even told in the form of a Disney film, matter. They give shape to the traumas we don’t always have words for. They remind us: silence has weight. And sometimes, what we don’t talk about… defines us the most.
If you’re curious, I’ve written more on Encanto: "The Matriarch Isn’t the Villain. She’s the Mirror." This post is about Abuela, and how matriarchs often carry both the power and the blame in intergenerational stories.
