All year long, Armando’s social studies teacher Mr. Anderson had been building his students’ anticipation of and excitement about “The Great Eighth Grade Family History Project.” It was like some sort of rite of passage that all eighth graders had to experience. To Armando, the project just sounded like a lot of work and frankly, kind of dull.

Mr. Anderson promised that every family history is a fabulous novel, a great movie, an epic just waiting to be discovered. Armando knew his grandparents on both sides: they’d all come to Arizona from Mexico after WWII, they were all ranchers and farmers, and he didn’t think there was anything “epic” about any of them. He had 16 aunts and uncles, more cousins than he could count, and none of them had lives that seemed straight out of a feature film, but maybe he was missing something. He hoped his research partner Jacinta’s family was more interesting than his.

When Mr. Anderson had paired him up with Jacinta, Armando was a little nervous. Jacinta was super-smart and so serious, with her long, straight dark hair and big round earrings with tribal designs on them. He knew her family was involved in the local powwow every year, so he was kind of interested to find out more about them.

Once Jacinta arrived, Armando was pleasantly surprised: Jacinta was really nice and actually pretty funny.

“My grandparents, my mom’s parents, are so embarrassing,” giggled Jacinta, looking through the box of old photos she had brought. “They’re always telling my sisters and me about how they went to the fair and fell in love, and then,” she brought her hand up to her eyes as if to shield them from a horrible sight, “they dance and sometimes kiss—right there in their kitchen!” Both young people howled with laughter.

“Oh man, I would just die if my grandparents did that!” Armando couldn’t even imagine any of his grandparents dancing, let alone in the kitchen. He was looking over Jacinta’s shoulder at the photos of people wearing native costume: feathers, brightly colored outfits, and jewelry like the earrings Jacinta always wore.

“So, is your family, like, Navajo, or what?” Armando knew that the Navajo nation was prominent in the Southwest.

“My family are Tohono O'odham, the Desert People,” Jacinta said proudly. “They have lived here for too many generations to count; forever, probably.” She continued flipping through photos as if she was looking for one specific one.

Armando was intrigued by what Jacinta had just said, that her family had lived there forever. What would it be like to grow up in the place where your great-great-times-a-hundred-greats-grandparents had lived?

“Here’s the picture I was looking for,” she held up a photo of two young people dressed in fancy native costumes. “This is where my grandparents met: the Sells Indian Rodeo.” The two people in the photo were holding hands and smiling beneath a big banner that read “Sells Indian Rodeo and Fair 1962.” Some hint of a memory tugged at Armando—where had he seen that sign before?

He picked up his box of photos and began pawing through them until he found the photo he’d remembered. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said haltingly, not quite believing it himself, and slid the photo over next to Jacinta’s. In Armando’s photo stood his grandparents, his father’s mom and dad, on the day they met. They were both wearing full cowboy gear; his grandfather had won a buckle that day for calf roping, and his grandmother wore a white cowboy hat and fringed gloves. Both were smiling, and both were standing under the exact same sign: “Sells Indian Rodeo and Fair 1962.”

"But that means,” said Jacinta, her eyes bouncing back and forth between the twin photos, “that they had to have been there at the same time—maybe on the same day!”

“My grandparents met there that day! My grandmother says she remembers watching my grandfather win that buckle and she decided right then and there that she was going to marry him!” Armando was a little embarrassed by how proud he was of that story, of how his grandmother loved his grandfather so fiercely.

Jacinta smiled, nodding her head, and said, “My grandparents have told me the story of this day a hundred times: how they went to this fair on their first date, danced with their troop at the big show, and afterward they rode on the Ferris wheel. They got married just a few months after this.”

Both kids stared at the photos, amazed at how their families’ histories seemed to rush up at them, and between them, and finally, all around them, until they felt like they were, after all, in a movie.

Which sentence BEST expresses the theme of the story?