As the last preparatory stages of this volume came to an end, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical film Roma had just won three Oscars for the categories best director, best cinematography, and best foreign language film in Hollywood’s recognition of Cuarón’s filmic mastery. Among the many nominations the film received, one made headlines weeks before the ceremony: the one for best actress. As The New York Times announced, Yalitza Aparicio was the first Indigenous Mexican actress to be nominated in this category.1 Aparicio, an actor of Mixtecan descent from Oaxaca, plays Cleo, the protagonist of Cuarón’s film. Her role as the housekeeper and nanny of an upper-middle-class family in Mexico City during the early 1970s is the center of the story.
What is relevant for us here is not so much the recognition from Hollywood and the Academy Awards of an already well-known and respected filmmaker such as Cuarón, but of the protagonist Cleo, who embodies gender, socioeconomic, and racial differences in the context of the family dynamics she is placed in as a live-in domestic worker. How these differences operate within the labor relationship that defines and characterizes most female domestic work—one that goes beyond the physical tasks to include the emotional care implicit in the domestic workers’ interactions with the families that employ them—and more importantly, how this relationship is cinematically represented and construed in twenty-first-century Latin American film are indeed the purpose, focus, and content of this volume.
The many and controversial discussions surrounding the release of Roma from film critics and scholars alike—as well as the public response to the screening in Mexico as reported by the media—confirm our original conception of this book: the need to critically analyze the domestic worker’s role and character in contemporary Latin American film. In particular, the chapters included in this volume challenge trite stereotypical conventions about the nana, criada, chica, sirvienta, and mucama encountered in popular culture and the national imaginaries of Latin America in most of the twentieth century and before.2 The timing of Cuarón’s film and the critical and popular responses serve us well in bringing to the fore the most controversial issue of those debates and pronouncements: the act of representing the Other and its consequences. Since the story of Cleo takes place in the 1970s, she, as a subaltern female subject, not only presents a traditional and hierarchical maid-mistress relationship but also brings to center stage the legacy of colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and, by extension, all of Latin America.
Despite Cuarón’s comments that part of his film revolves around class and race, his insistence that he had no political agenda or intention to create any critical discourse—“que se fueran dando los temas, pero sin discurso, sin adoctrinar [that the themes would flow without a discourse, without indoctrination]”3—was not equally shared by scholars and film critics. The most vocal critic, Richard Brody of The New Yorker, went so far as to claim that Cuarón “reduces [Cleo] to a bland and blank trope,” one full of stereotypes that include “a strong, silent, long-enduring, and all-tolerating type,” and that Cleo is indeed an enigma, a “cipher.”4 For Brody, the domestic worker is constructed as a “silent angel,”5 to the point that the character remains inaccessible not only to the audience but also to Cuarón himself. Thus, he states, Cleo’s representation is “the essential and crucial failure of Roma .”6 Another critical voice, that of Latin American cultural and literary studies scholar Joseph M. Pierce, points to the fact that the representation of Cleo as a passive, Indigenous subject within a system of oppression and exploitation only exacerbates Cleo’s subordinate position based on her gender and racial difference: “I saw in Roma not sensitivity, but the continuation of an imaginary that can only see Indigenous women as the surrogate life force of a still-colonial society.”7
Although Cuarón dismisses the idea of making Cleo political, as an embodiment of Mexico’s most underprivileged and disenfranchised classes based on gender, class, and race, he is acutely aware of how he construed this character: “Hay una manera en la que se percibe a ciertos personajes, que tiene que ver con que son personajes invisibles. Y lo son en el sentido que no tienen voz [There is a certain way to understand some characters, in the sense that they are invisible. And they are so because they have no voice].”8 Cuarón shies away from satisfying the audience’s yearnings about Cleo, of making her some type of heroic character or, simply put, of deciphering her as the Other. Several film scholars have commented on precisely the certain way in which the director construes Otherness in his film. Deborah Shaw finds Cleo’s ubiquitous presence remarkable; she is featured “in (almost) every shot,” and the fact that her labor as a domestic worker “is made visible throughout” in a film “full of illustrations of unconscious power dynamics ” that clearly renders Cleo’s subaltern position within the family and Mexican society.9 Another film scholar, Pedro Ángel Palou, talks about the director’s “subtlety” in creating Cleo’s voice “through framing, point of view,” and other film techniques that “highlight Cleo’s simultaneous subordination and elevation and consequently her position inside and outside the family.”10
Beyond these academic and intellectual debates, it is revealing that Cleo and Roma have brought visibility to paid domestic work, an occupation that is a legacy of the colonialist practices of slavery and servitude based on racial and class subordination in Latin America. Although male servants were common during the colonial period, over time women began to occupy the majority of these positions because of prevalent notions—many of which continue today—about what was appropriate work for women. Paternalistic and patriarchal attitudes—legacies of colonialism—made female workers dependent on their employers/masters and limited them to the domestic sphere.11 With these attitudes came expectations of femininity that included practices of hygiene, sexuality, and religion. Paid domestic labor remains a pressing issue because it has not decreased, as was once predicted. Whereas it was thought that modernization and economic development would result in less paid domestic labor, globally that is not the case.12 In fact, there has only been a slight decrease in Latin America, “from 19.2 percent of the urban economically active female population in 1995 to 16.8 percent in 2009.”13 Despite the fact that women now have more access to education and jobs, they are still largely expected to take care of the household, or perform reproductive labor more broadly, within the framework of a traditional, heteronormative family. It is no surprise, then, that in the majority of films featuring paid domestic labor, Roma included, male characters are largely absent or irrelevant. The expectation that women remain responsible for reproductive labor has in turn generated what is referred to as the “crisis of care,” a phenomenon largely responsible for making domestic employment a well-known global trade phenomenon and reality lived by millions of women in Latin America.14 Due to this ongoing demand for paid domestic work that reproduces patriarchal hierarchies between so-called First World and Third World countries, the majority of scholarship on the topic to date focuses on the transnationalization of this labor and the immigration patterns associated with it.15...