*Ignacio M. S\u00e1nchez Prado<\/p>\n
Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s Roma<\/em>, like his previous two Mexican films, is troubled by class. This is a criticism and a praise. Class trouble has placed all three works into a central spot in their different historical moments. S\u00f3lo con tu pareja<\/em> resisted lower-class tremendism by focusing on the emergent creative class. In doing so, Cuar\u00f3n foresaw the reshaping Mexican commercial cinema after 1998. Y tu mam\u00e1 tambi\u00e9n<\/em>, conversely, engaged critically with this very bubble, by puncturing it, and rendering visible the class specters that haunt the neoliberal fantasy.<\/p>\n Roma <\/em>is a far more complex endeavor. It is an archeology of Mexico\u2019s class trouble, focusing on the year of 1971, the time when President Luis Echeverr\u00eda\u2019s authoritarian populism (present in the film from propaganda of the PRI to the recreation of the Halconazo<\/em>) quashed social dissent.[1]<\/a> Roma<\/em>\u2019s microcosm, the life of Cleo as a domestic and care worker in a professional middle-class household, is constructed upon the uneven modernization of the so-called \u201cMexican miracle.\u201d[2]<\/a> The family\u2019s privileges are a direct outcome of State-funded professionalization (Antonio, the patriarch who leaves his family, is a physician at the government-run Hospital General). Cleo\u2019s position as a domestic employee, in contrast, results from the devastating effects of the failure of post-Revolutionary agrarian reform, including the mass migration of former peasants to the city. This is signaled when we learn that Cleo\u2019s mother had been ultimately expelled from her lands by government agents. The concurrence of urban development and rural failure became the infrastructure that led to the new ways in which social class was constructed through race, pigmentocracy and labor regimes.<\/p>\n Unlike Y tu mam\u00e1 tambi\u00e9n<\/em>, modernity here is not narrated (the way the voiceover narrates the future hotel development of Chuy\u2019s beach, for instance), but sensorially conveyed. While in S\u00f3lo con tu pareja<\/em>, the creative class space is formalized in Emmanuel Lubezki\u2019s virtuosic nocturnal cinematography, in Roma<\/em> it appears in the intersection of two notable formal elements. First, Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s visual language (which he controls by being his own DP) fluctuates between static long takes that equally capture the movements of the city and the stasis of the slums and the countryside (following Gabriel Figueroa\u2019s work not only with Bu\u00f1uel and Emilio Fern\u00e1ndez but also with Julio Bracho) and the tracking shots that convey the awkward dynamic of domesticity (Cleo moving around the house carrying out her tasks whilst the families private lives continue in the background). Second, the sound design, Roma<\/em>\u2019s most brilliant technical feat, building on the territory explored by directors like Lucrecia Martel in La ci\u00e9naga<\/em><\/a>, turns the noises and utterances of everyday life, along with the mediascape of Mexican and global popular culture, into a constant set of signifiers related to the affective and social environment of 1970s modernity.<\/p>\n Through its self-presentation as fictionalized autobiography, Roma <\/em>shows how the social order of 1971 was the condition of possibility for the class privileges of the present, Enrique Krauze\u2019s<\/a> own self-reflecting review in the New York Times<\/em> is a telling example of this. The cancellation of Cleo\u2019s own futurity, embodied in Ferm\u00edn\u2019s role in Echeverrista political violence and, of course, in her painfully rendered miscarriage (including the brutal coldness of the physicians for whom her life is likely of little value), is what allows the futurity of the entire family to persist after the loss of their patriarch. As scholar Natalia P\u00e9rez pointed out in a Facebook comment, there is a nod to the idea that the feminism of the middle class is permitted by the domestic labor of women like Cleo. Sofia\u2019s new career and her ability to support her children require Cleo\u2019s loss.<\/p>\n Detractors<\/a> of the film have noted that Cleo\u2019s submission and silence reproduce longstanding stereotypes. They also wish there was more of her voice and backstory and complain that the film is too sympathetic of the family\u2019s exploitation of Cleo. These critiques are fair, but also somewhat simplistic. Yalitza Aparicio\u2019s exceptional performance conveys Cleo\u2019s affective and emotional layers as inherent to the subjective erasure and dehumanization inflicted by domestic work. Cleo and Adela\u2019s Mixtec language are fading as their diglossic conversations are met with Pepe\u2019s demands to \u201cstop talking like that.\u201d Cleo\u2019s desubjectification is a central issue across Roma<\/em>. It appears when Teresa, the grandmother, is unable to remember Cleo\u2019s age in the hospital reception or when Ferm\u00edn disavows his paternity by calling her \u201cgata\u201d (the racialized derogatory term for a maid in Mexico), thus making Cleo\u2019s employment a condition of her unworthiness. And, of course, this erasure takes place at the very end of the film when Cleo\u2019s about-face on wanting her child to not be born is superseded by Sof\u00eda, when Sof\u00eda praises Cleo for saving Sofi and Paco. Her heroics are in turn erased when Cleo nonchalantly returns to her domestic duties. A film in which Cleo \u201chad a voice,\u201d whatever that could have meant, would altogether miss the point of her constant dehumanization.<\/p>\n In its grandeur and its limitations, Roma <\/em>has a legitimate claim to be one of Mexico\u2019s best and most important films of all time. But, more significantly, the phenomenon it has created\u2014both the widespread praise and the passionate objections, as well as the social conversations on domestic work and the debate on Netflix and film distribution\u2014show what Mexican cinema can be when it receives the financial support and creative freedom that nearly all other filmmakers are denied, and when audiences give Mexican films their attention instead of flocking to mediocre Hollywood franchises. I left the theater wondering what would happen if the latitude and support that Cuar\u00f3n received was afforded to Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante, Fernando Eimbcke Natalia Berist\u00e1in or Yulene Olaizola, not to mention old masters like Mar\u00eda Novaro and Felipe Cazals. That this film exists is also the indicator that Mexico can have a relevant cinema that is passionately debated and supported by producers, distributors and audiences. In spite of, and thanks to its class trouble, Roma <\/em>is the first concrete example in years of what such cinema could be.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n *Ignacio M. S\u00e1nchez Prado is Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies and Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Screening Neoliberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema (1988-2012)<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n