Abstract
Through a peek at one family’s life, Roma offers a glimpse at the burgeoning middle class, privileged not only by race and family inheritances but also by new possibilities of supposedly merit-based higher education.
Following a Golden Globe award win for Roma, director Alfonso Cuarón was quoted in Entertainment Weekly as saying: “In reality, this film was directed by Libo, by my mother, and my family, and maybe even more importantly by this place, this very complex lab that shaped and created me…so muchas gracias, México.”
An autobiographical glimpse at Cuarón’s early childhood in Mexico City’s Roma district circa 1970, the film focuses on one of two indigenous women who provided domestic services to his family. Here, “Cleo,” the character representing Cuarón’s real-life nanny, Libo, is the center of the story that unfolds.
Like much of Latin America at the time, Mexico was a “laboratory” of political and social experimentation. Through a peek at one family’s life, Roma offers a glimpse at the burgeoning middle class, privileged not only by race and family inheritances, but also by new possibilities of supposedly merit-based higher education. The backdrop of this changing landscape is student-led demonstrations against an authoritarian and brutally repressive government. In this context, Cuarón brings to the forefront a key figure in Latin American culture: the household worker, the nanny, la empleada.
Through a peek at one family’s life, Roma offers a glimpse at the burgeoning middle class, privileged not only by race and family inheritances, but also by new possibilities of supposedly merit-based higher education.
In contrast to the dynamism of the socially progressive manifestations questioning social hierarchies, Cleo remains in a subservient position—a constant in an otherwise tumultuous landscape. Her second-class status is evident and reflects back to a privileged audience members’ Mexican class relations that feel familiar and “right.” Despite Cuarón’s loving treatment of her and the suggestion that she was “part of the family,” Cleo’s agency as a human being with her own plans and critical thoughts of her station in life takes a backseat to her role as a cleaner and caregiver who pillars the social station of the family for whom she works.
Today, as in 1970s Mexico, it is still young, mostly indigenous migrant women of color who are providing the domestic and care work that makes it possible for other people to go to work, to educate their children, and to move ahead. Yet, instead of enjoying a full gamut of rights, the idea that workers like Cleo are part of the family continues to persist as a sort of reciprocal currency that does little for their own socioeconomic advancement. They do not share the same rights as their employers, neither in legislation nor in their social positioning. Only in 2019 did Mexico grant social security and paid vacations to domestic workers. And in most of Latin America, remuneration is very low for this sector.
ILO Asia-Pacific, Flickr CC
As Latin America’s middle class has expanded, mostly rural women hope domestic work will assure them a pathway toward upward social mobility. Yet the reality is that they are often trapped. In some cases, these women are being held responsible for paying back the debt of a place to stay in the process of their rural-to-urban work transition. Though many have plans to pursue their education while in the city, these plans are often thwarted for lack of time and resources; many ultimately remain in this work for lack of better options. Many also experience young motherhood, making their employment imperative for not only their own survival but also for that of their children, who they might see less than the children whom they are employed to care for. Their children might be far away in their mother’s hometown and in the care of others—or the time and distance devoted to domestic work limits how often women can see their children.
Such a model of household reproduction is still the norm for most homes in Latin America, where few of the region’s countries can claim solid institutions. Yet one institution, servitude, remains intact, particularly for those countries where state-led welfare services and citizen rights remain weak. Only recently has Mexico agreed to provide domestic workers with the right to enroll in the Mexican Social Security Institute. Just last year, Peru ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention 189, which calls for domestic workers’ equal rights. Yet, in these countries, as in others, until the laws are applied and monitored, it is unlikely anything will change. Workers remain dependent on the goodwill of their employers. As workers who execute their jobs in private homes where the power is indisputably in the latter’s hands, changes must start inside the homes where these women perform their duties, where the day-to-day occurs.
Like others who have watched Roma, I was moved by the director’s film-making talent and the sensitivity and honesty with which he laid out the stark social differences between Cleo and her employers. However, I had also hoped that Roma would make it abundantly clear that Cleo could never be a full family member because the weight of the intersecting conditions that placed her near the bottom of the social hierarchy would not allow it. This would make it a more honest portrayal of Cleo’s life—of the constraints that limit the possibility of upward social mobility for women like her.
My research in Peru focuses on the continued inferior position of domestic workers. Women in domestic work generally do not enjoy the upward social mobility they hope their employment will bring. Rather, their relationship with the servitude sector and the families that employ them is a revolving door. In this context, it becomes important for women to find a “good” employer. This dependency is paternalistic, protecting them from becoming vulnerable to exploitation and continued inferiorization. What is particularly tragic for these women is that there are few options for decent work, and the “best” job might lie with the discovery of a kind employer, not unlike Cuarón’s own mother in the film, but certainly one with unchecked power in the relationship. Of course, individual answers to larger social problems are precarious at best.
Indeed, Cuarón was right. His story was shaped by a complex social lab that included his mother, Libo, and the then political state of Mexico. The problem is that for most women in Libo’s position, other work options remain distant as non-monetary currencies like the idea of family, or kinship, bind them to the status quo. Paying them with some level of reciprocity and affection, perhaps, but refusing to provide women in this work with the full gamut of rights, wages, and respect that other workers might enjoy. In Cuarón’s memory of 1970s Mexico, where social change was abuzz, the status of the worker, comparatively, was frozen in time. And nearly 50 years later, the fight for domestic workers’ rights is far from over.