Abstract
By speaking through Cleo, Cuarón offers the working elite a narrative to ease their own anxieties around class instability.
At first glance, the film Roma, by acclaimed Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, seems to expose the challenges faced by household workers. Cleo, a live-in maid of indigenous origin, works for a white, upper-middle-class family in Mexico’s capital during the 1970s. The film is a social dialogue about the invisibility of her job, the isolation she experiences, and the complex relationship she has with her female employer, Sofia. As Roma’s main character, Cleo symbolizes the simultaneous feminization and racialization of domestic service. Beyond Cuaron’s intended tribute to his childhood nanny, the film spotlights the physical toll, and the emotional labor employers expect of domestic workers living at the margins of their homes. Yet numerous researchers on domestic work have dismantled the nostalgic tone of Cuaron’s tribute by arguing that he is really speaking to, about, and through Cleo, rather than allowing her to speak for herself. By speaking through Cleo, he offers the working elite a narrative to ease their own anxieties around class instability.
As Roma’s main character, Cleo symbolizes the simultaneous feminization and racialization of domestic service.
Cleo’s lack of voice leads the audience to see her as someone “we have” but not someone who “is,” noted historian Romina Cutuli. The film engages the colonial legacy of feudal hierarchies, where indigenous communities are forced to migrate to urban areas for work that serves white middle-class families. Thus, Cleo epitomizes the experience of poor women of color in the global market. The film offers a portrayal of the daily construction of racial “otherness.” It exposes how work and life are merged within a model of mutual dependency between employers and employees, as noted by social scientist Santiago Cane-varo. As scholars María Julia Rossi and Lucia Campanella have discussed, this mutually dependent relationship distinguishes a job that has been historically racialized, feminized, and underpaid. Employers profit from the labor of social subordinates in isolated and private spaces who become receptors of employers’ emotional and psychological needs.
The resounding applause to which Roma was released could be a response to changes in cultural attitudes towards domestic work, where the public is becoming more critical of the inequalities that place women of color inside the houses of whiter, more affluent families. At the same time, Cuaron provides his upper-middle-class audience a narrative to cast themselves as exceptional. Nowhere in the film does he reference payment, and he emphasizes the maid’s devotion to the family, as if she would do this work even if she were not compensated. In this way, Roma is not really about Cleo and does not formulate a clear standing about domestic work and workers’ conditions. Instead, it is possible that the film resonates with white upper and middle-class professionals due to their own crises of being disposable as elite workers. Cleo actually serves as a black mirror of her employers and middle-class spectators. She symbolizes work flexibilization at its extreme: a body totally at the disposal of capitalism, the merging of private life and work, personality as key to productivity, and emotional labor as appropriately central to how employers evaluate domestic workers’ performances.
ILO Asia-Pacific, Flickr CC
As a member of an exploited class, Cleo does not dare to challenge Sofia’s demands. For example, when it is clear that the family is starting to struggle after Sofia’s husband abandons them, there is no doubt Cleo will remain as their live-in maid. Cleo represents the perfect employee: endless love and benefit, and an infinite source of affective labor so highly valued in care workers. Two scenes serve as the initial and final visual articulation of rhetoric that eases middle classes’ anxiety around their own disposability within a changing and more extractive economy. The first scene occurs at the beginning of the film when the family gathers at night to watch TV. After finishing her duties, Cleo sits on the floor next to Pepe, the youngest child, who is also the most attached to her. After observing the child’s affection toward Cleo, Sofia requests something of her; boundaries are constantly redefined by those in power who appear uncomfortable with the too-familiar presence of their employees.
As an arm retaining and releasing, the employer’s sight enforces obedience rather than recognition and exchange. The last scene shows Sofia and the children holding Cleo at the beach. After risking her own life to save two of the children from drowning, Cleo has an emotional breakdown in which she expresses her lack of love for a baby she lost, and that was the result of an unwanted pregnancy. This emotional exchange could be seen as the ultimate expression of alienation, although by expressing her rejection of the baby, she acknowledges her feelings towards the man who abandoned her and reassures her love (and belonging) to her employers.
Cleo represents a “maid’s paradigm”: a sort of labor exploitation where devotion means total alienation and love conceals an extractive capitalist dynamic. Cleo is the “other” that upper- and middle-classes do not want to be, but whom at the same time they rely on to love them and their children. Roma’s emphatic reception might rise more from middle-class fears of becoming as alienated as Cleo, rather than from a real understanding of household workers’ conditions. In the same way, domestic workers do not want to see themselves as Cleo, middle-class employers do not want to see themselves as victims of others’ exploitation of their emotional labor. In this context, Sofia, Cleo’s female employer, cannot ultimately be the villain. The film reinforces a horizon that does not threaten the employee-employer relationship but relieves middle-class anxieties about the disposable condition of the working elite.