ROMA: A Guide for Outsiders
There is very little dialogue in Roma. This is a story told visually, through moving eyes, gestures, and facial expressions, and what is left unsaid is just as important as the lines recited onscreen. How the characters interact with one another through nonverbal cues, what they do, how they move, and how they interact with their surroundings are key for the viewer to piece together the story. Every frame here is meticulously crafted and imbued with detail and meaning.
The film’s story is also not a cohesive narrative, but a series of glimpses at everyday life in 1970s Mexico. It tells the story of Cleo, an Indigenous woman in her twenties working as a housekeeper for a middle-class Mexico City family, loosely based on writer-director Alfonso Cuarón’s own childhood and the life of his own chldhood nanny, Libo.We see this film’s world through Cleo’s eyes: her complicated relationship with the family she works for, her close friendship with her coworker, her experiences with dating, and glean as much information about this world as she does at any given moment.
At first view, the narrative is a simple one, but by looking closely, there are clues that something much bigger is going on: a forest fire on New Years’ Eve, a confrontation in the next room, objects hidden in a drawer, a political poster on a lamp post, a protest seen through a shop window. All of this tells us of what is really at play here. This is not just the story of Cleo and the people she works for, but of Mexico itself at a tumultuous time in its history. As everything in the film, it is not done overtly, but through subtle visual cues.
To many Mexican viewers, most of these cues will be obvious as they relate to things we experience, have lived through, or at the very least, have learnt about. However, for an outsider who knows little about Mexico and its history, these things might go above their heads. For this reason, this piece will attempt to explain many of the subtexts that might not be obvious upon first viewing.
Please note: SPOILERS for the film are included and discussed below.
City as Character
Mexico City is as much a character in Roma as any of the people we see depicted onscreen. The film is notable for Cuarón’s painstaking recreation of the city of his childhood and it is a love letter to the place he grew up in. Every location shown and recreated onscreen is a real place that either existed in the past or still stands today. Restaurants that were used as locations were reverted to how they looked forty years ago. Entire streets are rebuilt, adding buildings that no longer stand, neon signs where today stand billboards, and vanished streetcars. The result is a living, breathing city onscreen, where every shot could be an old picture stashed away in a drawer or album.
The city is embodied not just by what we see onscreen, but also through what we hear. Via a sublime sound design, Cuarón manages to convey a sense of place that immediately immerses the viewer. Every scene is peppered with the sounds of a bustling and unique city, from the sounds of traffic, to a military band marching in the mornings, to the acute whistle of a sweet potato cart on the sidewalk. In an explanatory piece on the film, Mexican urbanist and Feminist activist Dana Corres mentions how it was likely that sound was integrated into the screenplay from the beginning, given how intrinsic it is to the film.
While the city is celebrated, it is not idealised. The viewer gets to see the staggering inequality that characterises this city first-hand. Cuarón draws a stark contrast between the leafy middle class neighborhood where Cleo works and the abject poverty that exists in other parts of the city. This is a refreshing break from the often gentrified portrayals of the city that have become all too common in recent years.
Priísmo’s Heyday
The early 1970s were a deeply interesting period in Mexico’s history. This decade was was haunted by the shadow of the 1968 massacre of students which, by that point, had been painfully etched into the national consciousness. Mexico was still an undoubtedly authoritarian country, ruled by a single party: the center-right Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The PRI maintained power in two ways. The first was through a corporatist system which involved co-opting all major groups in society: unions, the army, political factions, intellectuals all fell under the PRI umbrella. The second was through building a social base through clientelist practices. These authoritarian corporatist practices, hiding a one-party state through a veneer of democracy, made the regime earn the nickname of “the perfect dictatorship”.
Then President Luis Echeverría, long regarded as one of the architects of the Tlatelolco massacre, ruled Mexico with a tenuous mix of limited reformism and authoritarian rule. While obviously Right-Wing, Echeverría fashioned himself a Leftist, using Third Worldist rhetoric and courting progressive leaders like Chile’s Salvador Allende, all while crushing the local Left. The ruling party was beginning to show its cracks, and people were starting to question the regime. In just twenty short years, the country would begin its transition toward a democratic, multi-party system. However, the PRI was still very much in charge.
Throughout the film, clues are peppered allowing the viewer to piece together this reality. Military bands playing patriotic songs are seen patrolling the city streets. PRI propaganda lines the streets in almost every outdoor scene, and seems almost inescapable. One scene that stands out takes place halfway through the film. We see Cleo exit a bus and walk along the streets a slum on the outskirts of Mexico City, in Mexico State (up until recently seen as the heartland of Priísmo). The streets are lined with Party propaganda. In the distance we hear music and a man speaking. As Cleo and the viewer get closer we hear what the man is saying. He is praising the President and exalting a man by the name of Carlos Hank, who was then governor of the State. Next to this we see a circus and people lining up for free food. This is emblematic of the Bread and Circus clientelism which characterised the PRI and is still very much a dominant practice in Mexican politics today.
The Corpus Christi Massacre
The film’s emotional centre is a scene where a pregnant Cleo is sopping for a crib for her child. Outside, a protest is unfolding through the window. Suddenly, we hear screams. From the window, protestors can be seen running from armed men. The armed men walk into the shop and begin looting the place. Cleo turns to one of them. It is the father of her child. In an interview, Cuarón describes this climax as the moment where “the personal and the social come together”. Events that happened earlier in the film are recontextualised by this scene in a deeply harrowing way.
The larger event we see unfold before us in this scene was real. On June 10th 1971, state-sponsored paramilitaries attacked and murdered a group of peaceful protesters. As a result, over 120 people died. The men shown looting were part of the “halcones”, or “falcons”, a trained paramilitary group designed to infiltrate protests, instigate violence, and kill students. The group was trained by Mexican authorities with support from the CIA.
There has not yet been justice for this case in almost fifty years, and it represents an extremely painful chapter in the country’s history, while remaining, sadly, very relevant. Students are still being murdered and disappeared on a regular basis to this day.
Race and class in Mexico
Across Mexico, Roma has sparked a public debate on race, class, and the nature of domestic work in Mexico. These are conversations that have long been necessary, but have mostly remained highly taboo in society. The issue of race in Mexico is hardly ever discussed in public, and has only come to surface in recent years, yet it has been a prevalent problem for centuries.
Mexicans tend to think that our country isn’t racist, or that institutional racism is an American problem. In Mexico, race and class are inextricably linked, and have been since the colonial era. A recent study by INEGI, Mexico’s national statistics institute, has shown correlation between skin colour, and education and income level, revealing the extent to which racially-based social barriers define Mexican society. The caste system that was established through colonialism, and its structures, remains for the most part, intact, only obfuscated by a “melting pot” mythos.
This is directly connected to a second issue, that of domestic work. Among Mexico’s middle and upper classes, employing live-in domestic workers is almost ubiquitous. The practice has become so normalised that few in these sectors pay attention to the dynamics of exploitation that underpin these relationships. The families that employ the over two million domestic workers in the country often tell themselves that domestic workers are “part of the family”, all while denying them decent wages or access to healthcare. In the film, Cleo is stuck in this precise situation, constantly being told that she is a member of the family, while being excluded and exploited.
Cuarón has spoken about using the film as a vehicle for more open discussion on these issues, yet despite Cuarón’s intentions, this aspect remains one of the more problematic elements in the film. Because of how the story is told, the film makes no overt statement on the racial and class dynamics of Mexican society, and how the ubiquity of domestic work plays into these dynamics. They remain only as subtext, understood only by the observant viewer or through multiple views. While the subtlety and nuance of the film’s message makes for incredibly compelling art, it ends up leaving the subtext as an optional takeaway. This is heightened by the film’s ambivalent, and almost happy, ending, and Cuarón’s obvious position of privilege when telling this story
Is ROMA merely an unintentional upholding of the status quo on this issue, as some have claimed, or was the subtlety of the message intended by Cuarón in order to spark a conversation? Like many things in the film, it all depends on how the viewer approaches it.
