by Gabriela Barrios Herrera, Prateek Reddy Doddla, and Lucy Yang
Roma is an impressive movie, and the impressiveness is not about music or CG, but the sense of
peace embodied in the narrative. The entire movie follows Cleo, a Mixtec woman working as a
housemaid for a middle-class household in Mexico City. Her daily jobs include waking up the
children, preparing meals, doing chores, and sweeping off the dog feces in the driveway.
Cleo’s calmness caught our attention when we first examined the addressable themes of Roma.
In the early 1970s, Mexico City experienced brutal suppression of the continuing student movement. Tragic moments such as the Corpus Christi Massacre took away dozens of student protesters’ lives. Roma depicts these upheavals alongside the personal misfortunes of Cleo, revealing yet another personal layer of tragedy beneath the layer of political instability.
We noticed that, as a female Mixtec housemaid, Cleo experienced gender, cultural, and socioeconomic inequalities. What’s more intriguing is the layered structure of cultural hierarchy, as we also observed that Cleo’s boyfriend’s abandonment and threats indicated an embedded gender hierarchy within culturally marginalized populations. As we noticed how these identities brought her societal and personal inequality in the power dynamics of romantic and employment relationships, we grew curious as to how that piece of quietness Cleo held throughout the entire movie led her to live through the turmoils of both socio-economic and societal levels.
We analyzed how her personality contrasts with most narratives, which typically characterize an
assertive and courageous protagonist in the face of unequal treatment, while symbolizing an
internalization of power.
She is not diffident; she is gentle, yet firm.
She is gentle to the kids and the people who seem to have made her life worse. She is gentle to her
stillbirth and fear of the ocean. We saw that gentleness as her internalization of strength and
wondered what the source of the strength might be—acceptance, or simply a contribution of her
personality? That is when we started inspecting the title, as we did not see a single mention of
“Roma” in the movie. We shifted the order of the word and found that Roma spelled backward is
“amor”, meaning love in Spanish.
We were pretty sure that this movie is titled Roma because Colonia Roma is the neighborhood in
Mexico City where Alfonso Cuarón grew up, but this finding reminds us of one possible element in Cleo’s behavior: her soft, unconditional love for her surroundings built her soundless strength.
In admiration of Cleo’s resilience and great love, we made our video essay, Roma: Invisible
Hierarchies and Layered Discriminations, to disclose the struggles of more indigenous female
domestic workers in Latin America like Cleo and to praise the power of love in every woman.