“Roma” represents Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón′s loving gaze at his mixteca nanny, “Cleo” in the film, Liboria Rodríguez in real life, as played by first-time actress Yalitzia Aparicio.  But the movie is also about something else: a critique of the multiple facets of patriarchal violence in Mexico.  Cuarón gives us a glimpse of personal, family, intimate violence and its mirror image in the state-sponsored violence of the 1970s, personified by the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre against student protesters carried out by Luis Echeverría’s government. 

Following Cleo’s every move as the indigenous maid of a middle class family at the point of its dissolution, the film shows the apparent ease with which the male head of household, a doctor, leaves his family, which includes a wife, four children, a mother-in-law, Cleo, and a young mixteca cook.  Cuarón shows his father as annoyed with the messiness of the house and the amount of excrement the dog leaves in the driveway—a not-so-subtle jab by the father at the women of the family: a wife who can’t manage her maids and the maids who can’t seem to do their jobs properly.  Later on in the film, Cuarón shows the father coming out of a movie-theatre joyously laughing with a new girlfriend, to the point of not noticing that one of his sons has seen him.  All the while the father is pretending that he is on a work trip to Canada in the few missives he sends to the children.  Child support is not on his agenda.  Although the father does not beat his wife or his kids, his selfishness causes them enormous pain.  The violence is symbolic and psychological, but certainly no less hurtful.  Even in middle class families, the patriarch’s own desires come first, and to hell with the needs of everyone else.

Cleo meets violence closer in the face, as befitting her class and ethnicity.  She is at the bottom of the social pecking order in the family, and no matter how much the mother in the house, Sofia, truly cares for her, she becomes the target of the latter’s frustration with her husband.  In flashes of anger because her husband has left the family, Sofia lashes out at the teenage Cleo for failing to control the dog or a precocious kid who overhears a conversation that reveals the true nature of the father’s absence.  Psychologists may have scientific terms to talk about the displacement of Sofia’s anger, but her behavior also shows that under patriarchy, all the females share the duty of keeping the man at the top of the hierarchy happy.  Sofia, as the female head of household, has the additional responsibility of enforcing that idea among women of lesser status.  Thus women uphold patriarchal values themselves, without the men getting their hands dirty.

In a moment of recognition and “sisterhood” fueled by apparent drunkenness, Sofia does tell Cleo that women have something in common: they are always alone.  Class and ethnicity might separate them, but patriarchy brings them together.  Under Mexican patriarchy, women can never trust the men in their lives will remain faithful in any sense of the word.  Women will end up on their own, at the mercy of the shifting desires of the patriarch.

What these men are really good at is abandonment or violence.”

Cleo finds that out soon enough.  Her first boyfriend, Fermín, impregnates her and abandons her right at the movie theatre when she tells him she’s pregnant.  When she seeks him out in that squalid slum of one million people that is Nezahualcoyotl–far removed from the respectability of la Roma–to remind him that she is carrying his child, Fermín promptly threatens her.  He tells her he will hurt her and “her” child if she doesn’t leave him alone.  Cleo knows he is not joking:  he is a martial arts expert, a young man of the lower classes who has seen his share of violence and experienced it from birth.  His way out of the structural violence that poverty forces upon him, in fact, is to escalate the violence.  He trains his body and transforms it into a tool for further violence.

Eventually the patriarchal drama taking place in the intimacy of the family becomes reflected in the violence perpetrated by the Mexican state.  Cleo and the grandmother are shopping for a crib when los halcones, a paramilitary group in civilian clothes, attacks a student demonstration going on outside the store.  Fermín, Cleo’s ex-boyfriend, rushes into the store chasing a demonstrator who is trying to hide.  He shoots the young man and kills him.  Aiming his gun at everything that moves, Fermín turns around and his gun points at Cleo.  Fermín is one of the halcones, a thug hired by the Mexican government to repress the students who would protest against poverty, injustice, and the broken promises of the Mexican revolution. The government resents the youth calling it out; they are spoiled children who need discipline.  The patriarchal state is happy to oblige.  It uses one poor man, Fermín, to wreak violence on middle class youngsters his own age, manipulating a type of class warfare to protect itself.  Cleo looks at Fermín with eyes wide open in recognition and fear.  He embodies power and violence, cocooned by the impunity guaranteed by the state he now represents. Fermín sees her and hesitates, then runs out onto the street. 

Cleo has one last encounter with the family patriarch, at the hospital where she is going to give birth to her baby.  He is a doctor there and rushes to reassure her she will be fine and show how much he cares.  He would love to be in the birthing room with her, but he says he’s not allowed in there.  His fine performance collapses when Cleo’s female ob-gyn tells him he’s welcomed to join her in attending to Cleo.  The father of the family is momentarily flustered as he is caught lying, mutters some excuse and like, Fermín, turns around and leaves.  The parallel leaves no doubt about the representation of patriarchy.  What these men are really good at is abandonment or violence. That’s all.

The end of the film, when Cleo saves the children from drowning despite the fact that she herself can’t swim has generated a lot of commentary.  I will only add that Cuarón leaves us with one more thought about patriarchy and female solidarity.  In her pain, Sofia might have been correct that women always end up alone.  But what she failed to realize in that moment was that women can also end up together, united because of, and in spite of, the viciousness of patriarchy.  And they can raise a family together.  And bring up a great filmmaker.

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