Maternidades 'heroicas' en Roma, de Alfonso Cuarón

Abstract

Between the hegemony of the 'superhero' in Hollywood's visual language today and the United States' appropriation of the hero--the police, the fire fighter, the paramedic--since the transformative events of September 11, the notion of the hero has reached a veritable semantic saturation. But that saturation has been limited to male subjectivities. Alfonso Cuarón's latest film, Roma (2018), proposes a resemantization of the heroic subject with the two female protagonists: Cleo, a Mixtec domestic servant, and Sofía, a middle-class, urban mother. This essay attempts to examine the ways in which the film structures a potential female heroic figure within the oppressive, male social hegemony in early 1970s Mexico. What is fascinating about Roma--in addition to its stoic cinematography and a narrative arc as sparse as it is rich--is that the female heroic figure is neither extraordinary nor extravagant: it is utterly everyday. And it orbits around a reconfiguration of the maternal. The figure of the mother in Mexican cinema has a long history since the advent of sound, and Roma dialogues with and redefines motherhood--literal and putative motherhood.