Op-Ed: Let “Roma” start a conversation about the household workers we employ

Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” is being touted as a masterpiece for the way it tells an epic story through a granular examination of the everyday life of a middle-class family in early 1970s Mexico City. It is, in other words, a moment of reckoning in Mexico, and the film has helped to focus the conversation on the legacy of colonialism and how it extends to the most intimate of spheres – as inside Cuarón’s autobiographical home in “Roma,” where Cleo and Adela, Mixtec Indians from Oaxaca, work from dawn until well into the night picking up after four young children, cracking soft-boiled eggs at the dinner table and sweeping up dog poop. “Roma” takes its name from the Mexico City neighborhood that Cuarón grew up in, but it could just as well be set in contemporary Silver Lake or Sherman Oaks. In “Roma,” Cuarón provokes with a question that the indigenous subject seems to be addressing to the Mexican middle class: Who are you, in relation to us?