Abstract

ESTERRICH, Carmelo. Maternidades 'heroicas' en Roma, de Alfonso Cuarón. Cuad. Cent. Estud. Diseñ. Comun., Ensayos [online]. 2021, n.91, pp.210-218.  Epub Aug 10, 2021. ISSN 1853-3523.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18682/cdc.vi91.3841.

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.

Keywords : Cuarón; Roma; Motherhood.

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