Roma: a hit movie and life in 1970s Mexico City

Roma was perhaps the most surprising international hit film of 2018. The dialogue is all in Spanish or in Mixtec, an indigenous language of the southern state of Oaxaca. Its star is Yalitza Aparicio, a young woman from Oaxaca who had not acted in a film before, and who learned Mixtec for her role. Roma is Alfonso Cuarón’s loving portrait of the Mexico City neighbourhood in which he grew up. As it happens, I was living in the neighbouring district of Condesa, so the sights and sounds of the film were familiar to me.

 

Mopping the driveway: Roma

I first arrived in Mexico in 1972 as part of an exchange programme between the Mexican and British governments, with two other young students: Alan Knight, now professor emeritus of Latin American History at Oxford, and Guy Thompson, emeritus of the University of Warwick. Two employees of CONACYT, the government agency that funds academic activities in Mexico, collected us at the airport to drive us to our lodgings. I decided to get out at the second stop and was greeted by my landlady, the recent widow of a businessman. When I returned to Mexico to research my PhD, she had remarried and moved to the USA, so I lodged with her daughter’s family in the same home.

Mexico City is divided into colonias, each with its own history and character. The original core of the city includes the vast main square or zócalo, the cathedral and the Palacio Nacional, the president’s official office. Many colonial buildings that have withstood Mexico’s violent past and numerous earthquakes give the centre recall the three centuries of Spanish rule. As the city grew, it colonized (hence colonias) pieces of land. For example, the victorian district where the British embassy now stands is Colonia Cuauhtémoc, known for its spacious homes of government ministers of the late 19^th and early 20^th-centuries.

Hotel La Casona, a former Roma mansion

On the other side of the east-west Avenida de la Reforma, and either side of the north-south Avenida de los Insurgentes, is Colonia Roma. One of the glories of Roma is its domestic architecture, notably Art Deco but also a variety of European-influenced styles popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th-centuries.

 

Colonia Roma domestic architecture

Colonias have their own distinctive street naming system. The streets of Roma are named after Mexican cities and states, as are the streets of Colonia Condesa, my colonia, so named because it was built on land owned by a countess. I lived on Mexicali street. This was a modern concrete and glass building, with a small indoor garden, a large sitting room/dining room, a perpetually busy  kitchen, and three large bedrooms. At the back was a concrete yard and another very plain concrete building which housed the laundry and the maids’ apartment, reached by an external stair.

 

Calle Mexicali: number 14 is centre left behind the small tree

Condesa was a solidly middle class neighbourhood, occupied by families for whom the post-revolutionary regime that dominated Mexico from 1930-2000 had been a source of good incomes. Mexicali had a mix of modern houses, small apartment blocks and some European-style and Art Deco homes that dated to the 1920s or 1930s. At either end of the street were wide avenues whose lanes of traffic were divided by trees. Avenida Insurgentes is a short walk east. There I would catch my bus to the archives and libraries where I researched. On my way home, I could stop at Sanborn’s café for a cool drink, and, if I felt extravagant, a bowl of strawberries.

My landlady was fairly typical of Condesa’s population. Her deceased husband was a prosperous businessman. She was an emotional, adorable lady of fiery temperament. She made a mean margarita, a mixture of only tequila and Cointreau, omitting the non-intoxicating lime juice. She had a collection of saints in her wardrobe, although as I recall she did not attend church. Every afternoon, a group of local ladies came to the house for the afternoon tertulia (social gathering) of coffee, chat and good manners. It was these ladies who persuaded me to abandon the Castilian I had learned for eight years, in favour of wonderfully expressive Mexican Spanish. I learned my earthier vocabulary over Friday night poker sessions with younger friends. My landlady’s daughter had worked as a flight attendant and spoke good English. She married an economist who graduated from the national university. He was active in the student protests of 1968 and, after the Tlatelolco massacre and government repression, had gone into hiding for a time. When I met him and lodged with his family, he was working for the Ministry of Public Works.

A Mixtec quinceañera and her "chamberlains"

Just as in Roma, the family had two maids. Silvia, a Mixtec speaker with an accent when speaking Spanish, and dark skin. Both marked her out as an Indian. She reached her 15^th birthday during my stay. In Mexico the celebration of a girl’s 15^th birthday is an important occasion for a mass and a party. I doubt that Silvia’s family could afford a very grand party, but her employers bought her an elegant white dress and sent her to her home village for the celebrations. And, just as in Roma, another of the maids became pregnant out of wedlock. The maids worked six days per week, did the laundry, swept and mopped floors indoors and out, cooked and served breakfast, lunch and dinner daily, and breakfast on Sunday, but not after 10am when their day off started.

Serving breakfast in Roma

A Condesa nevería

Condesa was a calm and agreeable place to live. Its iced cream shops were legendary and there was a good selection of taquerías for an excellent snack, or small restaurants serving a hearty comida corrida (fixed price lunch) for 12 pesos (the equivalent of a US dollar). There were street sellers also. I recall vividly the sound that announced the arrival of the itinerant seller of baked sweet potatoes, a low, throaty steam whistle.

Life for the residents of Condesa was immeasurably more comfortable and cossetted than for residents of Mexico City’s poorer neighbourhoods, such as Tepito, a central district notorious  as a den of criminals. The home on Mexicali was spacious, well-lit and comfortably furnished. The Ministry of Public Works ran a subsidized store where employees could buy food and clothing. The butcher was a cross-eyed gentleman. It was terrifying to see him wield a sharp cleaver with abandon. Items not available there could be bought at the Puerto de Liverpool or Palacio de Hierro department stores.

 

El Palacio de Hierro department store

Those who had achieved a still more prosperous lifestyle than the residents of Condesa, might live in the swish modern neighbourhood of Polanco. Polanco housed the best hotel in the city, the Camino

Deportivo Chapultepec

Real (the Queen stayed there while I was in Mexico City). Across the road from the Camino Real was the Deportivo Chapultepec, a combination sports and social club with the best facilities in the city. I was often invited there by a group of young men, which included one of Mexico’s best tennis players and two brothers who played for the national badminton team. The gentleman members who were a little too old for strenuous sports might gamble away a sociable afternoon playing chuti mul, a form of dominos, in a room in which the continuous clack of dominos slapped on to the table drowned out most conversation.

A home in Lomas de Chapultepec

More prosperous still were the neighbourhoods where the truly rich had their homes. One such was Lomas de Chapultepec, close to Chapultepec park at the far end of Avenida de la Reforma. A friend who lives there once introduced me to a neighbour who was chief of staff to president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. To the south of the city, San Ángel was a wealthy district of cobbled streets with homes and gardens concealed behind high walls covered in gloriously colourful but very thorny bougainvillea.

 

Homes in San Ángel

Certain things were beyond the reach of any but the very rich. For example, when Mexicans referred to vino (wine) they invariably meant not wine but rum, tequila or some other nationally produced spirit. Wine came from Europe, and European goods were prohibitively expensive. On a road trip with my Deportivo friends I visited the federal territory of Quintana Roo. This area, now an international tourist destination, was then so remote from central Mexico, and transport of goods so prohibitive, that it was a tax free zone. Goods from overseas were imported by. I bought a small supply of Cadbury’s chocolate and English tea (unaffordable in the capital) and smuggled them past the customs officers on the territory’s border as a treat for my host family.

I recall only one alarming event. I was sitting at home one Sunday reading calmly when I heard six gunshots. I did not go out that day, but learned later that in the apartment building across the street, the doorman had been pestering a pretty young girl. Her brother borrowed a gun from a friend to persuade the doorman to leave his sister alone. The doorman argued the point and received six bullets for his trouble.

A sweet potato seller

I can testify that Cuarón’s film captures beautifully the lifestyle, the sights and smells of 1970s Colonia Roma. During one scene, I heard in the background the whistle of the sweet potato seller and was transported to Colonia Condesa for a moment. If you are tempted to visit Condesa, my old neighbourhood has become one of the chic colonias, full of expensive restaurants, late night clubs and lively gay bars (Mexico City is a remarkably tolerant place for gay men and women). Except for those brought down by 2017’s earthquake, the buildings are mostly the same, but the ladies of the Condesa tertulia where I learned to speak like a Mexican have long gone.