Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema 3030332950, 9783030332952

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Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema Edited by Elizabeth Osborne · Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro

Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema

Elizabeth Osborne  •  Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro Editors

Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema

Editors Elizabeth Osborne Department of World Languages Worcester State University Worcester, MA, USA

Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro Department of Spanish and Linguistics Franklin and Marshall College Lancaster, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-33295-2    ISBN 978-3-030-33296-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Daniel Saliva / EyeEm - Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the support of many individuals and organizations. To begin, we thank the Worcester State Foundation—Office of University Advancement for their grant. We also thank our patient and incredibly efficient copyeditor, Cyndy Brown. This volume has benefited from conversations with all of the contributors as well as with Natalia Polito and Milton Fernando González-Rodríguez. We are grateful for your hard work, patience, and understanding through each stage. The ideas for this volume have been germinating for years. Sofía thanks Adrián Pérez-Melgosa for his insightful comments on her initial ideas presented at the first MLA conference about domestic labor and the US– Mexico border, as well as her partner, Melissa, for her unconditional love, support, and patience throughout the project. Elizabeth’s research is indebted to her Worcester State family—Elena Cuffari, Vicki Gruzynski, Naida Saavedra, and Alex Tarr—and her ideal reader, Kathrin Theumer, for sharing insightful conversations, writing, films, and friendship. Finally, Elizabeth thanks Dani, her partner in domestic labor, from La nana to Roma.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Elizabeth Osborne and Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro 2 Restoring Names, Stories, and Voices for Cinematographic Maids: Toward a New Poetics of Domestic Service in Recent Argentine Films 23 María Julia Rossi 3 Moving Beyond Maternalism: Negotiating Models of Womanhood in La nana, Cama adentro, and Hilda 53 Elizabeth Osborne 4 Leftovers No More: Affect, Food, and Power in Recent Latin American Films on Domestic Work 75 Karina Elizabeth Vázquez 5 Serious Camp: Juan Gabriel’s Queer Repertoire in ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? 99 Olivia Cosentino 6 Defamiliarizing the Maid: Alicia Scherson’s Play121 Susana Domingo Amestoy vii

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CONTENTS

7 Beyond Tropes: Otherness and the Identity of the Brazilian Maid in Domésticas-O Filme and Doméstica143 Maurício Sellmann Oliveira 8 Partial Affection: The Place(s) of Female Domestic Workers in Recent Brazilian Cinema167 Carlos Cortez Minchillo 9 Domestic Labor and the Crisis of Care in La tierra y la sombra and La Sirga191 Marcelo Carosi 10 Domestic Matters: Hollywood and the Politics of Representing la doméstica in Babel and Cake209 Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro 11 Filmography231 Kerry Moynihan Index235

Notes on Contributors

Marcelo  Carosi  is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at Hamilton College. He holds a PhD from New  York University. His research examines the role of the female worker as a major trope that redefines politics of class, race, gender, sexuality, language, and nationality. Carlos  Cortez  Minchillo is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Brazilian literature and cinema from a political and sociological standpoint. His ­current research focuses on the forms of dissidence in contemporary texts and considers the multiple ways in which artistic discourses and practices respond to social inequalities and violence in Brazil. Olivia Cosentino  is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University. She specializes in post–Golden Age and contemporary Mexican cinema and culture, specifically gender, critical youth studies, affect theory, and violence. Cosentino has previously published on 1980s youth star Lucerito, twentieth-century Mexican female stardom, and the Mexican youth road film. Her latest article considers recent Mexican cinema’s use of spectrality as a metaphor for gender violence that haunts Central American female migrants. She is currently co-editing a volume on the “lost” Mexican cinema of the 1960s–1980s. Susana Domingo Amestoy  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies and in the Cinema Studies Program at University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has written articles on Hispanic ix

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literature and film and is working on a book project on representations of transatlantic connections in productions of a new generation of Chilean filmmakers. Kerry Moynihan  holds an MA in Spanish from Worcester State University where she was also a graduate assistant in 2019. She is a high school Spanish teacher and team leader of her department at Blackstone Valley Technical High School in Upton, Massachusetts. She teaches multiple levels of Spanish, including AP Spanish Language and Culture. After graduating from Boston College with degrees in Communications and Hispanic Studies and studying abroad in Quito, Ecuador, Moynihan taught English in Boruca, Costa Rica, for a year before returning to her native Massachusetts. Elizabeth Osborne  is an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages at Worcester State University. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literature from Stony Brook University and an MA in literature from the Universidad de Chile. Her research specializes in post-dictatorial film and literature of the Southern Cone, with an emphasis on Chile. The common theoretical framework running through each of her projects involves gender, affect, and empathy. She has published peer-reviewed articles on Chilean literature and documentary films in Chasqui, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, and Hispanic Issues Online. María Julia Rossi  is an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at John Jay College, City University of New  York, in New  York. Rossi holds a PhD from University of Pittsburgh. She has published on her research and teaching interests of Southern Cone literature, women writers, servants in fiction, and translation studies in journals such as Revista Iberoamericana, Hispamérica, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, and Variaciones Borges. Sofía  Ruiz-Alfaro  is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. She holds a PhD in Spanish and an MA in Cinematic Arts from University of Southern California. Her research revolves around representations of gender and sexuality in contemporary Latin American film, literature, and popular culture, as well as subject representations associated with the US–Mexico border. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Hispanic Review, Aztlán, Carátula, and

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Quarterly Review of Film and Video. She also edited a special volume for Hispanic Journal that focuses on marginal historical figures of Mexico’s popular culture. Maurício Sellmann Oliveira  is a visiting scholar in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Dartmouth College. He received a PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies from the University of Manchester for his dissertation about Jorge Amado, urban space, and Brazilian identity. His latest articles about social and spatial configurations in Brazilian culture are featured in the edited volumes Space Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema (2017) and Literary Landscapes: Charting the Worlds of Classic Literature (2018). Karina  Elizabeth  Vázquez  is the director of the Spanish CommunityBased Learning Program at the University of Richmond in Virginia. In addition to having written a number of articles and book chapters on literary and visual studies, and CBL in Spanish, she has authored Fogwill: Realismo y mala conciencia (2009), Aprendices, obreros y fabriqueras: el trabajo industrial en la narrativa argentina del siglo XX (2013), co-edited Insomne pasado: lecturas críticas sobre Latinoamérica colonial. Un homenaje a Félix Bolaños (2016), and translated to Spanish the graphic novel Darkroom. A Memoir in Black and White, by Lila Quintero-Weaver (2018).

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 8.1

Yolanda’s hair in Nosilatiaj. La belleza35 A body in action: Ramona’s hand in Reimon37 The contrast between leisure and work in Reimon39 Raquel trying on Pilar’s sweater in La nana58 Beba and Dora in similar positions at the hair salon in Cama adentro63 Hilda and Susana dressed alike in Hilda67 Fausta and Aída in the kitchen in La teta asustada82 Raquel having dinner on her birthday in La nana86 Barbara saying thank you to Val for her birthday gift in Que horas ela volta?89 Martina (Gina Vargas) and Lupita (Olinka Velázquez) ’s small shared bedroom in ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? (Teresa Suárez, 2014)106 Martina and Lupita pass through the bus station security in ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios?108 Domestic employees perform “Yo no nací para amar” in the streets in ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios?113 Cristina in front of the striking workers in Play128 Cristina’s reflection in the mirror with the map of Santiago in Play133 Cristina organizing Tristán’s objects in Play136 Créo breaks the fourth wall in Domésticas154 Lucimar and her mistress chat in the kitchen in Doméstica158 Flávia performs for the camera in Doméstica159 Live-in maid Val and her employer Bárbara, in Que horas elas volta?177

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3

Bábara listens to Jéssica’s ambitious academic plans in Que horas ela volta?179 Jean on a bus in Casa grande180 Alonso meets Alicia in Land and Shade197 Men under the shade of a rain tree in Land and Shade198 Alicia fixing the terrace railing in La Sirga204 Amelia’s tenderness toward Mike in Babel212 Amelia and the children lost in the desert (Babel)218 Female empathy and affection in Cake226

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Elizabeth Osborne and Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro

As the last preparatory stages of this volume came to an end, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical film Roma had just won three Oscars for the categories best director, best cinematography, and best foreign language film in Hollywood’s recognition of Cuarón’s filmic mastery. Among the many nominations the film received, one made headlines weeks before the ceremony: the one for best actress. As The New York Times announced, Yalitza Aparicio was the first Indigenous Mexican actress to be nominated in this category.1 Aparicio, an actor of Mixtecan descent from Oaxaca, plays Cleo, the protagonist of Cuarón’s film. Her role as the housekeeper and nanny of an upper-middle-class family in Mexico City during the early 1970s is the center of the story. What is relevant for us here is not so much the recognition from Hollywood and the Academy Awards of an already well-known and respected filmmaker such as Cuarón, but of the protagonist Cleo, who E. Osborne (*) Department of World Languages, Worcester State University, Worcester, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Ruiz-Alfaro Department of Spanish and Linguistics, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_1

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embodies gender, socioeconomic, and racial differences in the context of the family dynamics she is placed in as a live-in domestic worker. How these differences operate within the labor relationship that defines and characterizes most female domestic work—one that goes beyond the physical tasks to include the emotional care implicit in the domestic workers’ interactions with the families that employ them—and more importantly, how this relationship is cinematically represented and construed in twenty-first-century Latin American film are indeed the purpose, focus, and content of this volume. The many and controversial discussions surrounding the release of Roma from film critics and scholars alike—as well as the public response to the screening in Mexico as reported by the media—confirm our original conception of this book: the need to critically analyze the domestic worker’s role and character in contemporary Latin American film. In particular, the chapters included in this volume challenge trite stereotypical conventions about the nana, criada, chica, sirvienta, and mucama encountered in popular culture and the national imaginaries of Latin America in most of the twentieth century and before.2 The timing of Cuarón’s film and the critical and popular responses serve us well in bringing to the fore the most controversial issue of those debates and pronouncements: the act of representing the Other and its consequences. Since the story of Cleo takes place in the 1970s, she, as a subaltern female subject, not only presents a traditional and hierarchical maid-mistress relationship but also brings to center stage the legacy of colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and, by extension, all of Latin America. Despite Cuarón’s comments that part of his film revolves around class and race, his insistence that he had no political agenda or intention to create any critical discourse—“que se fueran dando los temas, pero sin discurso, sin adoctrinar [that the themes would flow without a discourse, without indoctrination]”3—was not equally shared by scholars and film critics. The most vocal critic, Richard Brody of The New Yorker, went so far as to claim that Cuarón “reduces [Cleo] to a bland and blank trope,” one full of stereotypes that include “a strong, silent, long-enduring, and all-tolerating type,” and that Cleo is indeed an enigma, a “cipher.”4 For Brody, the domestic worker is constructed as a “silent angel,”5 to the point that the character remains inaccessible not only to the audience but also to Cuarón himself. Thus, he states, Cleo’s representation is “the essential and crucial failure of Roma.”6 Another critical voice, that of Latin American cultural and literary studies scholar Joseph M. Pierce, points to the fact

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that the representation of Cleo as a passive, Indigenous subject within a system of oppression and exploitation only exacerbates Cleo’s subordinate position based on her gender and racial difference: “I saw in Roma not sensitivity, but the continuation of an imaginary that can only see Indigenous women as the surrogate life force of a still-colonial society.”7 Although Cuarón dismisses the idea of making Cleo political, as an embodiment of Mexico’s most underprivileged and disenfranchised classes based on gender, class, and race, he is acutely aware of how he construed this character: “Hay una manera en la que se percibe a ciertos personajes, que tiene que ver con que son personajes invisibles. Y lo son en el sentido que no tienen voz [There is a certain way to understand some characters, in the sense that they are invisible. And they are so because they have no voice].”8 Cuarón shies away from satisfying the audience’s yearnings about Cleo, of making her some type of heroic character or, simply put, of deciphering her as the Other. Several film scholars have commented on precisely the certain way in which the director construes Otherness in his film. Deborah Shaw finds Cleo’s ubiquitous presence remarkable; she is featured “in (almost) every shot,” and the fact that her labor as a domestic worker “is made visible throughout” in a film “full of illustrations of unconscious power dynamics” that clearly renders Cleo’s subaltern position within the family and Mexican society.9 Another film scholar, Pedro Ángel Palou, talks about the director’s “subtlety” in creating Cleo’s voice “through framing, point of view,” and other film techniques that “highlight Cleo’s simultaneous subordination and elevation and consequently her position inside and outside the family.”10 Beyond these academic and intellectual debates, it is revealing that Cleo and Roma have brought visibility to paid domestic work, an occupation that is a legacy of the colonialist practices of slavery and servitude based on racial and class subordination in Latin America. Although male servants were common during the colonial period, over time women began to occupy the majority of these positions because of prevalent notions—many of which continue today—about what was appropriate work for women. Paternalistic and patriarchal attitudes—legacies of colonialism—made female workers dependent on their employers/masters and limited them to the domestic sphere.11 With these attitudes came expectations of femininity that included practices of hygiene, sexuality, and religion. Paid domestic labor remains a pressing issue because it has not decreased, as was once predicted. Whereas it was thought that modernization and ­economic development would result in less paid domestic labor, globally that

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is not the case.12 In fact, there has only been a slight decrease in Latin America, “from 19.2 percent of the urban economically active female population in 1995 to 16.8 percent in 2009.”13 Despite the fact that women now have more access to education and jobs, they are still largely expected to take care of the household, or perform reproductive labor more broadly, within the framework of a traditional, heteronormative family. It is no surprise, then, that in the majority of films featuring paid domestic labor, Roma included, male characters are largely absent or irrelevant. The expectation that women remain responsible for reproductive labor has in turn generated what is referred to as the “crisis of care,” a phenomenon largely responsible for making domestic employment a well-known global trade phenomenon and reality lived by millions of women in Latin America.14 Due to this ongoing demand for paid domestic work that reproduces patriarchal hierarchies between so-called First World and Third World countries, the majority of scholarship on the topic to date focuses on the transnationalization of this labor and the immigration patterns associated with it.15 This volume explores the filmic representation of immigration, as well as the heteronormative and patriarchal representations of female domestic work. Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro’s “Domestic Matters: Hollywood and the Politics of Representing la doméstica in Babel and Cake” argues that mainstream cinema in the United States has appropriated the character of the housemaid/nanny at will to perpetuate patriarchal views of motherhood based on traditional gender mores that emphasize heteronormative views of both masculinity and femininity. Moreover, the ethnicity and socioeconomic difference that the domésticas embody serve “Hollywood’s political agenda well in their portrayal of an imagined ideal of the family and nation that, in the end, supports whiteness and nativism as its pillars.”16 The cinematic treatment of the housemaid in these films reflects historical changes in how immigration, specifically in the case of migrants coming from Mexico, has influenced public and political debates in the United States since the 1980s. Another important facet to consider when analyzing female domestic laborers is the fact that these workers have historically been underrecognized and denied workers’ rights. Nevertheless, during the 1970s and 1980s, women’s domestic work received more attention from Western scholars and activists pushing for labor organization and rights, most notably in Elsa M. Chaney and Mary García Castro’s volume Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, still the

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primary starting point for research in this area. While this academic attention garnered increased visibility for underrecognized female laborers and highlighted the exploitative and discriminative nature of domestic service, the scholars’ demands largely failed to recognize the intersection of class, gender, and race in maintaining domestic work’s hierarchical power structure. In the following decades, intersectional feminism as well as the transnationalization and feminization of labor began to emerge in academic conversations surrounding domestic labor to address some of the gaps previously mentioned.17 Moreover, intersectionality provides a useful analytical tool by “allowing us to view two dimensions of power relations: on the one hand, the production of disempowerment, oppression and discrimination; on the other, the production of political agencies, democratic mobilization and political subjects.”18 Part of the empowerment that women have experienced through political organization is evidenced in the increased legal rights granted to domestic workers in a number of countries. As of 2010, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru had all reformed domestic labor laws to varying degrees.19 Mexico too, known for its deregulation of this sector, recently legally formalized these workers’ access to health benefits and social security in a ruling by the Supreme Court on December 5, 2018, in part due to the success of Roma.20 However, overt political organization by domestic workers is not depicted in the films analyzed in this volume, perhaps due to the “subjective turn”21 that has taken place in filmmaking since the 1990s in Latin America.22 Nevertheless, these films bring attention to the unequal power relation between workers and employers; in most of them, these workers experience moments of empowerment. Audiences in Latin America and elsewhere were startled by the powerful realizations of resistance and acts of contestation by the housemaids. Some of the more notable examples were Dora in Cama adentro (Argentina, 2004), in which the maid ultimately hosts her mistress, Beba, for tea at her house in the countryside; Raquel, the live-in maid of La nana (Chile, 2009), joyfully going for a jog after a day’s work; and Fausta, the young maid who takes her mistress’s pearls as an act of fair retribution in La teta asustada (Perú, 2009). Most recent films have even included a total break from the oppressive power dynamics that maids endure. The young rebellious live-in maid in Hilda (Mexico, 2014) and the initially complacent Val in Que Horas Ela Volta? (Brazil, 2015) ultimately and consciously abandon a type of labor that they come to realize is exploitative and coercive. Indeed, the coexistence

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of both oppression and opportunity that these characters endure is what N.  Michelle Murray deems a “feminist paradox.”23 The dimensions of power relations are exacerbated or highlighted in domestic space, which may become a site of solidarity (between patrona and servant, or servants) or one of further inequality. Drawing on Mary Louise Pratt’s work, Murray reads the home as a contact zone between different subjects, more particularly between women.24 For example, in this volume, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez’s chapter “Leftovers No More: Affect, Food, and Power in Recent Latin American Films on Domestic Work” interprets the kitchen itself as a contact zone for the preparation and consumption of food. Vázquez examines food as a tool of power in the relationship between live­in maids and their employers in La teta asustada, La nana, and Que Horas Ela Volta? Both the preparation and consumption of food, she argues, are “a social situation through which affect and class are intertwined in the performance of power, class identities, and resistance.”25 The notion that domestic space lends itself to both oppression and opportunity is highlighted in the construction of social distinction through spatial divisions in the household and the affective work performed there. The spatial division of labor into public and private spheres and their associations with masculinity and femininity are reproduced in the films through the (false) division of spaces between servant and master. The spatial separation between employers and employees is artificially constructed to maintain class distinction, especially for live-in maids who live and work in the same house as their patrones. In this way, the physical household itself reproduces patriarchy’s sexism, classism, and racism. At the same time, however, the workers in these homes are able to traverse spatial divisions in ways that their employers are not. Although relegated to sleeping in smaller, more-secluded rooms, such as Cleo and Adela—the other female Indigenous live-in maid present in the household—in Roma, these women move freely throughout the house, aware of the family’s most intimate moments and interactions. They also move beyond the house when they go into the city on their days off or on errands. For the domestic worker, this exploration of the urban, a distinct space beyond the household, is one of discovery and freedom, a theme also studied in this volume. Susana Domingo Amestoy examines how the protagonist care worker of Alicia Scherson’s film Play traverses the space of the city and defamiliarizes the audience’s expectations for a Mapuche domestic worker as she embodies “a postmodern individual living in consumer society … who claims a certain freedom … a freedom that the city might allow.”26

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For Domingo Amestoy, the film’s defamiliarizing aesthetic empowers this otherwise-marginalized figure by portraying her in the public space rather than confined to the home. The worker’s active gaze, both as she looks at herself in the mirror and at others in the city, challenges the viewer’s and society’s conception of the domestic worker (and her labor) as invisible/familiar. The attempt to maintain distance and spatial separation in a number of the films in this volume stems from the need to distinguish the maid from the rest of the family, largely due to the ambiguity of their relationship. In other words, the often-close affective ties between family members and domestic employees blur the limits of the labor relationship/contract. This affective ambiguity thus represents a threat to the employers’ power, which they attempt to eradicate through separations between them and the workers. Nevertheless, the affective relationship with the employing family allows the maid some power and agency, as seen in films such as Casa Grande and Cama adentro, both analyzed in this book. For instance, Carlos Cortez Minchillo’s analysis of the recent Brazilian films Casa Grande and Que Horas Ela Volta? looks at the intimate, intertwined, and often-confusing living spaces of live-in workers and their employing family, a space “highly polysemous … in which each party negotiates a multilayered, unstable, and often-hypocritical politics of (dis)affection.”27 Providing an important connection to Brazil’s cinematic history and its history of slavery, Cortez Minchillo’s chapter interprets the political implications of the films’ narratological and aesthetic choices since they end with the workers leaving employment, showing that in the end “oppressive social structures can be defied and subaltern individuals can reshape identities and recast subjectivities.”28 A number of other films reflect a similar shift toward leaving the house, such as Cama adentro, La nana, and Hilda. Elizabeth Osborne’s chapter looks at these three films and the relationship between the maids and their employers, the latter of which attempt to provide models of womanhood through maternalism, a strategy of dominance that manipulates affect and allows the mistresses to feel morally superior through their generosity while the maids are infantilized. Ultimately, however, the maids resist the models of both appearance and behavior as “each film culminates in an act of ‘liberation’ from the confines of the employing household to suggest the maids’ self-care and independence and their movement away from the institution of domestic labor.”29

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A central and common feature of these films that revolve around domestic labor is the emphasis placed on the affective element implicit in this type of work, one that in most cases involves intimacy, emotion, and love. In this way, Roma and most of the films included in the volume underline domestic work as gendered labor, perpetuating the tenets of patriarchy by continuing to construct women as nurturers and caretakers. This intrinsic aspect of domestic labor resonates deeply with the ongoing interest in the humanities and social sciences to theorize affect as a crucial element in producing knowledge and exploring the ensuing political implications of such a conceptualization. In particular, scholars have focused on how affect construes new forms of subjectivities in today’s world. In our motivation for compiling this volume, we draw on Laura Podalsky’s work in The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema to posit the doméstica as a prime example of these emergent subjectivities appearing within the specific socioeconomic and geopolitical contexts in different Latin American countries. Against other film and cultural critics who have criticized the “superficiality” and lack of politically militant cinema, Podalsky argues that the analysis of emotions and feelings of contemporary Latin American films presents an incredible and radical interpretative potential for their audiences.30 Like many of the films discussed in this volume, the films that she analyzes focus on the individual and the private sphere rather than offer direct commentary on social or political structures. Therefore, whereas a number of films featuring domestic labor do not directly critique the systems that maintain such exploitative and hierarchical power relationships, they do represent individual stories that have the potential to affectively engage viewers to reflect on their roles as participants in an ongoing problem. As Podalsky explains, “a film’s sensorial appeals can, at times, perform political work by helping the audience to think about the past (and their own roles as historical actors) in fresh ways.”31 Moreover, the films included in our volume highlight the inequalities at the heart of paid domestic labor today, either directly or subtly engaging with the contemporary legacies of Latin America’s colonial and authoritarian pasts. If Podalsky identifies certain subgenres and new social protagonists, such as coming-of-age stories in which adolescent characters play a central role, film scholar Deborah Shaw has recently pointed out that the portrayal of domestic workers is a “new thematic genre of filmmaking”32 in Latin America cinema; one that, as we argue in this volume, transforms the domestic worker from a marginal character, always on the edges of the

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frame, to the center of the camera’s gaze. More specifically, Shaw states that this new genre “marks a collective moment in which there is recognition from filmmakers that to understand the deep, often hidden manifestations of national and social inequalities, the focus needs to shift to daily interactions inside the home.”33 Again, we see here a departure from previous cinematic trends in the region toward a focus on the private domain. We have limited our volume to films dedicated to this theme and produced in the twenty-first century, a choice corroborated by Shaw when she mentions that the first film to pertain to this thematic genre was the Brazilian film Domésticas-O Filme by Fernando Meirelles and Nando Olival in 2001.34 The fact that this film focuses on the lives of five women with different backgrounds and personalities who work as domésticas, intentionally leaving their masters and mistresses off the screen to instead follow these workers’ own idiosyncrasies as subjects, signals a new beginning in the representation of domestic workers in Latin American cinema. In this book, Maurício Sellman Oliveira takes on the analysis of this film in its exploration of the cinematic representation of the maid and her presence in the nation’s social fabric, one that clearly demarcates and subordinates the female domestic worker based on her class status as well as on parameters of ethnicity and race. This chapter examines Meirelles and Olival’s film in dialogue with the ethnographic film Doméstica (2012) to argue that the two works develop a multiplicity of new subjectivities that contradicts the traditional and simplistic types of maids found in Brazilian popular culture: “These cinematic maids symbolize the slow and erratic progress of Brazilian society but they also complicate cultural tropes or schematic sociological readings.”35 This new cinematic direction toward and interest in the representation of the maid/nanny as an independent subject also spread to other national cinemas, such as that of Argentina. The first chapter of our collection features María Julia Rossi’s “Restoring Names, Stories, and Voices: Towards a Poetics of Domestic Service in Recent Argentine Films,” a piece that proposes that recent Argentinian films featuring paid domestic labor have focused on the individual worker and the voluntary nature of her employment rather than resorting to a paternalistic and traditional take on this figure. Rossi posits that these films question the asymmetrical power relation between master and servant by bringing to the viewer’s attention the domestic worker’s personhood. Instead of overtly fighting for labor rights or denouncing social inequalities, the films “reorient the cinematographic gaze toward their affective labor”; in this way, the films depart from

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­revious, more-stereotypical, one-dimensional representations of the p domestic worker by focusing on “how their presences, actions, and words alter the very shape of the narratives.”36 Another example of how Latin American cinema has focused on the representation of the emergence of new subjectivities in regard to domestic work can be found in recent Colombian films. Marcelo Carosi’s chapter opens the door to include other forms of domestic labor in addition to those associated with the traditional maid, who wears a uniform, earns a salary, or works within a bourgeois urban home. As audiences see in La Sirga (2012) and La tierra y la sombra (2015), the contextual backdrop of these new types of domestic labor appear in the countryside, as Carosi explains, and within a “political and economic unrest” that has displaced millions and has “radically transformed the limits of labor.”37 The changes in the traditional forms of economy parallel the transformations found in the nuclear family system as well as the disruptions of heteronormative gender roles. The protagonists of these two films are placed in households that they try to make their own while completely problematizing the dynamics that characterize paid domestic labor. The representation of domestic service, it must be noted, is not new to Latin American cinema or Latin American culture in general.38 In fact, domestic workers have been starring on the big screen and in popular culture formats since the beginning of the twentieth century. To provide a detailed history of the popular culture origins of this figure is beyond the scope of this volume, but a brief overview provides an idea of some of its key tropes and characters. Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico—historically the three countries with the most robust film industries in the region—have notable representations of domestic labor that provide a context for more contemporary productions and their audiences. In Argentina, for instance, comedic actress and screenwriter Niní Marshall is well known for her working, immigrant characters Catita and Cándida, the latter of which is a Galician maid. Originally developed for radio, these characters were eventually brought to the big screen in the late 1930s and enjoyed popularity through the 1940s.39 Similarly, in Brazil, there is a long tradition of maid tropes in popular culture, discussed in this volume by Maurício Sellman Oliveira in his chapter “Beyond Tropes: Otherness and the Brazilian Maid in Domésticas-O Filme and Doméstica.” A number of these well-known maid figures that were taken to the big screen and television come from stage plays, such as Olívia from Marcos Caruso’s play Trair e Coçar, É Só Começar (1986) and Etelvina from Eurípides Ramos’s musical comedy

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Cala a Boca Etelvina (1959).40 In Mexico, as in Brazil and other countries, television is a central medium for the representation of domestic service, most notably in telenovelas. In her chapter for this volume, Olivia Cosentino explains that the film ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? departs from typical representations of domestic workers in Mexican telenovelas and romantic comedy films. While in reality, these women are typically poor and of indigenous origins, the actresses that commonly portray them in telenovelas tend to be fair-skinned. ¿Qué le dijiste, however, casts darker-skinned actresses as domestic workers who question, through the display of a highly visible and recognizable camp discourse, common tropes and tendencies of the genre. The prominence given to these women results in female agency and transgression, materialized in their appropriation of the mistresses’ poses, clothing, and hyperfeminine gender norms. Moreover, she argues, the unmistakable queer reference of Juan Gabriel, one of Mexico’s most beloved and charismatic queer singers, transforms this musical comedy into a political platform that “serves to denaturalize and question domestic labor norms, gender roles, and the power relations between women within the household.”41 Due to these previous representations based on differences and stereotypes of class, nationality, race, and gender, more-recent contemporary films—whether feature, documentary, or short—respond to these historical images and interpretations by making female domestic workers complex characters and persons at the center of the narratives, their families, and society. By doing so, they question the historical marginalization of female domestic workers by granting them a newly discovered agency and empowerment as subjects. The organization of this book attests to our effort to present an introductory vantage point from which to critically explore the role and character of the domestic worker in contemporary Latin American cinema without focusing entirely on specific nationalities/countries. For example, the first three chapters of this volume center on the emergence of this new subjectivity across borders and genres to study characteristics and trends found in cinematic representations of the doméstica in films from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru. The following four chapters are analyses of films from Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, contextualized within specific national productions and sociopolitical debates, as in the case of Brazil where issues of class and race are at the core of how the doméstica is constructed and construed. The last two chapters offer variations and idiosyncrasies in the representation of domestic work, as is the case with unpaid care labor and the female Mexican immigrant working as a maid at the

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U.S.-Mexico border. Thus, this volume includes individual analyses of films, comparative and contrastive studies of this character found across borders and genres, and explorations that depart from the “norm” of paid domestic work performed by women in Latin America, ultimately shedding light on the diversity and complexity of this cinematic figure. Two films that we believe are crucial to the study of the doméstica that were not included in this book are Viudas / Widows (Marcos Carnevale, Argentina, 2011) and La novia del desierto / The Desert Bride (Cecilia Atán and Valeria Pivato, Chile/Argentina, 2017). Both movies continue to exemplify the new representational paradigm of domestic labor found in twenty-first-century Latin American cinema, one that breaks stereotypes and the traditional characterizations that abound in the continent’s media and popular culture. Curiously enough, this introduction started with Roma as the most recent filmic representation of the female domestic worker in Latin American cinema, one that, however, follows precisely a more traditional characterization of the housemaid. One interesting aspect of Roma that film scholars and critics have not really discussed is the shooting of the film in black and white, a filmic technique that clearly signals memory and a time long gone. One can argue that Cuarón’s choice emphasizes a specific historical/past moment that serves as the background that the story develops: a conservative and patriarchal system in which Cleo is clearly the subaltern figure. Thus, what the audience sees is a subservient subject within a clearly delineated hierarchy that is played out in her relations within the family she works for and, by extension, within the Mexican society of the time. By contrast, current filmic representations of the housemaid such as those of Justina and Teresa, the domestic workers in Viudas and La novia respectively, present a clear departure from Cleo and feature the arrival of a contemporary social reality that corresponds with a more-complex representation of the housemaid as subject. Viudas offers a transgressive representation of the female domestic worker in Justina, a transgender housemaid who has worked most of her adult life for an Argentine upper-middle-class couple, Augusto and Elena. The story starts with the unexpected death of Augusto, the emotional ties and dramatic entanglement that occur when Adela—Augusto’s secret, pregnant lover—moves in, and becomes inextricably immersed/embedded in the mourning process along with Elena and Justina. As the plural title suggests—widows—these women have to coexist in the same household and adjust to one another at the same time that they create a different

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type of family unit. Unlike Cleo, who participates in a passive and observant role in the emotional roller coaster that occurs within the family she works for, Justina is a crucial character whose actions and words function as a catalyst to finding common ground of empathy and understanding in the home that the three women share. Film scholar Natalia Polito argues that Justina, as a transgender subject, serves as a metaphor of the time of transition that the mourning process represents for all of them, and as a figure of transgression, one that challenges traditional notions of family under patriarchy. Also, the housemaid is in Carnevale’s film is a vocal and visible queer subject whose gestures, clothing, gender-bending behaviors, and demeanor upend heteronormative notions of female femininity. Moreover, Justina is also marked by her ethnic difference, just as Cleo is. Even though Viudas does not delve into this facet of this character Justina uses her native tongue, guaraní, not only as a means of communication and habit as Cleo does but also as a clear demarcation of her autonomy as subject, creating a personal identity and space within the household she works for as a live-in maid.42 Polito also points out that Justina knows her rights as an employee, and how she is able to uphold her rights when she feels mistreated by her señora. This is a fact that sharply contrasts to Cleo’s unclear and undefined terms of employment. On several occasions, Justina confronts Elena about her words and behavior toward her without fear, something impossible to imagine in Cleo’s case. Indeed, when Cleo is pregnant and desperate, her only and last resort is to request the protection and care that her señora can offer her, perpetuating her subordination to the family and society. By contrast, with Justina, Carnevale presents the emergence of the housemaid as a subject who embodies and appropriates difference, and with his film offers a different take on domestic labor rights, gender and sexuality norms, as well as new definitions of the concept of family. Interestingly, Viudas was produced and released against the backdrop of fundamental changes in Argentine law that not only regulated domestic employment but also incorporated more-inclusive and diverse definitions regarding gender identity and the term/concept of “family” under the existing Civil Code.43 If Carnevale opens the door to new subjectivities for the female domestic worker, with Teresa, the protagonist of La novia del desierto, Cecilia Atán and Valeria Pivato present the process of transition and constitution of a new female subjectivity that stems precisely from the limits and constraints of women within domestic labor. The film depicts Teresa, a

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­ fty-­four-­year-old domestic worker from Chile who has worked for the fi same Argentine family since she was twenty years old. Instead of presenting Teresa in her job and the power relations in which her relationship with the family is embedded, the film focuses on her journey through the desert en route to her next place of long-term employment in San Juan in Northern Argentina. The film directs viewers to the protagonist in the present, a woman who has lost her bag on the trip up north. Notably, Teresa’s character in La novia is not defined by her job but rather by her personal quest—a search for a lost bag, an encounter with a stranger, and a spiritual/personal journey—that becomes the central theme of the film. Reserved and somewhat passive at the beginning of the film—metaphorically presented by the image of a caged canary that she cares for in the old house where she worked for most of her life—Teresa eventually opens up to more, similar to the seemingly barren and limitless landscape of the desert through which she wanders most of the film. This cinematic representation of the female domestic worker is the most novel and groundbreaking: an aging domestic worker as a subject outside the domestic sphere, a woman who ultimately discovers herself as an individual with her own desires through this physical and personal journey. The most transgressive part of Teresa’s development as a character is not only the intimate relationship she develops with El Gringo, a man she has known for a brief time, but also and more importantly her transformation as a subject. Indeed, Teresa determines how she engages in her relationship with him and ultimately what her own destiny looks like, a future that does not include what was, at the beginning of the story, her destination of working again as a housemaid. The film’s ending points to a radical realization of individual agency in Teresa: she decides to not pursue a romantic relationship with El Gringo, and in this way, the story forecloses a happy romantic ending. However, El Gringo’s love for movement, which is symbolized by his profession as a traveling salesman, functions as a catalyst to Teresa’s change. At first, his way of life serves as a contrast to Teresa’s life as a domestic laborer, working and living with the same family in the same place for most of her adult life. The journey she embarks on with this man to search for her lost bag is crucial to Teresa’s own discovery of movement and freedom. She ultimately embraces both, exemplified by the film’s ending in which she leaves her lover after sleeping with him and walks alone down the desert road, looking directly at the camera and continuing on her own personal journey. Instead of placing Teresa once again within the hierarchical power relation between masters and servants, this

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film emphasizes the protagonist’s movement and life outside domestic employment, similar to the characterization of other domestic workers in a number of films analyzed in this volume. The films addressed in the chapters that follow and the study of the cinematic representation of domestic labor in this volume are a first step to thinking further about this body of work, and open the door to other areas that lie beyond the scope of this book. Here we have focused primarily on the female domestic worker since women are, in the vast majority, the ones who engage in this type of occupation, and cinema has consequently mirrored this pattern of factual evidence.44 The reference list of Latin American films produced since 2000 at the end of this volume attests to this trend as well. However, male domestic labor is also introduced in our book, briefly in the case of Sellman Oliveira’s chapter on representing domestic work in Brazil and more in depth with Carosi’s analysis of male unpaid domestic work in the Colombian film La tierra y la sombra. Men performing domestic chores as criados, chauffeurs, sirvientes, and butlers bring to the discussion other parameters from which to analyze these cinematic representations of alterity. If ethnicity, race, and class continue to be fundamental to how these subjects are construed as subservient, gender, sexuality, and social mores regarding masculinity and manhood, both hegemonic and marginal, play a fundamental role in the distinctiveness of how men are portrayed within the domestic arena and its power structures. Prime examples of the criado can be found in films such as Batalla en el cielo (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2005), Santiago (João Moreira Salles, Brazil, 2007), and Zona sur (Juan Carlos Valdivia, Bolivia, 2009). We end this introduction by returning to Roma because it brings back the question that remains at the heart of what it means to represent difference, marginality, and the power dynamics that exist in our everyday existence and, more specifically, in families around the world and its most intimate locus, the home. Cuarón’s own words as he accepted the award for best director for Roma—“I want to thank the Academy for recognizing a film centered around an Indigenous woman”—brings to the fore the potential impact that cinema has as a vehicle of awareness and possible change. The fact that a Latin American director such as Cuarón brings domestic work to screens worldwide and makes the housekeeper/nanny visible not only to U.S. audiences—those who hire mainly Latin American and other migrant women to perform care labor—but also worldwide, a testament to how migrant female domestic work is fully incorporated in the new economic and global order, is an outstanding feat by itself. Indeed,

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the release of Roma in Mexico, as mentioned earlier, brought immediate public attention to the recent legal reform regulating domestic work. Moreover, Cuarón’s political activism in Hollywood, along with stars such as Meryl Streep, whose guest at the 2018 Golden Globes was Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Eva Longoria and Laura Dern, who hosted a ceremony in Los Angeles honoring domestic workers right before the Oscars, is what Poo defines as a “cultural moment” that makes domestic workers “increasingly visible” within public and political debates about their right to organize in the pursuit of legal and social recognition.45 It is our hope that this volume not only contributes meaningfully to the scholarly and public debates on domestic labor but also, and more importantly, participates actively in recognizing these workers as rightful subjects on their own.

Notes 1. Kathryn Shattuck, “Yalitza Aparicio is the Oscars’ First Indigenous Mexican Actress Nominee,” The New  York Times, January 22, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/apoline/2019/02/23/us/ap-us-oscarsyalitza-aparicio.html 2. We have only listed some of the terms used throughout Latin America to refer to domestic workers. While the etymology of these words lies outside the scope of this volume, our brief list provides insight into the pejorative association with this type of work. A variety of terms are used throughout this introduction and the volume, depending on the perspective of the author. For more on the terms used in Mexico, see Gustavo García’s “¿Cómo se llama la que salía de sirvienta?” Thanks to Olivia Cosentino for sharing this article with us. Equally, in this volume a number of terms are used to refer to the work itself, including reproductive labor, domestic service, domestic work, domestic employment, and domestic labor. 3. Alfonso Cuarón, “Entrevista a Alfonso Cuarón ‘Con Roma quería honrar el tiempo y el espacio; que los lugares dictaran lo que iba a pasar,’” interview by Fernanda Solórzano, Letras Libres, December 1, 2018, https:// www.letraslibres.com/mexico/revista/entrevista-alfonso-cuaronroma-queria-honrar-el-tiempo-y-el-espacio-que-los-lugares-dictaran-loque-iba-pasar 4. Richard Brody, “There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma,’” The New Yorker, December 18, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/theres-a-voice-missing-in-alfonso-cuarons-roma 5. Brody, “There’s a Voice.” 6. Brody, “There’s a Voice.”

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7. Joseph M.  Pierce, “Roma is a Beautiful Film of Indigenous Erasure,” Indian Country Today, December 28, 2018, https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/roma-is-a-beautiful-film-of-indigenous-erasureBuOrS3iGSEmLaNZcSHP2Uw/ 8. Solórzano, “Entrevista.” 9. Deborah Shaw, “Special Dossier on Roma: Children of Women? Alfonso Cuarón’s love letter to his nana,” Mediático, December 24, 2018, http:// reframe.sussex.ac.uk/mediatico/2018/12/24/special-dossier-on-romaalfonso-cuarons-love-letter-to-his-nana/ 10. Pedro Ángel Palou, “Special Dossier on Roma: Broken Memory, Voice and Visual Storytelling.” Mediático, December 24, 2018, http://reframe. sussex.ac.uk/mediatico/2018/12/24/special-dossier-on-roma-brokenmemory-voice-and-visual-storytelling/ 11. For more on the colonial origins of domestic labor, see Elizabeth Kuznesof’s chapter “A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492–1980” in Elsa Chaney and García Castro’s Muchachas No More, and the introduction to The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy by Helma Lutz. 12. Merike Blofield, Care Work and Class: Domestic Workers’ Struggle for Equal Rights in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 9. 13. Blofield, Care Work, 9. 14. As a point of comparison, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum’s Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India (9) examines the institution of domestic servitude in Indian society. The authors propose that the “crisis of care” is not the same or even applicable to all countries. Notably, they question what is at the root of the need for domestic workers, stating that it is not necessarily so that other women can go to work. This idea deserves more contemplation, given the different histories of Latin American countries and Western countries like the United States. For more on the crisis of care, see Nancy Fraser’s article “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” and in this volume Marcelo Carosi’s chapter “Domestic Labor and the Crisis of Care in La tierra y la sombra and La sirga.” 15. For more on the transnationalization of domestic employment, see Helma Lutz’s The New Maids, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, and N.  Michelle Murray’s new book Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture. 16. See p. 215. 17. For more on the relationship between female domestic labor, migration, and globalization, see Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s introduction to Global

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Woman. At the same time, Blofield argues that domestic labor makes a good case for studying intersectionality. Blofield, Care Work, 5. 18. Joaze Bernardino-Costa, “Intersectionality and Female Domestic Workers’ Unions in Brazil,” Women’s Studies International Forum 46 (2014): 74. 19. Blofield, Care Work, 6. 20. Amy Guthrie, “After ruling, hit film, Mexico reconsiders domestic workers,” AP News, December 20, 2018, https://www.apnews.com/e89d8dd061ac40b590d1fb606bece49f. According to this article, “domestic workers should be enrolled in the social security system, offering them greater rights as well as access to the public health system and free, government-­run daycare.” 21. Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2006). 22. In their introduction to Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), María Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael Lazzara explain that this subjective turn and dominance of the first person reflect both claims for rights and equality by subaltern individuals and groups, and “the nature of the globalized, neoliberal era in which we live” (5). 23. N.  Michelle Murray, “On Feminist Paradoxes: Transnational Domestic Encounters in Contemporary Spain,” Letras femeninas 41, no. 1 (2015): 266. 24. Murray, “On Feminist Paradoxes,” 266. 25. See p. 79. 26. See p. 135. 27. See p. 170. 28. See p. 170. 29. See p. 54. 30. Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 8. 31. Podalsky, The Politics of Affect, 83. 32. Deborah Shaw, “Intimacy and Distance—Domestic Servants in Latin American Women’s Cinema: La mujer sin cabeza and El niño pez/The Fish Child,” in Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics, eds. Deborah Martin and Deborah Shaw (London: I.B.  Tauris, 2016), 124. 33. Shaw, “Intimacy and Distance,” 126. 34. It is worth mentioning that Silvio Caiozzi’s filmic adaptation of José Donoso’s novel Coronación, which features a female domestic worker, came out in 2000 as well. 35. See p. 162. 36. See p. 42.

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37. See p. 192. 38. Latin American literature also includes numerous examples of domestic labor. This extends beyond the focus of our volume, but is an important predecessor. See, for example, Sonia Roncador’s book Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil (1889–1999) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 39. Recently, the role of humor in Latin American film has garnered more attention in scholarly work, notably Nilo Couret’s Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) and Juan Poblete and Juana Suárez’s edited volume Humor in Latin American Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), both of which have chapters dedicated to Niní Marshall. In her unpublished paper, Natalia Polito’s look at Justina in Viudas finds parallels with Marshall’s comedic immigrant maid. 40. See pp. 147–148. 41. See p. 102. 42. Natalia Polito, “¡Écheme y arreglamos!: Domestic Work and Family Bonds in the Argentina Contemporary Film Viudas,” unpublished paper, 2018. 43. Polito mentions that Viudas can be construed as a reflection of the public and political debates on gender identity at the time Carnevale’s film was released. Indeed, the Gender Identity Law 26.743 in the Argentine Civil Code was approved by Congress in 2011 and then enacted in 2012. 44. Blofield notes that over 90 percent of employed domestic workers in Latin America are women. Blofield, Care Work, 10. 45. Lauren Hilgers, “The New Labor Movement Fighting for Domestic Workers’ Rights,” The New  York Times Magazine, February 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/ national-domestic-workers-alliance.html

References Arenillas, María Guadalupe, and Michael Lazzara, eds. 2016. Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bernardino-Costa, Joaze. 2014. Intersectionality and Female Domestic Workers’ Unions in Brazil. Women’s Studies International Forum 46: 72–80. Blofield, Merike. 2012. Care work and Class: Domestic Workers’ Struggle for Equal Rights in Latin America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Brody, Richard. 2018. There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma.’ The New  Yorker, December 18. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-frontrow/theres-a-voice-missing-in-alfonso-cuarons-roma

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Chaney, Elsa M., and Mary García Castro, eds. 1989. Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Couret, Nilo. 2018. Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960. Oakland: University of California Press. Cuarón, Alfonso. 2018. Entrevista a Alfonso Cuarón ‘Con Roma quería honrar el tiempo y el espacio; que los lugares dictaran lo que iba a pasar.’ Interview by Fernanda Solórzano. Letras Libres, December 1. https://www.letraslibres. com/mexico/revista/entrevista-alfonso-cuaron-roma-queria-honrar-eltiempo-y-el-espacio-que-los-lugares-dictaran-lo-que-iba-pasar Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Russell Hochschild. 2002. Introduction. In Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1–14. New  York: Henry Holt and Company. Fraser, Nancy. 2016. Contradictions of Capital and Care. New Left Review 100: 99–117. García, Gustavo. 2012. ¿Cómo se llama la que salía de sirvienta? Nexos 412: 60–62. Guthrie, Amy. 2018. After Ruling, Hit Film, Mexico Reconsiders Domestic Workers. AP News, December 20. https://www.apnews.com/e89d8dd061ac4 0b590d1fb606bece49f Kuznesof, Elizabeth. 1989. A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492–1980. In Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary García Castro, 17–35. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lutz, Helma. 2011. The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy. London/New York: Zed Books. Murray, N.  Michelle. 2015. On Feminist Paradoxes: Transnational Domestic Encounters in Contemporary Spain. Letras Femeninas 41 (1): 265–281. ———. 2018. Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Palou, Pedro Ángel. 2018. Special Dossier on Roma: Broken Memory, Voice and Visual Storytelling. Mediático, December 24, http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/ mediatico/2018/12/24/special-dossier-on-roma-broken-memor yvoice-and-visual-storytelling/ Pierce, Joseph M. 2018. Roma is a Beautiful Film of Indigenous Erasure. Indian Country Today, December 28. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/ opinion/roma-is-a-beautiful-film-of-indigenous-erasure-BuOrS3iGSEm LaNZcSHP2Uw/ Poblete, Juan, and Juana Suárez, eds. 2016. Humor in Latin American Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Podalsky, Laura. 2011. The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Polito, Natalia. 2018. ¡Écheme y arreglamos!: Domestic Work and Family Bonds in the Argentina Contemporary Film Viudas. Unpublished paper. Ray, Raka, and Seemin Qayum. 2009. Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Roma. 2018. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Mexico: Netflix. Sarlo, Beatriz. 2006. Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Shattuck, Kathryn. 2019. Yalitza Aparicio is the Oscars’ First Indigenous Mexican Actress Nominee. The New  York Times, January 22. https://www.nytimes. com/apoline/2019/02/23/us/ap-us-oscars-yalitza-aparicio.html Shaw, Deborah. 2016. Intimacy and Distance—Domestic Servants in Latin American Women’s Cinema: La mujer sin cabeza and El niño pez/The Fish Child. In Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics, ed. Deborah Martin and Deborah Shaw, 123–148. London: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2018. Special Dossier on Roma: Children of Women? Alfonso Cuarón’s love letter to his nana. Mediático, December 24. http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/ mediatico/2018/12/24/special-dossier-on-roma-alfonso-cuaronslove-letter-to-his-nana/

CHAPTER 2

Restoring Names, Stories, and Voices for Cinematographic Maids: Toward a New Poetics of Domestic Service in Recent Argentine Films María Julia Rossi Focusing on Servants In his 1950 essay “Balaam and the Ass: On the literary use of the Master-­ Servant Relationship,” British poet W. H. Auden analyzes about a dozen domestic servants in literature, positing in the process a set of four features that describe service in the master-servant relation. To Auden, service is (a) an act of will (not a “natural” act); (b) purely social and historical (i.e., it does not satisfy a vital need); (c) dependent on the concurrent decision of both parties involved (it is, then, a dual albeit asymmetrical commitment); and (d) a relation established between two real persons (instead of, for example, a person and a company or factory). Service is thus an unnecessary—and asymmetrical—artifice contingent on the will of two people. For this abstract characterization of the master-servant relation that casts aside important contextual and other elements, “Balaam and the Ass” has been rightly criticized.1 However, it is precisely this decontextualized M. J. Rossi (*) City University of New York, John Jay College, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_2

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abstraction that makes it a good starting point to think about ­representations of servants—rather than the attributes of representations—in the growing corpus of contemporary Argentine films on the topic, four of which I analyze in this article: La ciénaga (2001), El niño pez (2009), Nosilatiaj. La belleza (2012), and Reimon (2014). In fact, I contend that the richest representations in this repertoire are precisely those in which some of the elements mentioned by Auden—the artificial, unnecessary, voluntary, asymmetrical, or personal nature of service—are either directly examined or questioned. A note first on the contextual reality: Argentina in the years between 2001 and 2014. After the crisis that threw the country into political and economic chaos in 2001, when President De la Rúa took off amid demonstrations and riots, there was a series of provisional heads of state until 2003, when Néstor Kirchner won the presidential elections. His only term in office was followed by the presidency of his wife, Cristina Fernández, from 2007 to 2015. While the crisis of 2001 created the illusion of homogeneity because of the seeming leveling of relations among individuals of different classes, the economic upturn in later years restored the distance that had existed between the middle class and the risk of indigence. In a 2013 article, Beatriz Sarlo describes what she calls a prevalent “Kirchnerist cultural mechanism”2 that was tightly connected to the eminently rhetorical strategies that defined the political imagination of the time. According to Sarlo, two key contrivances—along with the highly publicized defense of human rights causes—delineated the political and media imagination of the time: the discursive creation of a common enemy for the middle class (from the agricultural sector, to the IMF and “vulture funds”), and the advocacy for the internal “Other” of the middle class, the poor, and indigent classes. Either because the risk of falling into poverty—something the 2001 crisis had installed in the imaginary—had receded, or in order to celebrate measures to alleviate marginalized populations (something key for these governments), spectators began to see a new repertoire of marginal figures, such as undocumented immigrants, squatters, cartoneros (paper-pickers), and other diverse participants in alternative economies, hitherto absent from their screens.3 If, as Diana Fernández Irusta (2015) suggests, the political struggle cannot be channeled on screen through an interparty drama,4 then “the great political question is how to create a social tie with the Other” (para. 5). In the early 2000s, there was a proliferation of portrayals of middle and lower classes in film production: Felicidades (Lucho Bender 2000), Bolivia (Adrián Caetano 2001), and a

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slight opening for non-porteño geographies, such as Rosarigasinos (Rodrigo Grande 2001), La libertad (Lisandro Alonso 2001), and Historias mínimas (Carlos Sorín 2002). The new lumpen protagonists entered the audiovisual cultural production en masse not only in films such as Pablo Trapero’s Mundo grúa (1999) and El Bonaerense (2002), and Israel Adrián Caetano’s Un oso rojo, but also in television series like Bruno Stagnaro’s Okupas (2000), Matías Bertilotti’s Cartoneros (2017), and Caetano’s Tumberos (2002) and El marginal (2016), both set in prisons. The maid is the domestic version of the poor: while close to the point of intimacy, she is sufficiently different from the employers so as not to be confused with them. Quotidian activities—cleaning, dressing, eating— depend on her, but she is also the target of atavistic fears. During the Argentine post-crisis years when, as Clara Garavelli puts it in her study of Jorge Gaggero’s films, there was “an ‘other’ that could potentially be us,”5 the fear of a “subversion of … traditional positions”6 was quite concrete. This anxiety enters the screen in Gaggero’s Cama adentro (2005)—significantly, a film that has been read as a national allegory—when Beba, the employer, ends up destitute and needs material help from Dora, the live-in maid.7 Since this kind of worry dissipates during the Kirchner years,8 one might expect—following Sarlo’s 2013 analysis—a proliferation of films that denounce unfair working conditions and advocate for domestic workers (filmic versions, as it were, of the legal debates on the rights of workers that were taking place).9 However, to understand more recent films as a mere symptom of the changing social series is insufficient. The poetics that emerges in contemporary films about domestic workers is ambiguous because, among other factors, it displaces the advocacy for a social class or segment of the population toward an advocacy for the person impacted by social and work conditions who voluntarily enters the master-servant relationship. The films I analyze further—La ciénaga, El niño pez, Nosilatiaj. La belleza, and Reimon—are indeed less about the social scale than about intimacy and the mechanisms that operate in domestic master-servant relationships. Their politics of representation involve decisions about which attributes defined by Auden—artificial, unnecessary, voluntary, asymmetrical, and personal—as well as their resulting tensions are emphasized or nuanced. In these films poverty and essential asymmetry are present, but so is the voluntary nature of service: the domestic worker can always rebel or quit. They also show how the asymmetrical nature of service conspires to deprive the maid of human attributes—something that is

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convenient to the employers. In these films, personhood is often at stake. In short, these films tackle the complexity that is intrinsic in master-­servant relationships as unnecessary, denaturalizing it and thus making it a key cinematographic and narrative element. They exploit the productivity of these characters as well as the stereotypes they evoke: the excesses that lead to animalization or crime, the lack of resources that lead to objectification, the habits that lead to homogenization and loss of subjectivity. The four films reveal different poetics in their treatment of domestic service. La ciénaga precedes the other three by nearly a decade, and thus works as an antecedent for exploring the presence and invisibility of domestic service in Argentine cinema that would reappear in full force in later films: presence because the maid, Isabel, is a character that—from the background she inhabits—is essential to the family fabric, and invisibility because she has been rarely mentioned by critics,10 with the notable exception of Ana Peluffo.11 As we shall see, Isabel remains in the backdrop of both plot and cinematography, but she is the one exhibiting the capacity to act that is lacking in children and in lethargic, alcohol-saturated adults. The protagonist of El niño pez is Ailín, a Paraguayan domestic worker of Guarani extraction working for an upper-middle-class porteño family. She is at the center of the family’s affective economy, and boasts an overpowering and captivating personality that grows throughout the film.12 Focusing on marginal characters does not always imply bringing them to the foreground, but sometimes it does; sometimes the gaze of the servant needs to take center stage to render the link between servant and master visible. The dissonance between social subordination and plot prominence—in the diegetic space these maids do remain socially subordinate—reveals the tension between asymmetry and personhood. While being subordinate, the portrayals of Isabel and Ailín endow them with every attribute of a person, something their masters fail to acknowledge. Not only the plot but, significantly, the visual and aural elements of the next two films—which, it should be noted, had significantly lower budgets than the first two—are deeply modulated by their protagonists. Nosilatiaj. La belleza follows the history of Yolanda, a native Wichi maid who works for a poor family in Salta, a northwestern Argentine province where La ciénaga is also set. In this case, the aesthetics surrounding the construction of the protagonists’ subjectivity is more experimental and daring than in the previous two films. In Reimon, the complex cinematographic construction of the protagonist, Ramona, an hourly maid, reflects on the asymmetric conditions of labor and her condition as a person, framing a

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critique of how the middle class relates materially and ideologically to ­service. None of these four films advocates openly for the rights of domestic workers, nor denounces or laments their plight. Much more disturbingly, they expose the contradictions in employer–employee relations by placing domestic workers that are characters, persons, in the limelight.

Beyond Utilitarian Functionality: Four Cinematographic Explorations of Subservient Characters Isabel in the Background: A Hidden Domestic Protagonist in La ciénaga “China carnavalera” [carnivalesque countrygirl] is the epithet that Mecha (Graciela Borges) directs at her teenage maid Isabel (Andrea López) as an insult for being a dissolute flirt and not knowing how to dress properly. Mecha’s anger toward Isabel is among the most consistent emotions in La ciénaga, written and directed by Lucrecia Martel and set in a somnolent family estate. Family dissolution is one of the central themes; everything in this film—house, domestic economy, family ties—seems to be in decay. Isabel is a native Colla employee13 who appears to be on the margins. She is one of the few solid pillars that does not seem to be about to crumble, at least for the youngest of Mecha’s daughters, Momi (Sofía Bertolotto), whose point of view spectators follow. The movie begins with what I call the “lizard scene”: a group of middle-­ aged men and women in an alcoholic stupor, moving slowly around a swimming pool with putrid water. This scene alternates with another, less-­ memorable one that takes place simultaneously but indoors, where Momi naps, sharing a twin bed with Isabel. The first sounds in the film are from the outside: first a gunshot, then the clicking noise of ice cubes turning in Mecha’s wine glass, then the screeching noise of deck chairs dragged next to the pool. The first words in the film, whispered by Momi next to Isabel, are: “Señor, gracias por darme a Isabel, gracias por darme a Isabel. Señor, gracias por darme a Isabel, gracias por darme a Isabel [Lord, thank you for giving Isabel to me. Lord, thank you for giving Isabel to me. Lord, thank you for giving Isabel to me].” The outdoor and indoor scenes are connected when Mecha trips and falls while carrying glasses on a tray: the lizards remain apathetic and Isabel is the only one who reacts when the

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broken glass cuts Mecha’s chest as she falls. Momi follows and assists the maid, while the elder sister Verónica (Leonora Balcarce) gets up from her nap, repeating: “Yo no quiero ver sangre [I don’t want to see blood].” Just before this moment, a dialogue occurred between the sisters: when Momi explains to her sister that she was crying because she wants to be with no one but Isabel (to whom, according to Cécile François [2009] and Peluffo [2011], Momi feels sexually attracted), Verónica replies, “Mamá la va a echar porque le faltan sábanas y toallas [Mom is going to fire her because there are towels and linens missing].” After Mecha falls Isabel moves in the background while the bodies and attitudes of the hosts and their guests remain flaccid—Mecha and her husband are more worried that the servant might steal from them than concerned that a drunk woman, as Isabel puts it, “está perdiendo mucha sangre [is losing a lot of blood].” Moving among the immobile bodies in the sun, Isabel hurriedly brings towels to stop the bleeding. Mecha remarks, “Ahora sí aparecen las toallas [So now the towels turn up].” When she is about to be taken to the hospital, Mecha sends her daughter to fetch some clothes for her: “Momi, andá a buscar mi vestido de botones que esta india me quiere llevar así a La Ciénaga [Momi, go get me that buttoned dress; this Indian wants to take me like this to (town)].”14 While the maid and the younger daughter rush to take the mother to the doctor, the father, in the foreground, dries his hair and casually calls out to his daughter, “Fijate qué se llevó Isabel [Watch what it is that Isabel is taking].” La ciénaga presents a figure of the servant that resonates with the imaginary that places her in the background, but at the same time subtly shows how her actions are essential so that the foreground can still function and continue to distrust her. While they leave for the doctor, a storm breaks out. An anonymous uniformed maid picks up the bloodied towels and broken glass in torrential rain. In La ciénaga, the maid does not only move and do, she is there for the family to reaffirm its social class, which is facilitated by Isabel’s ethnicity.15 Suspecting that things are being stolen creates cohesion and identity: we never see Isabel steal16; we see a dismembered family that finds common ground in suspecting and denigrating her. The father and mother are at odds the rest of the time, among other things, because the former had cheated on Mecha with a former friend of hers, who is simultaneously their son’s lover. The syntagma “china carnavalera” thus says more about the enunciator than the referent. The last time it is repeated is when Isabel quits. When she says she will not return, Mecha, humiliated and offended,

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mutters a diatribe—not at Isabel, who looks down, but about her—in which we can recognize the well-known discourse of a self-satisfied master that aims to erase Isabe’s individuality in a crude-class generalization— “Uno les da todo: familia, casa, comida y así te pagan. Son todas iguales, siempre te dejan. Desagradecidas [One gives them everything: family, house, food, and this is how they pay you back. They are all the same, they always leave you. Ingrates].” Contempt toward Isabel is condensed in the constant suspicion that she will steal and in the uses of her Colla ethnicity as insult. Every member of the family makes reference to valuables that are missing or that could be missing, suggest that Isabel should be monitored, and insult her by calling her “Colla” or “Indian.” Isabel’s ethnic identity is never explored beyond these epithets, which all the family members pronounce. This commonality crosses the generations, as part of the rite of passage to adulthood. Verónica humiliates the already-animalized “Perro” (Isabel’s boyfriend).17 When Momi suspects that Isabel is going to abandon her, even she, for all her almost mystical affinity with and emotional attachment to the maid, resorts to her class privilege and repeats her mother’s words: “China carnavalera.” In the same vein, Momi’s younger brother, Joaquín, embodies this family attitude. In the scene that follows a children’s fishing expedition, Joaquín throws the fish away and blurts out, “Qué vamos a comer esta cagada. Puro barro. Esos collas de mierda comen cualquier cosa [How could we eat this shit. It’s pure mud. Those shitty Colla can eat anything].” Both scenes of explicit insults with reference to her ethnicity are followed by moments in which Isabel gets her way by avoiding confrontation. While Momi showers, she sees through the window that Isabel goes out to see her boyfriend; after Joaquín throws away the fish Isabel picks them up and cooks them for dinner, getting compliments from Joaquín.18 Isabel’s acts of resistance are secretive and effective weapons of the weak, to borrow James C. Scott’s phrase. She hides them behind an appearance of compliance in which we, the spectators, become her accomplices. The film does not hide from us Isabel’s acts of muted rebellion. We are privileged witnesses to how much her affective and material labor— even her silent acceptance of insults—sustains the family. We suspect that upon Isabel’s departure the family may finally crumble. However, we can only suspect this because the movie ends soon after, in a tragic scene at a relative’s house where there is no maid to save a child from falling to his death.

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Ailín’s Visual Transformation from Object to Empowered Subject in El niño pez While in La ciénaga, we can identify the typical positioning of the maid in the background, El niño pez—directed and adapted from the 2004 eponymous novel by Lucía Puenzo—places the domestic worker in the foreground, as a coprotagonist. After quick disjointed scenes that work as a prologue,19 the film begins with a close-up of a woman’s face and her left shoulder; she appears to be sleeping as a light from an oblique angle enters the room. Slowly and increasingly, she moves rhythmically along with a sound, but we still only see her face. The camera pans out slightly and a man, possessing her from behind and thrusting regularly, enters the frame. The woman appears to refuse, somewhat effortlessly, to wake up. In the next scene, we see the same woman, now wearing a pink uniform, opening a window. She wakes up another woman, a girl who seems infinitely younger. The first woman is Ailín (Mariela Vitale), Lin, or, as she is nicknamed in the household, “la Guayi,” a live-in maid working for the Brontës, an upper-middle-class porteño family who have employed her for seven years since she came from her native Paraguay. The other woman is Lala (Inés Efrón), the daughter of the family.20 Ailín’s passivity and submission in the early scene is deceiving, first, because she is inscrutable (does she want to have sex with that man or not?); second, because it hints at a tone (an attitude) that the rest of the film—through both visual and sonic elements—stubbornly disproves. Yet this is how the film starts, putting forth for the spectators a figure of the servant that may resonate with the viewers’ imaginary: the domestic worker as an intrinsically subaltern victim. Puenzo does not plainly reject the various stereotypes (the hypersexualized maid, the criminal maid)21 nor the realities from which they originate. Furthermore, the maid is placed in this position when Brontë and Lala, father and daughter who are both romantically involved with Ailín, talk to the maid to tell her what to do but also talk about her and on her behalf to one another while she is in front of them. This tug-of-war dialogue takes place during a family dinner when Brontë exceptionally invites the servant to sit at the masters’ table in what amounts to a display of mastery and power: Lala [a Ailín, refiriéndose ¿Qué querés? a la comida de la fuente]:  Ailín: Es lo mismo.

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Brontë: No te puede dar lo mismo. ¿Te daba lo mismo quedarte en Paraguay o venirte para acá? A: No. B: ¿Ves? las cosas no dan lo mismo. … ¿Qué querés… de la vida? L: Dejala. B [a Lala]: No te pongas celosa, vos. A: Cantar. B: ¿Querés ser cantante? A: En guaraní. B: ¿Sólo en guaraní? A: Yo no sé cantar si no es en guaraní. B: Cantame un poquito. [Ailín mira a Lala y la cámara le sigue la mirada.] L: No cantés si no querés. B: Sí que quiere. [Ailín canta mirando para abajo y levantando la vista brevemente.] B: Así los hechizaron a los españoles las guaraníes. Cantándoles. [El padre saca una selfie de todos y Ailín sale.] L: No te metas con ella. B: Tenés razón. Sacala de acá. Lala [to Ailín, talking about the food on the serving plate]: What do you want? Ailín: It’s the same. Brontë: It can’t be the same. Was it the same for you to stay in Paraguay or come here? A: No. B: See? Things are not the same. … What do you want… in life? L: Leave her alone. B [to Lala]: Don’t be jealous. A: To sing. B: You want to be a singer? A: In Guarani. B: Only in Guarani? A: I can only sing in Guarani. B: Sing a little bit for me. [Ailín looks at Lala and the camera follows her glance.] L: Don’t sing if you don’t want to. B: She wants to. [Ailín sings while looking down and then briefly looks ahead. The father makes a comment about Guarani women “bewitching” Spaniards by singing. Ailín leaves; Lala and Brontë are left at the table.] L: Leave her alone. B: You are right. Get her out of here.

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This dialogue represents a barely concealed fight between forces that know their side in the master-servant asymmetrical relation. The dialogue does not involve the maid herself, who remains quiet and looks down for most of the scene, while both generations of employers speak on her behalf. But Ailín does sing. The song, sung in a language that the masters do not understand, transcends mere domestic labor.22 It expresses a humanity that resists being objectified, sexually, or within a power-struggle, as it takes the shape and sound of a personal desire. Her desire comes to the fore in one of the most paradigmatic scenes in the film, one that appears on the promotional poster, in which Lala and Ailín sit together in a steamy bathtub lit by dim candlelight behind a fogged-up shower screen. Onscreen, Ailín uses her finger to draw the floor plan of the house she wants to build next to Ypacaraí Lake in Paraguay and explains to Lala what it would be like.23 Afterward she tells Lala about her early life over there.24 What is remarkable in this scene is that Ailín—her desires, her past, her voice—is the exclusive protagonist. She designs the house, she draws it for Lala, she tells a story in which she is the protagonist, and she monopolizes the audience’s attention. At the very end of the movie, we find Ailín in the back of a truck, hugging Lala and finally telling her the true story of her past. As Ailín recounts her story, the narrative bounces visually between present time and flashback. In the present, we see close-ups of Ailín’s and Lala’s faces, both sweaty and teary-eyed in the dark, as the lights shine through the window and light up first one face and then the other. In the flashback, filmed in sepia with strident impressionistic colors, we see scenes of Ailín’s childhood (Ailín Salas) in which she is pregnant and lonely in a somber house. The story we listen to as these two time frames alternate is Ailín’s confession: her childhood pregnancy as the result of incest, and the way she not only carried out but also justified her murder of the baby. Ailín’s final confession dispels the myth of the fish child that had concealed her crime throughout the film. Ailín thus owns up to the terrible story and moves from a romanticized version of a horrific event to the affirmation of an agency—the maid’s agency. Contrary to the apparent objectification we have seen in the film in which she is both a sexual object and a topic for debate, in the end, she is a being with power who takes control of her destiny in the plot and tells us, in first person and in her words, her tragic narrative.

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Yolanda’s Beauty in her own Words and her own Language in Nosilatiaj. La belleza From the very beginning of Nosilatiaj. La belleza, written and directed by Daniela Seggiaro, there is no question whose story this film will be telling. The film is narrated mainly through two periods in the life of a Wichi woman, Yolanda. We follow Yolanda through her childhood (Sasa Sharet Isabel Mendoza) and adolescence (Rosmeri Segundo), and then while she works as a maid for a poor family consumed with planning the quinceañera celebration for their older daughter, Antonella (Camila Romagnolo). Despite their shared poverty, the closeness between the maid and the family she works for is clearly abolished by Yolanda’s ethnicity. In this movie, her Wichi identity is a key facet of the aesthetic of her character, and the aural and temporary approaches to her construction. The difference between both moments—Yolanda as a child and Yolanda as a teenager maid—is cinematographically pronounced. Family life as a maid is recounted in a fairly traditional, episodic way. In it the predominantly domestic setting of bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and patio is punctuated with walks in the neighborhood to the store or the hairdresser and diegetic sounds. The family that Yolanda works for is composed of Sara (Ximena Banus), the mother, who is constantly worried about family finances; her husband, Armando (Víctor Hugo Carrizo), whose intermittent presence in the household irritates Sara; and their children: Antonella, an adolescent obsessed with her looks, and Marquitos (Octavio Moreno Hardoy) who persistently hovers around the scenes. We witness the family dynamic through Yolanda’s eyes. In a very early scene, a subjective camera angle over her shoulder makes us privy to only her perspective. The dialogue is realistic and the aesthetic is mimetic and costumbrista. On the other hand, the childhood narrative is markedly nonrepresentational. In the scenes that correspond to Yolanda’s early years, we hear a voice-over—a voice that we hear singing along with the chirping of birds in the opening soundscape of the film—telling her own story in Wichi while, against a background of out-of-focus images of natural objects, we can read the Spanish translation in white letters at the center of the screen. The narrative woven by that voice—a narrative the spectator is compelled to read—resists linear development. In the childhood narrative, space and movement are oneiric. There are long and some extreme long shots of open spaces in which human silhouettes are insignificant against the natural landscape. Some frames resemble paintings or, more accurately,

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­tableaux vivants in which the illusion of stillness is broken by very subtle movements. The slow lyricism of these scenes calls attention to a differential passage of time. Just as the contrasts between these two periods in Yolanda’s life are visually and auditorily irreconcilable, so are the worldviews underlying them. There is a sharp opposition between the Catholic faith and a spirituality rooted in nature and ancestral traditions. In one instance, a Catholic slogan posted on the front door—“Este hogar es católico. No aceptamos doctrinas diferentes. Gracias por respetarnos [This is a Catholic home. We do not accept different doctrines. Thank you for respecting us]—is juxtaposed with a reference in Wichi to “lo que los viejos piensan [what the elder think],” urging us to respect nature since we belong to it, and presenting God as just an afterthought. In another, a bird flies into the church and interrupts the priest’s homily, awakening the congregation from soporific boredom as they celebrate the naughty interruption of life. Amid this clash, the family thematizes Yolanda’s knowledge as a bridge. When she prepares the fire for the barbeque, one of the guests compliments her work and casually connects her skills to her ethnicity. In an outdoor scene Sara asks Yolanda what the songs of the birds mean. Antonella even asks the maid if her father is a wizard. Annoyed, Yolanda threatens her with a fabricated curse. Yolanda’s origin is often linked to its utilitarian use: employers can access and use her knowledge.25 Her body, mainly her healthy and glossy hair, is also thematically important. About halfway through the film Sara takes Antonella and Yolanda to the hairdresser. Yolanda simply requests, “Me peina un poquito y ya [Brush it a little please, that’s all].” What we see next is a quick succession of close-ups: Yolanda’s long, loose hair, a pair of scissors, Yolanda vomiting. The haircut has a devastating effect on her. She develops a fever, and after convalescing, she barely recovers in time to continue preparing for the party. Sara is aware of the damage she has produced. She consoles Yolanda—“No le queda mal. Ya le va a crecer [It doesn’t look bad. It will grow back]”—and asks Antonella not to bother the maid. When her husband excoriates her, Sara first lies that Yolanda wanted the haircut but then pleads, “No me hagas sentir mal [Don’t make me feel bad].” At this point, we still do not know why or to what end Sara ordered the hairdresser to cut Yolanda’s hair, but we do see to what extent her control over the maid’s body transcends domestic service (Fig. 2.1). By the film’s end, we realize that Yolanda’s hair is central to the film. In retrospect, there are several repeated indications that prepare the epiphany

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Fig. 2.1  Yolanda’s hair in Nosilatiaj. La belleza

in the final scene.26 However, it is not until the end that we finally understand the full force of the ancestral dictum “Tendrás un pelo hermoso como las ramas, no tienen que cortarlo nunca [Your hair will be as long as branches, and you will have to never cut it]” followed by a shot of Yolanda’s still face quickly replaced by the huge willow tree (a dialogue of icons) that appears at the very beginning of the film. The story of the hair ends when Antonella is dancing a flamenco, the highlight of her quinceañera party for which she has practiced throughout the film. As she turns her back to the camera, the shot reveals she is wearing Yolanda’s braid as an extension. At that moment, we understand Sara’s motivation. All the clues fit: this is not just a decision over the body of the employee but an exploitation of her body as a resource, a body that is Sara’s to usufruct as long as she employs her. An ellipsis ensues, which the oral narrative sutures and recomposes. The suspension gives way to the continuation of the story (Yolanda leaving) that resignifies all the narrative section as a flashback, effectively repositioning Sara and her family as secondary characters in Yolanda’s life. After her recount of her return to her native land where she ceased feeling like she was not herself, the film shows us an old Wichi woman (Yolanda?) as she braids her hair. Once the braiding reaches the end of her long hair, we hear her voice now following a logic that escapes syntagmatic c­ oherence.

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A succession of about thirty words or pairs of words in Wichi composes a litany that includes natural elements, animals, things, and family relations, the last of which is “nuestro idioma [our language].” Narrative sequences, with indoor shots, medium shots, and master shots with diegetic sound, mostly rest on a syntagmatic development ruled by causality and chronology. Poetic sequences, along with long shots, almost-pictorial aestheticization of frames, and the preeminence of nature, and the use of Wichi language accompanied by the Spanish text follow in turn a paradigmatic development constructed of images, ancient customs, and the enunciation of community values. This brings us to the braid and its dual function: it functions metonymically in the narrative sequence (it is the sign that Antonella needs to impersonate a Spanish bailaora), and as a metaphoric sign of beauty in the poetic sequence. As witnesses to the interweaving of both functions, dimensions, and cultures, while listening to an undecipherable language, spectators cannot but accept that their own knowledge is insufficient to understand the maid’s story. Ramona, a Working Person among Absences and Empty Silhouettes in Reimon Reimon, written and directed by Rodrigo Moreno, is less lyrical but also intent on representing a subordinate protagonist and alternative representations of time. Ramona (Marcela Díaz) works as a domestic worker paid by the hour in houses in Buenos Aires. The movie shows her at home, in her neighborhood, working in different places, and traveling to work in what can be called “dead time.” In fact, a sizable part of the movie is spent tracing Ramona’s daily commute, from her house in an impoverished suburb to three residences in the capital where she works. In a very early sequence, we follow Ramona as she travels by train and bus, gets on and off buses, and crosses streets. There is no dialogue, just the street noise. The scenes of transportation, even though stylized by the framing, reveal the material poverty of the surroundings—the train seats are in disrepair, the city outside the train looks dilapidated—and the human landscape: the passengers, like Ramona, are racially marked as poor. Through all this, Ramona’s movements are parsimonious and the meager expressions of her unchanging face (a permanently arched eyebrow subtly suggesting haughtiness) portray her as a reserved person at work, in transit, or at home.27 Ramona’s body is framed with two types of shots. There are frequent extended close-ups of her face when she appears to be doing nothing, as

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in the opening and closing of the film: a frontal and a profile close-up, respectively, one in a working-class restaurant and the other in a house she cleans.28 Her face, sharp against the background, seems to call attention to Ramona’s humanity and personhood. Quite differently, at various moments, the frame reveals fragments or traces of Ramona’s body while she works: we listen to the vacuum cleaner and see the cable being jerked offscreen; we see Ramona’s gloved hands doing the dishes, her feet and ankles on a stool as she cleans a window, her arms as she changes sheets, her hand holding an aerosol can. This fragmentation, as well as the fragmented nature of her day, seems to detach Ramona’s identity from her labor. In those instances, she is reduced to her body in action, not a person, but literally the servant’s hand. For the most part, we only see Ramona’s body in its entirety when she commutes and walks her dog. In a way, her work—as well as the cinematic framing—takes her body apart, and both her masters and the film seem to profit from specific body parts and their labor. Only as she lives through unproductive moments with no external purpose or benefit, such as the commute and leisure time, does her body regain unity (Fig. 2.2).29 Reimon encourages a reflection on the nature of work and compensation. The film itself opens by detailing how much money went into its production, with Moreno claiming he did not earn a salary but only kept

Fig. 2.2  A body in action: Ramona’s hand in Reimon

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a percentage from the movie’s profits. However, the crux of this reflection takes place in a series of scenes in the third house, inhabited by a young hipster couple (Cecilia Rainero and Esteban Bigliardi). We first encounter them lying in bed and reading aloud to each other fragments that refer to the work-day from Marx’s The Capital. Rainero’s character reads that the poor cannot enjoy inactivity and that the difference between poor and rich is how they relate to their work. As Bigliardi’s character hears that last phrase, he interrupts her and concludes, “There it is, that’s it. Excellent”, and walks away to listen to some music. In pajamas and socks, he plays a vinyl record—yet another sign of their cultural identity, hums along, and greets Ramona with his hand. Later on, they coincide in the frame: the employer is in focus—in the back, still, unproductive, listening to music with headphones—while Ramona is shown up close but out of focus, moving and sweeping the floor. What happens next is probably the moment of the most symbolic violence in the film, although neither of the participants seems to notice. He calls her Reimon and gestures her to dance with him. She walks over and obediently dances; as the song ends, there is an awkward moment in which she stays characteristically calm and he stands still, not quite knowing what to do next. The second of these awkward encounters takes place with the female employer. The screen is dramatically split by a window and a railing: on the left, the homeowner is sitting on a staircase, snacking on a piece of quiche for which she praises the domestic worker (also calling her “Reimon”); on the right-hand side, we see Ramona through a window, emptying a dustpan. The contrast between leisure and work and what each yields parallels the silence and eloquence of employee and employer: verbal production is present where work is absent (Fig. 2.3). A third remarkable scene takes place when Ramona returns to that house and the readers of Marx have doubled. Another young couple (Juvelina Díaz and Bruno Dubner) sit at the table along with the hosts, and take turns reading a contemporary Marxist text on the struggles to put limits on the workday.30 As the maid arrives, the female guest continues reading. Some of them greet her and the female employer gets up. The guest tries to continue reading but cannot: “Oh, I’m sorry, guys, I got lost.” The homeowner tells Ramona to follow her and, in an awkward and winding way that the film has prepared us for, tells her she found some clothes when organizing her closet that she does not wear anymore and she needs room “for more things”.

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Fig. 2.3  The contrast between leisure and work in Reimon

These three encounters—the unilateral dance, work juxtaposed with eating the product of such work, and the “donation” of clothes—are testimony not only to the asymmetry of the relation between the employers and Ramona but also, importantly, the irreconcilable distance between the reading of Marx and the readers’ everyday practices. Exclaiming “Excellent” and being distracted by the maid are indications that these readers are in fact impervious to what they are reading. Alien to the struggles of their employee, blind to her presence, they read Marx as a succession of empty signifiers that are appealing to a progressive, well-meaning class. The materiality of their voices contrasts to the emptiness of their experience. They cannot perceive someone who is near them, to the point that they feel free to snobbishly change her name, Ramona, with its criollo sound, to the imagined Americanized pronunciation of “Reimon.”31 However, Marx’s words function not only as a background soundtrack for the viewers. We can no longer ignore that Ramona’s commute in the first half hour of the movie is neither paid nor considered as part of her labor, or we can ignore it if we are like her bosses. In the first two places, they are invisible and empty silhouettes, and in the third, they are young readers of Marx,32 well-meaning retro caricatures from the1970s. Their favorite music could be their parents’—The Beatles—or come from their childhood; the vinyl the employer listens and dances to is El garabato, a

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1971 LP for children. Reimon calls the attention of the viewers, whose class identity is very likely closer to her employers, to the time the maid spends commuting to work, to the way she is or is not treated, and to the fragmentary aspect of a profession defined by a body in action through a universe of domestic details. In a scene that mirrors the first one in which Ramona enters a deserted, elegant house, the maid greets an empty space. This time, along with the money, there is a note for her, but now the greeting becomes the last words we hear in the film: “It’s Ramona.” In its dissonance with the title of the film, we hear Rodrigo Moreno’s critique of his class.

Toward a New Poetics of Servants: Reimagining Domesticity on the Screen The master-servant relation presupposes the construction of a social Other in the heart of the family. This operation is often predicated on a priori material (economic, ethnic) as well as immaterial (class, education, nationality) differences, along with elements that accentuate alterity like the obligatory use of a uniform and the differential use of home spaces. If by virtue of these signs, some are more of a “person” than others, what is truly at stake in this differentiation is the very condition of personhood. In Persons and Things as well as in “The dispositif,” Roberto Esposito33 traces the category of person back to ancient Rome, identifying important continuities that continue today. The central difference he establishes between things and persons is that the latter has the ability to possess, whereas the former can be possessed. However, he remarks that the subjugation of things to persons is somehow replicated among persons who are unequal in terms of rank, status, and power. In his words, both in Rome and nowadays, “to possess a patrimony meant not only to have things … but also to exert dominion over those who had less, or did not have any at all, and who were therefore forced to place themselves in the hands of the possessors.”34 Possessors and possessed, persons and things, mirror key attributes of masters and servants. The body—a central concern of his essay—is essential to the mechanism of reification of others by some.35 Esposito’s exploration enables us to see in the treatment of filmic maids this tension between the master’s eagerness for possession of the body and the maid’s reclaiming of her body, decisions, and actions—in short, the struggle to avoid reification and gain personhood. There is

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another tension involving the worker’s status of person: despite the depersonalizing impulse she is subjected to, she often takes on affective work, which is essentially personal. Beyond the upkeep of material conditions for everyday life for which maids are hired, domestic service produces human relations.36 A representational paradox around domestic labor—it is as ubiquitous as it is invisible—poses an aesthetic and ethical dilemma in contemporary film. How can these materially essential but socially irrelevant beings enter the filmic picture? How does one avoid caricatured, pathetic, or melodramatic representations? How can representations not succumb to the depersonalizing operation of the masters, assuming a viewpoint that renders domestic labor irrelevant? While representing domestic service runs the risk of replicating social subordination—that is, to emphasize the service to the masters and their narratives—it also affords an opportunity: to recompose the human complexity of these subordinate characters as persons without negating the essential features of subordination. While not eluding encounters of symbolic violence resulting from the tension between the interests of asymmetric actors in a shared space, these film characters constitute a new repertoire for fictional domestic service that defies both traditional criteria for visibility and well-intentioned simplifications, thus disrupting the viewer’s perception of service. The strategic uses of the background in La ciénaga and foreground in El niño pez reveal Isabel and Ailín as essential to their respective narratives. Isabel’s secretive actions keep the family institution alive while her employers mistreat her—her role and that of her bosses are far from dialectical.37 Martel seems to protect Isabel’s interiority through the hyperdemonstration of her employers’ class ideology. Isabel quietly rejects their opinions on what she wears, silently cooks the rejected fish, and impassively looks down during Mecha’s conventional tirade against her. Isabel laughs last: she exercises her autonomy and quits her job. As Auden reminds us, the master-servant relationship necessitates a dual commitment. In El niño pez, Ailín is not exempt from moments of humiliation, stereotypes, or crass subjection, but the maid owns a story and a desire that are worth narrating. Her voice deserves attention. Without condescension or pathos, Puenzo endows the Paraguayan maid with the necessary materials to make her the protagonist: her story is the engine of the film, and it is her voice that reveals the secret that explains it. With lower budgets and production possibilities, Reimon and Nosilatiaj are also vastly more radical. The fragmentation of Ramona’s body and the

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representation of her daily commute, as well as the construction of employers that are seen through the labor of the domestic worker, impact images and screen time. The main character is at times inscrutable,38 which deliberately encourages the viewers to consider the worker as a person with a life that exceeds her mere work. Seggiaro’s answer to the question of representation in Nosilatiaj does not attempt to display a simple subjectivity either; rather, this film exposes a cultural identity that Yolanda preserves and that remains inaccessible to her employers while she lives with them. There is a material manifestation of this division that impacts the aesthetics of the film: Yolanda’s spoken words in Wichi are not translated with subtitles located at the bottom of the screen, serving a passing utilitarian purpose, but in the center and as intertitles, suspending the action. Yolanda turns out to be the main protagonist in the narrative through her own language and values. The importance of domestic workers in these two films affects the very structure of their plots and aesthetics. The construction of these four figures—Isabel, Ailín, Ramona, and Yolanda—each from traditionally marginalized ethnic backgrounds, neither denies their personhood nor avoids the complexities of their subordinate position. Furthermore, they appear in films that deliberately reorient the cinematographic gaze toward their affective labor, something audiences are socially trained to ignore. They call on us to not only look and see them but also to acknowledge how their presences, actions, and words alter the very shape of the narratives, and to question the reading protocols that have hitherto systematically and consistently erased them. The representation of the servant as a complex person involved in affective labor, I argue, delineates a poetics in contemporary Argentine films. Along with the four films analyzed in this study, this corpus includes: El delantal de Lili (Mariano Galperin 2004) with a particular gender twist, Una semana solos (Celina Murga 2007), Criada (Matías Herrera Córdoba 2009), Francia (Adrián Caetano 2010), Los dueños (Agustín Toscano and Ezequiel Raduzky 2013), La Paz (Santiago Loza 2014), Mi amiga del parque (Ana Katz 2015), and the television detective series La chica que limpia (Lucas Combina 2017).39 This new attention to maids and servants can be associated with the aforementioned changes in the social context, but their presence onscreen has aesthetic and political implications. When the filmmakers’ gazes seek to capture the gaze of servants, the clash is inevitable but so is the encounter. The solution cannot be simple, but these films do not bypass the challenges. The invisible, relegated, negated people become politically strident

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presences essential to a new poetics that challenges habitual perception practices. This challenge avoids the pitfalls of “benign framings”40 that tend to reify the master-servant relationship. Much to the contrary, they denaturalize it, calling critical attention to Auden’s simple but powerful point: service is a dual commitment and, above all, an artificial institution. Translated by Martín Gaspar

Notes 1. According to Edward Mendelson, “‘Balaam and the Ass’ pointedly ignores the economic and political relation of the master-servant relation in real life, and considers instead its literary expressions as instances of mutual love and voluntary commitment.” Edward Mendelson, “Introduction,” in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Volume III. Prose: 1949–1955, by W. H. Auden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), xxvi. 2. Beatriz Sarlo, “Los intelectuales, la tierra fértil del kirchnerismo,” Cuadernos de Literatura 12, no. 33 (2013): 30. 3. Gonzalo Aguilar, Other worlds. New Argentine film, trans. Sarah Ann Wells (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 23–24; Karina E. Vázquez, “Corre muchacha, corre: Estructura de clases y trabajo doméstico en La nana (2009), de Sebastián Silva,” Chasqui 43, no. 22 (2014): 161–62, http:// www.jstor.org/stable/43589638; Karina E.  Vázquez, “La poética del enrarecimiento en La mujer sin cabeza (2008), de Lucrecia Martel,” Hispanic Research Journal. Iberian and Latin American Studies 16, no. 1 (2015): 32, https://doi.org/10.1179/1468273714Z.000000000110. Mainly but not exclusively masculine characters, Aguilar describes them as “outside of the social world” (23) and “equally distant from the oppressed rebels of political cinema who acted to transform the society they had received and from costumbrista cinema in which each person was a sign of his place in the social hierarchy” (23). 4. Diana Fernández Irusta, “Cine y política: la generación post 2001 toma las cámaras,” La Nación, August 2, 2015, https://www.lanacion.com. ar/1815023-pagina-3wwwlanacioncomarideas-ideasln-lnideaspensamiento-libros-arte. Fernández Irusta pointed out that, despite the active politization of this period “el Kirchnerismo no se nombra” (para. 11). 5. Clara Garavelli, “Post-crisis Argentine films: De-localizing daily life through the lens of Jorge Gaggero,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 7, no. 1 (2010): 39, https://doi.org/10.1386/shci.7.1.35_1 6. Garavelli, “Post-crisis Argentine films,” 40.

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7. To dispel the illusion of an even playing field, the piano scene in the end highlights an intractable distance. After moving some of her furniture to the humble house where Dora lives, Beba complains that the movers ruined the tuning of the piano, and Dora tries to calm her down by offering to cover it. 8. In her conclusion, Garavelli points out that “now we know that the rearticulation of certain ways of interaction among individuals brought about by the events of December 2001 was short lived. In general, once the social and economic situation was stabilized, people went back to their individual class roles and usual daily life activities.” Garavelli, “Post-crisis Argentine films,” 45. 9. On the debate around the 2013 “Régimen especial de contrato de trabajo para el personal de casas particulares,” see R. Lerussi, “Insubordinaciones sociojurídicas: La destinataria de los servicios en el sector doméstico y de cuidados en Argentina,” in Los de abajo. Tres siglos de sirvientes en la literatura y el arte de América Latina, eds. María Julia Rossi and Lucía Campanella (Rosario: UNR Editora, 2018), 211–25. 10. Ana Amado, “Velocidades, generaciones y utopías: a propósito de La ciénaga, de Lucrecia Martel,” ALCEU. Revista de Comunicação, Cultura e Política 6, no. 12 (2006). Amado contrasts the pace of each generation in La ciénaga (“hay en La ciénaga una velocidad doble, en la medida que cada generación de sus protagonistas, la de los adultos y la de los niños y adolescentes, adscribe sus gestos a una velocidad diferente [in La ciénaga there is a double velocity, inasmuch as each generation of protagonists, that of the adults and that of the children and teenagers, ascribes their gestures to a different velocity])” (49), but significantly excludes the maids in her analysis. When she states that “las apariciones infantiles energizan el movimiento interno de los planos” (54), neither Isabel’s constant movement nor that of the other, anonymous maid is taken into account. Gonzalo Aguilar, Other Worlds: New Argentine film, trans. Sarah Ann Wells (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Aguilar focuses on the “sedentary tendency” (39) that he identifies with the family, briefly mentioning Isabel’s departure as a sign of nomadic hope and neglecting altogether the fact that she is constantly moving in the house. In his inventory of characters, he only mentions the members of the two families, referring to Isabel as an anonymous appendix defined by her role and not as a character in her own right: “Momi sees the maid as a sister-girlfriend” (44). Laura Podalsky, “The politics of disaffected youth and contemporary Latin American cinema,” in Youth culture in global cinema, eds. Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). Podalsky’s reading focuses on “disaffected youth” (109) and does not consider Isabel except as a maternal figure for Momi, a character Podalsky analyzes with great insight.

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11. Ana Peluffo, “Staging class, gender and ethnicity in Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga/The Swamp,” in New trends in Argentine and Brazilian cinema, eds. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2011). In her essay Peluffo highlights Isabel’s importance for Momi in her role as a maternal figure as well as a homoerotic object of desire, and how the maid works as a source of self-affirmation for Mecha: “Women hire domestic workers not only to get help with the household chores but to also affirm an invisible class status based on a racialized process of cultural differentiation” (216). 12. Fernando A.  Blanco and John Petrus, “‘Argentinian queer mater.’ Del ‘Bildungsroman’ urbano a la ‘road movie’ rural: Infancia y juventud post-­ Corralito en la obra de Lucía Puenzo,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 37, no. 73 (2011), https://doi.org/10.2307/41407241. Blanco and Petrus focus on Lala as the only protagonist of the film (320– 23) and refer to “her love affair [amorío] with the Paraguayan maid” (320). 13. Ana Martín Morán, “La ciénaga,” in The Cinema of Latin America, eds. Alberto Elena and Marina Díaz López (New York: Wallflower Press, 2004). Morán states, “Another relevant aspect of this portrait of Argentine society is the presence of the large community living in the north of the country which has been completely ignored in the national identity-building discourses and generally excluded from cinematic representation” (234). She also connects these presences with the racism that Mecha expresses in such expressions as “shitty Colla [colla de mierda].” 14. This attention to clothes and Isabel’s failure in choosing them is repeated later on, when Isabel is helping Momi get dressed and the girl pokes fun at the maid’s sartorial ignorance. 15. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), quoted in Peluffo, “Staging class, gender and ethnicity.” Rollins indicates that the presence of domestic service “enhances the employer’s self-esteem as an individual” (216). Peluffo focuses her analysis on Mecha (216–17), while I argue that the whole family’s class cohesion relies on its members’ individual relationships with and attitude toward Isabel. 16. As a matter of fact, we see quite the opposite: Momi steals from Isabel, coming up with a flimsy excuse: “No te la robé; la guardaba ahí [I did not steal it from you; I kept it there].” 17. David Oubiña, Estudio crítico sobre La ciénaga: Entrevista a Lucrecia Martel (Buenos Aires: Picnic, 2007). Oubiña points out, “El Perro es invitado a desvestirse delante de Isabel (o, más bien, ella es forzada a presenciar cómo las hijas de los patrones abusan de su novio) sólo para que Vero huela la transpiración que ha quedado en la remera y la deseche con asco [El

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Perro is invited to undress in front of Isabel (or rather, she is forced to witness how the employers’ daughters abuse her boyfriend), only for Vero to smell the sweat that remains on his t-shirt and discard it in disgust]” (37). 18. In her analysis of this scene, Peluffo states, “It is clear that Martel wants the viewer to read the scene politically as a condemnation of Joaquín’s rabid racism” (“Staging class, gender and ethnicity,” 218). Remarkably, this formulation syntactically erases Isabel’s agency. I see this as de-emphasizing the fact that Isabel uses her available room for maneuvering to resist. The film depicts her using her agency as she pleases in both cases. In line with Aguilar (Other worlds), Peluffo refers to “the mobility of the maid” (216) as something that differentiates her from sedentary Momi. As I see it, that mobility is key in the portrayal of Isabel as owner of her agency and will. 19. This temporal frame of Brontë’s killing opens up to numerous flashbacks that, reconstituted, form the narrative. 20. Ailín is more feminine than Lala; there are several scenes that contrast Lala’s androgyny to Ailín’s conventional femininity. 21. Ailín’s hypersexualization comes through in the way she dresses compared to Lala, and the many sexual relationships she engages in. Many characters convey the fact that she, as the maid, could be suspicious, including Ailín herself. They all agree that no one will believe that Lala is the culprit stealing from her home and killing her father. The only one who seems oblivious to these stereotypes is Lala; when she escapes to Paraguay after killing her father she is unaware that the maid will be the prime suspect. 22. Vitelia Cisneros, “Guaraní y quechua desde el cine en las propuestas de Lucía Puenzo, ‘El niño pez’, y Claudia Llosa, ‘La teta asustada,’” Hispania 96, no. 1 (2013): 51–61, https://doi.org/10.1353/hpn.2013.0005. According to Cisneros, the Quechua language in La teta asustada serves the same purpose as Guarani here: “Un modo común de imaginar al hablante femenino de una lengua nativa [A common way to imagine the female speaker of a native tongue]” (51). Cisneros relates the appearance of these languages to a “renovado interés por el mundo indígena tras los procesos de globalización y los movimientos políticos recientes [renewed interest in the indigenous world after globalization processes and recent political movements]” (60), without exploring the stigmatization that these languages have undergone in their respective countries of origin and associating them with the sexual threats to which the characters who speak them are subjected. 23. Margaret Frohlich, “What of unnatural bodies? The discourse of nature in Lucía Puenzo’s XXY and El niño pez/The Fish Child,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 8, no. 2 (2011): 159–74, https://doi.org/10.1386/ shci.8.2.159_1. Frolich, whose interest focuses on the discourse of nature, relates the urban space to the limits on their relationship from which they

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will be liberated when they arrive in Paraguay: “Ailín and Lala make plans to escape the class structure and divides of the urban home in which they met but cannot live as equals who love one another” (167). 24. Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Melissa M. González, “Orthodox transgressions: The ideology of cross-species, cross-class, and interracial queerness in Lucía Puenzo’s novel El niño pez (The Fish Child),” American Quarterly 65, no. 3 (September 2013): 711–33, https://doi.org/10.1353/ aq.2013.0036. In their article on Puenzo’s novel Donoso Macaya and González analyze Ailín’s expressions about herself in terms of “neocolonial romanticization of the indigenous, lower-class protagonist” (713). 25. That Yolanda is treated almost as an object to profit from and control is clear when Antonella tells her, “When I get married and I leave you can come with me”—a proposition that suggests the young girl already thinks of a subordinated, predetermined destiny for the maid. 26. As if to forecast its importance for the plot, in one of the first scenes Antonella cuts her bangs extremely short and regrets it immediately as she is mocked by the children. Later on, Sara says, “Nos tenemos que ocupar del peinado de la Anto [We have to take care of Anto’s hairdo].” In another scene, Antonella pours lemon juice on Yolanda’s hair without her consent and says, “Qué largo lo tenés [It’s so long].” Later on when she practices her flamenco dance, she laments, “No voy a tener lo que me hace falta [I’m not going to have what I need].” 27. Expressions of emotions are exceptional in the movie. We only see Ramona smile once with her family. She may be wiping away tears with her back to the camera when she bids farewell to some relatives taking a long distance bus to the north. Also, her family is only portrayed at the beginning of the film. Although Moreno seems to place Ramona’s family ties as key to the construction of her character, her family is absent in the rest of the film. 28. Julia Kratje, “En busca del tiempo perdido. Intervalos del ocio en Réimon,” in Los de abajo. Tres siglos de sirvientes en la literatura y el arte de América Latina, eds. María Julia Rossi and Lucía Campanella (Rosario: UNR Editora, 2018), 167–89. In one of the few studies on this film, Kratje discusses Ramona’s style (clothing, mannerisms, way of walking) as well as the diegetic music in the film “para analizar el cruce de fronteras urbanas (centro-periferia; capital-conurbano) y las zonas de pasaje socioculturales (cultura popular-cultura alta), que articulan ciertas dislocaciones respecto a la división entre trabajo y ocio [to analyze border crossings (center-­periphery; city-suburbs) and sociocultural transitions (popular culture-high culture), that articulate certain disruptions in the work-leisure division]” (168). 29. An exception is when, as we will see, she tries on clothes in garbage bags that an employer left to her as a gift, but even in that scene Ramona is blurred by a reflection on the windowpane between her and the camera.

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30. The text is “Lo que significa la jornada laboral de 65 horas,” Àngel Ferrero and Iván Gordillo, “Lo que significa la jornada laboral de 65 horas,” Rebelión, June 19, 2008, http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=69069, in response to the EU’s push for a longer workweek. 31. Changing maids’ names to other real names is a time-honored practice in England. That these readers of Marx instinctively replicate it speaks volumes to their capacity to understand their maid’s social position. 32. Gustavo García, “¿Cómo se llama la que salía de sirvienta?” Nexos, April 1, 2012, https://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=14762. When discussing the maid in Mexican movies, Garcia calls her an “invento genial de una clase media buscando marcar su territorio recién conquistado [ingenious invention of a middle class in search of demarcating a recently conquered territory]” (para. 1), and “agente fidedigno de culpas y complacencias de la clase media [trustworthy agent of guilts and complacencies for the middle class]” (para. 11). 33. Roberto Esposito, Persons and things: From the body’s point of view, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015), 33. 34. Esposito, Persons and things, 25. 35. Esposito, Persons and things, 28 and 42–43. 36. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). In brief, Hardt and Negri characterize affective labor as one of the main forms of immaterial labor (Empire, 293, Multitude,108), “even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, or passion” (Empire, 292–93). The product of this labor is far from insignificant: “Caring labor is certainly entirely immersed in the corporeal, the somatic, but the affects it produces are nonetheless immaterial. What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower” (Empire, 293). As we see in all of the films in this study, “it directly produces social relationships and forms of life” (Multitude, 110). 37. Leila Gómez, “El cine de Lucrecia Martel: La Medusa en lo recóndito,” Ciberletras 13 (2005), http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v13/ gomez.htm. My reading is at odds with that of Gómez, who identifies a radical “absoluta dependencia” [absolute dependence] between employees and families, and states that “los roles de amos y esclavos se vuelven ambiguos y fluctuantes [roles of masters and slaves become ambiguous and fluctuating]” (para. 19). 38. Ezequiel I. Duarte, “Notas dispersas: ‘Reimon’ y ‘La patota’: La mirada de los otros,” El Zapato de Herzog, August 5, 2015, accessed August 1, 2018, https://elzapatodeherzog.wordpress.com/2015/08/05/notas-disper-

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sas-reimon-y-la-patota-la-mirada-de-los-otros/. Duarte wonders why Moreno does not explore Ramona’s subjectivity further, concluding that there may be three reasons for it: because he does not want to, because he finds it impossible to do it, and because he thinks himself incapable of doing so (para. 3–5). 39. Other less-central but notable maid figures in contemporary Argentine filmography are the trans Justina (Martín Bossi) in Viudas (Marcos Carnevale, 2011) and Nora (Charo Bogarín) in Paco (Diego Rafecas, 2009). 40. Jessi Streib, Miryea Ayala, and Colleen Wixted, “Benign inequality: Frames of poverty and social class inequality in children’s movies,” Journal of Poverty 21, no. 1 (2017): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/10875549.20 15.1112870. According to Streib, Ayala and Wixted, a “benign” metaframe of poverty “erases, downplays, or sanitizes poverty and class inequality, implying that povadderty and inequality are not particularly problematic”—as opposed to a “malevolent” one that “highlights hardships and unequal resources and validates them as the just desserts for people of unequal worth” (3).

References Aguilar, Gonzalo. 2008. Other Worlds. New Argentine Film. Trans. Sarah Ann Wells. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Amado, Ana. 2006. Velocidades, generaciones y utopías: a propósito de La ciénaga, de Lucrecia Martel. ALCEU. Revista de Comunicação, Cultura e Política 6 (12): 48–56. Auden, W.H. 1954. Balaam and the ass: On the Literary Use of the Master-Servant Relationship. Encounter 3: 35–53. Blanco, Fernando A., and John Petrus. 2001. ‘Argentinian Queer Mater.’ Del ‘Bildungsroman’ urbano a la ‘road movie’ rural: Infancia y juventud post-­ Corralito en la obra de Lucía Puenzo. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 37 (73): 307–331. https://doi.org/10.2307/41407241. Cisneros, Vitelia. 2013. Guaraní y quechua desde el cine en las propuestas de Lucía Puenzo, ‘El niño pez’, y Claudia Llosa, ‘La teta asustada’. Hispania 96 (1): 51–61. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpn.2013.0005. Donoso Macaya, Ángeles, and Melissa M.  González. 2013. Orthodox Transgressions: The Ideology of Cross-species, Cross-class, and Interracial Queerness in Lucía Puenzo’s novel El niño pez (The Fish Child). American Quarterly 65 (3): 711–733. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2013.0036. Duarte, Ezequiel I. 2018. Notas dispersas: ‘Reimon’ y ‘La patota’: La mirada de los otros. El Zapato de Herzog, August 5. https://elzapatodeherzog.word-

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press.com/2015/08/05/notas-dispersas-reimon-y-la-patota-la-mirada-delos-otros/. Accessed 1 Aug 2018. Esposito, Roberto. 2012. The Dispositif of the Person. Law, Culture and The Humanities 8 (1): 17–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872111403104. ———. 2015. Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View. Trans. Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity. Fernández Irusta, Diana. 2015. Cine y política: la generación post 2001 toma las cámaras. La Nación, August 2. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/1815023-pagina3wwwlanacioncomarideas-ideasln-lnideaspensamiento-libros-arte Ferrero, Àngel, and Iván Gordillo. 2008. Lo que significa la jornada laboral de 65 horas. Rebelión, June 19. http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=69069 François, Cécile. 2009. El cine de Lucrecia Martel. Una estética de la opacidad. Espéculo. Revista de Estudios Literarios 43. http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero43/lucmarte.html Frohlich, Margaret. 2011. What of Unnatural Bodies? The Discourse of Nature in Lucía Puenzo’s XXY and El niño pez/The Fish Child. Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 8 (2): 159–174. https://doi.org/10.1386/shci.8.2.159_1. Garavelli, Clara. 2010. Post-crisis Argentine Films: De-localizing Daily Life Through the Lens of Jorge Gaggero. Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 7 (1): 35–46. https://doi.org/10.1386/shci.7.1.35_1. García, Gustavo. 2012. ¿Cómo se llama la que salía de sirvienta? Nexos, April 1. https://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=14762 Gómez, Leila. 2005. El cine de Lucrecia Martel: La Medusa en lo recóndito. Ciberletras 13. http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v13/gomez.htm Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press. Kratje, Julia. 2018. En busca del tiempo perdido. Intervalos del ocio en Réimon. In Los de abajo. Tres siglos de sirvientes en la literatura y el arte de América Latina, ed. María Julia Rossi and Lucía Campanella, 167–189. Rosario: UNR Editora. Lerussi, Romina. 2018. Insubordinaciones sociojurídicas: La destinataria de los servicios en el sector doméstico y de cuidados en Argentina. In Los de abajo. Tres siglos de sirvientes en la literatura y el arte de América Latina, ed. María Julia Rossi and Lucía Campanella, 211–225. Rosario: UNR Editora. Martín Morán, Ana. 2004. La ciénaga. In The Cinema of Latin America, ed. Alberto Elena and Marina Díaz López, 231–239. New York: Wallflower Press. Mendelson, Edward. 2008. Introduction. In The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Volume III. Prose: 1949–1955, ed. W.H. Auden, 13–34. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Oubiña, David. 2007. Estudio crítico sobre La ciénaga: Entrevista a Lucrecia Martel. Buenos Aires: Picnic. Peluffo, Ana. 2011. Staging Class, Gender and Ethnicity in Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga/The Swamp. In New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, ed. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha, 211–223. Bristol: Intellect. Podalsky, Laura. 2007. The Politics of Disaffected Youth and Contemporary Latin American Cinema. In Youth Culture in Global Cinema, ed. Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sarlo, Beatriz. 2013. Los intelectuales, la tierra fértil del kirchnerismo. Cuadernos de Literatura 12 (33): 18–33. Streib, Jessi, Miryea Ayala, and Colleen Wixted. 2017. Benign Inequality: Frames of Poverty and Social Class Inequality in Children’s Movies. Journal of Poverty 21 (1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10875549.2015.1112870. Vázquez, Karina E. 2014. Corre muchacha, corre: Estructura de clases y trabajo doméstico en La nana (2009), de Sebastián Silva. Chasqui 43 (22): 161–178. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43589638. ———. 2015. La poética del enrarecimiento en La mujer sin cabeza (2008), de Lucrecia Martel. Hispanic Research Journal. Iberian and Latin American Studies 16 (1): 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1179/1468273714Z.000000000110.

CHAPTER 3

Moving Beyond Maternalism: Negotiating Models of Womanhood in La nana, Cama adentro, and Hilda Elizabeth Osborne

As a legacy of colonialism and latifundia systems, domestic service perpetuates power hierarchies and social inequalities in twenty-first-century Latin America. What’s more, extreme income inequality—a byproduct of neoliberal economic policies and modernization—has led to a rise in paid domestic employment, which is occupied predominantly by women of color in the region.1 Employers thus distinguish themselves from domestic workers through class and race. The representation of the relationship between the female domestic worker and her female employer in three recent films, La nana [The Maid] (Sebastián Silva 2009, Chile), Cama adentro [Live-in Maid] (Jorge Gaggero 2004, Argentina), and Hilda (Andrés Clariond 2014, Mexico), sheds light on how power imbalances between the two are sustained by class, race, and gender differences. All three films portray maternalism as a strategy of dominance, that is, in the films, the employers manipulate affect to wield power that allows them to feel morally superior through friendliness and generosity at the expense of E. Osborne (*) Department of World Languages, Worcester State University, Worcester, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_3

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the workers’ infantilization. Despite their differences in narration, aesthetics, and national context, the films reflect both the female stereotype of maternal generosity in line with Western, Christian values and the legacies of the authoritarian governments of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, offering a subtle critique of those repressive regimes. Notably, even though the films fail to offer a clear solution or demand radical change, they do not deny the problems of domestic labor’s “invisibility” and uneven power structures. In each film, the employer, who perceives herself as superior, presents a heteronormative model of womanhood and femininity predicated on privileges of class and race. To enforce her model, the female employer claims the maid is “part of the family” and showers her with gifts, expecting the domestic worker to aspire to and imitate both her maternal generosity and white femininity. Through close readings of familial rhetoric, gift giving, and mirrors in the films, this chapter analyzes the maids’ responses to the employers’ maternalistic models to determine the degree to which the films challenge class and power inequalities.2 In the end, the maids’ daily tactics of resistance and final movements beyond household spatial divisions indicate a potential rupture in the distinctions established by their employers. Each film culminates in an act of “liberation” from the confines of the employing household to suggest the maids’ self-care and independence and their movement away from the institution of domestic labor. According to sociological research, the rhetoric of family furthers exploitation because employees may think they need to keep working, potentially for free, due to affective ties.3 Maids who demonstrate “love, loyalty, generosity, and the recognition of mutual obligation”4 are considered part of the family, albeit at the lowest level, similar to a child. Similarly, in the films, the mistresses’ familial affection coupled with gifts reinforces their feelings of superiority, encourages obligation, and creates models of behavior and distinction. The attempt to incorporate the maid into the family undermines the labor contract and results in confusion and conflict over household roles. Nevertheless, the “emotional ambiguity”5 of belonging to the family also gives maids partial rights in the homes in which they live and work, allowing them to contest the models laid out before them. Gift giving is another maternalistic strategy that the employers use to reinforce power inequalities. As Judith Rollins observes, maternalistic

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gift giving in the maid/mistress relationship is unique since “no return is expected by either party and the gifts are almost always second-hand or discarded articles. The fact that material goods—wages and gifts—go in only one direction in the relationship is a clear statement that it is one of inequality.”6 In the films, gifts from the mistresses to the maids communicate through affect the women’s hierarchical relationship and power differential. These affects—both positive and negative, kind and violent—become imprinted on the objects and energies that circulate between the two women since “to experience an object as being affective or sensational is to be directed not only toward an object, but to ‘whatever’ is around that object, which includes what is behind the object, the conditions of its arrival.”7 The films’ camerawork traces the affective connection between object and recipient by focusing on the maids’ reactions through close-ups instead of reinforcing the mistresses’ gaze that treats them as part of the house or as another child in the family. Notably, the maids in each film also bestow gifts, whether to the mistress or another maid, in acts of genuine affection or appreciation that starkly contrast to the maternalist undertones of the mistresses’ gifts. The mistresses present a model of womanhood that their maids ultimately negotiate, whether through their own gift-giving practices or through their bodies, from clothing and physical appearance to sexuality and movement. In each film, the mistresses keep their hair lighter in color and the maids wear uniforms to continually mark distinctions of class and race. What’s more, the models of femininity and womanhood espoused by mistresses are white, since, according to sociological research, “white women’s image signifies the apogee of beauty, motherhood and morality”8 and as such perpetually exclude nonwhite domestic workers. The films’ mirror shots and parallel framing insist on the affective and reflective distances between the maids and the imposition of their models, since, as reverse images and external appearances, they are not true representations of reality or personhood. Furthermore, the mirrors communicate the duality of the women’s relationship as both employer and “friend/family.” The specular motifs in each film reference the notion of the maid as a reflection of her employer, yet they also reveal its fragile construction to instead propose the worker’s independence.

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La nana Following more traditional depictions of paid domestic labor, La nana and Cama adentro feature long-term, live-in maids and their relationships with their employing families through a minimal, documentary aesthetic and soundtrack that convey realism. Based on the director’s own childhood maid, La nana narrates the story of Raquel, a middle-aged domestic employee who has worked for the same wealthy family in Santiago, Chile, for twenty-three years, coinciding with the time of the Concertación government.9 Although Raquel considers herself one of the family, her mistress, Pilar, asks more of her without proper accommodation or compensation, causing her to become increasingly ill. Ignoring Raquel’s request to respect her schedule, Pilar instead hires other maids to help, but Raquel rejects them until she forms a bond with the third and final maid, Lucy, a friendly and confident woman from southern Chile. By the end of the film, Lucy has left this employment while Raquel remains, yet she has found more freedom and independence through their friendship. A term of endearment, the title of Silva’s film suggests that the maid, Raquel, is part of the employing family.10 This part-of-the-family rhetoric is further displayed and contradicted in the film through the family’s actions, ultimately affecting Raquel’s physical and mental health. In the opening sequence, Pilar, in her attempt to be a benevolent mistress, organizes a small celebration for Raquel’s birthday in the dining room with the rest of the family. Nevertheless, she undermines the gesture by ringing a bell to summon Raquel, who is reminded of her “proper” place within the home. Reluctant to eat her cake since she is still on duty, Raquel quickly retreats to the kitchen to clean the dishes, and thus “the reality of employment interrupts the illusion of family belonging.”11 She later returns to her bedroom to open her birthday gift, a sweater, which she throws on the floor after reading the presumably off-brand label. In addition to reminding Raquel that she is not part of the family, the gift implies that she is an imperfect embodiment of femininity unworthy of wearing an expensive brand. The film’s opening sequence is representative of the ambiguity, or “emotional blurriness”12 according to the director, that surrounds the maternalistic employer/employee relationship: on the one hand, Pilar confirms Raquel’s claim that she is part of the family and that the children love her, yet on the other, she denies such kinship through a sweater that no one in the family would wear.

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A similar gift appears later in the film when Raquel gives Lucy, her fellow maid and friend, a name-brand blouse for her birthday. Lucy, as well as Pilar and her daughter Camila are surprised by the gift, especially after reading the label. Through her gift for Lucy, Raquel relinquishes Pilar’s model of maternalism and femininity, which, as in the other films, is based on consumerism. She defies the position to which she and Lucy have been relegated by showing that they can independently obtain the same things as the mistress. Raquel’s ability to buy and wear clothes like Pilar’s erases class distinctions and thus threatens the employing classes’ identity and hegemony.13 Raquel imitates Pilar’s purchasing power but rejects her maternalistic gift giving for a display of genuine affection. By successfully celebrating Lucy’s birthday, Raquel supersedes her mistress’s previous actions and challenges her monopoly on power. It should also be noted that the places of the celebrations are imbued with different affects, reflecting the relationships between the women. Whereas Pilar rings for Raquel to come into the family’s dining room, Raquel waits for Lucy to independently enter their space—the kitchen—with balloons and cake. The birthday party at the beginning of the film emphasizes Raquel’s distance from the family, which she perceives and reacts to negatively. By contrast, Raquel’s inclusive party for Lucy comes from sincere affection and establishes the women’s horizontal relationship, perceived most clearly in the joy both women express, culminating in an emotional embrace. These details, along with Raquel’s contagious excitement as she runs from her room to the kitchen to prepare the surprise, contrast with the first half of the film in which she ambles in isolation. This example of Raquel’s refusal to imitate Pilar’s maternalism can be read as an influence of Lucy’s explicit rejection of Pilar’s model. Lucy consistently preserves her independence, whether through her afternoon jogs in the neighborhood or her rejection of Pilar’s maternalistic attempt to give her used clothes set aside for donation. Lucy’s behavior also sets an example for Raquel’s relationship with Pilar’s objects. Prior to Lucy’s arrival, Raquel butts heads with Pilar’s daughter Camila, who represents a new generation of mistresses. In one of their altercations, Camila angrily remarks, “Tú eres la empleada no más acá [You are just the maid here],” marking the generational shift from a rhetoric of familial love to a contractual labor relationship. Immediately after this scene, Raquel tries on Pilar’s sweater in the mistress’s closet, a model of privacy/intimacy and feminine consumption that is unattainable for the maid.14 As she returns downstairs after looking at her reflection in the mirror, she faints for the first time in

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the film, possibly due to a realization of the contradictions surrounding her role in the employing family and Pilar’s model of femininity. Later, on her day off, Raquel walks the upper-class streets of Santiago, visibly uncomfortable and out of place as if she is unsure of what to do in her free time. In contrast to her appearance when working, she is wearing makeup, her hair is down, and she no longer wears a uniform. She eventually enters a store to buy the same sweater as Pilar. As she contemplates her image in the mirror, she shows no visible, positive reaction to her reflection. Looking to attain a certain appearance, Raquel never seems satisfied with her reflection in the mirror since she is reminded of the distance between herself and the employing family. Notably, both of these mirror scenes reveal “that consumerism will not resolve those contradictions”15 of the domestic labor relationship (Fig. 3.1). The contradictions of Raquel’s experience are further reflected in the relationship between camera and space. Often stationed outside the rooms of the house as if it were a distant observer, the handheld camera looks in on an intimate space that feels claustrophobic. This example, like others, depicts how territorial divisions undermine the claims that Raquel is part of the family. Raquel’s territorial attitude toward the house reflects her affective investment in her work as “part of the family,” while the bars on the windows and divisions between the rooms (kitchen, doors, laundry,

Fig. 3.1  Raquel trying on Pilar’s sweater in La nana

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etc.) highlight the prisonlike conditions of the home and her exclusion from the family. In another scene at the dinner table, the camera depicts Raquel laughing in the background as she watches the antics of the oldest son, Lucas. In response, Pilar and her husband, Mundo, instruct their son to close the door so that Raquel does not intrude on their family time. In this way, the film highlights the employers’ contradictions between their words and actions regarding space and belonging. Whereas the employers do not actually include Raquel in their space or know her intimately, the camera requires the viewer to take a closer look at her from the beginning. La nana opens with Raquel looking directly at the camera as she picks at her dinner in the kitchen and overhears the family eating in the dining room. Breaking the fourth wall, Raquel demands visibility and recognition. The camera’s intimate gaze into Raquel’s room and bathroom starkly contrasts the affective, verbal, and physical distances between Raquel and the family, especially Pilar. In one particular scene, the mirror in the bathroom reflects Raquel in the shower. The representation of her body highlights her personhood beyond the maid’s uniform. In my reading, the camera here is not voyeuristic but rather reveals how her body is controlled through and affected by employment. Moreover, the camera is more transparent than the relationship between the family and Raquel. When Lucy arrives to work at the house, she is also shown in a mirror putting on her uniform and in the shower singing. These scenes juxtapose the two maids and their attitudes toward their bodies and their employment. Lucy is carefree, comfortable, and enjoying herself in the shower, confirmed later on when she sunbathes topless in the employer’s yard after Raquel locks her out. Her body transmits positive energy and affects to Raquel, who roars with laughter for the first time in the film upon seeing Lucy in the yard. Another parallel between the two is conveyed when they lie in bed at night in their bedrooms, watching and commenting on the same television program. During this scene, Lucy “defies the convent-cell atmosphere of their tiny quarters”16 by shouting down the hall and inviting Raquel to her family’s home in the countryside for Christmas. The house’s spatial boundaries and the mirror shot comparisons between Raquel and Lucy in the shower later disappear when the two forge a friendship, thereby emphasizing their horizontal relationship as opposed to that between maid and mistress. The film’s portrayal of Raquel is potentially complicit in repeating Pilar’s maternalistic view of her maid as an adolescent since it follows a

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Bildungsroman structure, or what the director describes as a fairy tale.17 Other details confirm this interpretation, such as Raquel’s Winnie the Pooh pajamas, her hysterical laughter at childish antics, and sexual inexperience. Nevertheless, the Bildungsroman narrative for an alienated figure reveals the effects of society on the maid’s development and personhood. Whereas the maid characters in Cama adentro and Hilda maintain intimate, sexual relations with male partners, even if not depicted on screen, Raquel—appropriately described as a “child-adult”18—is uncomfortable around Lucy’s uncle, who tries to seduce her during their trip to the countryside. Raquel’s visit to Lucy’s home provides her with the necessary distance from the employing family to realize she is an independent adult. The unexplored aspects of Raquel’s identity, such as her sexuality, seem to suggest that she is in the process of exploring her own body, culminating in the final scene as she runs down the street. Now inserted into the city, no longer part of the house or the family, Raquel claims a healthy body in response to the negative psychological and physical effects from employment. For the first time, the camera awaits Raquel outside the home instead of following her as she begins to slowly jog with her CD player. As she jogs down the street, she appears more attuned to her own psychological and physical self-care. Raquel’s movement signifies a departure from rigid class divisions and notions of femininity espoused by Pilar to potential other meanings and identities. In particular, Raquel is able to construct a different type of interiority, of privacy, separate from the employing family’s gender and class norms and Pilar’s femininity.19 The actress thus “transforms the act of jogging into an awakening,”20 characteristic of the Bildungsroman. Whereas the domestic’s inferiority is not meant to be overcome or outgrown in the labor relationship, the film’s Bildungsroman narrative breaks with the employer’s maternalism by depicting Raquel’s self-awareness and growth.

Cama adentro Set in 2001, the year of the Argentine financial crisis, Cama adentro portrays the ensuing economic struggles of Beba, an upper-class divorcée who struggles to maintain a relationship with her ex-husband and her daughter who lives in Spain. Beba’s financial ruin leaves her unable to pay her maid, Dora, who quits and pursues employment elsewhere. At the end of the film, Beba must move into a smaller apartment. She subsequently visits Dora’s modest home in the country with the pretext of leaving some of

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her furniture there, yet she accepts Dora’s invitation to stay the night instead of returning to her new apartment. Although Beba never explicitly calls Dora a member of the family, she expects a certain level of attention characteristic of family, especially as she grapples with the devastating effects of the Argentine economic crisis. In this way, care work—beyond being part of domestic labor—contributes to the familial rhetoric that implies Dora is part of her employer’s family. Nevertheless, in almost all the examples of care work that Dora performs, it is she who decides when and how to care for Beba, determining the limits of her (uncompensated) labor. Early in the film, Dora demonstrates her resentment of Beba by breaking a teapot, but then, despite her mistress’s protests, lovingly tends to Beba when she cuts her foot on a shard from the teapot. Remembering how Beba cut her stockings in this incident, Dora later gives her a new pair as a thoughtful birthday gift. Another example of the negotiation between Beba’s expectations of care and Dora’s boundaries takes place when Beba is drunk. Feeling lonely, she asks Dora to hold her and invites Dora to stay nearby in her daughter’s room. In response, Dora silently turns around and heads to her own room, ignoring her mistress’s attempt to treat her as a daughter.21 Dora performs care work on her own terms, when Beba does not request it. She perceives Beba’s inability to maintain the apartment without her and, similar to a family member, tidies up even though she has left employment. In these examples, Dora decides when to provide care, thereby establishing her agency and effectively negotiating the tasks asked of her. In addition to demanding attention and affection, Beba engages in maternalistic gift giving to exercise power and control; to maintain the appearance of her economic, moral, and social superiority; and to influence Dora’s womanhood. Early in the film, Beba joins a group of female “entrepreneurs” who sell cosmetics, creams, and other beauty supplies. Beba must first buy the items and as a result becomes indebted to the company since she never sells for money, opting instead to exchange the creams for a hairdo and Chinese food. This type of barter system reflects the effects of the Argentine economic crisis, Beba’s inept business skills, and her desperation to make ends meet.22 Beba’s ignorance and vanity further come to light when she tests the mud mask on Dora. The careful application of the mud mask to Dora’s face is a disciplinary practice that produces “proper” feminine skin: “A woman’s skin must be soft, supple, hairless, and smooth; ideally it should betray no sign of wear, experience, age, or deep thought.”23 Beba’s femininity, carefully imitative of a

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European appearance to reflect her upper-class lifestyle, is presented as a model to Dora, who confirms that she likes the masks and seems to appropriate some aspects of this. For instance, she applies the mud mask at her home in the countryside to prepare for a friendly visit to Beba so that can give her former employer a birthday cake and the new pair of stockings. As the only one who remembers Beba’s birthday, Dora solidifies her place in Beba’s family. Like Raquel’s gift for Lucy, Dora’s celebration of Beba’s birthday demonstrates genuine care, without expecting anything in return. Dora’s relationship with Beba is further established through similar shots of both women. For instance, the film’s parallel editing begins by presenting Dora and Beba separately and in different shots, yet by the end of the film, they are together in the same frame, suggesting a more-­ horizontal relationship and potential friendship. The introduction of each character fragments their bodies, emphasizing their differences. The film opens with Dora’s hands cleaning Beba’s piano with a rag as her face is blurrily reflected in the piano’s surface. Beba first appears in a framed picture in the same shot as Dora dusting before the camera cuts to her high-­ heeled shoes walking the streets of Buenos Aires. Even though Beba is not physically in the same shot as Dora, she is still present. Later in the film, another shot recalls Beba’s dominant presence as both women walk together, with similar dress and gait and Beba slightly in front, to the hair salon. Once there Dora selects her own hairstyle and thereby establishes her autonomy and own version of femininity by rejecting the one Beba prefers. Sitting side by side at the salon, the two women are identically framed, stealing side glances at each other, seemingly both approving and suspicious (Fig. 3.2). The morning after the card game a split screen simultaneously portrays Dora and Beba in different parts of the apartment leading up to Dora’s departure, again highlighting their parallels and distance. Likewise, an abundance of mirror shots communicates the disjuncture between the women despite their physical proximity. The majority of mirror shots are of Beba alone as she recognizes her solitude without Dora, a life she struggles to accept. The multiple mirrors confirm Beba’s obsession with maintaining an appearance of upper-class status while they also reveal her fragility and falsity. Following Gilles Deleuze’s work on mirrors in cinema, Ana Ros explains that “the reflected characters’ double condition of virtual and actual refers to a world also ambivalent where past and present/ real and imaginary constantly affect each other, introducing the possibility

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Fig. 3.2  Beba and Dora in similar positions at the hair salon in Cama adentro

of movement and transformation in what is perceived as permanent and fixed.”24 In other words, what appears fixed—the subject and her identity—are revealed to be unstable through the mirror reproductions that blur lines between the real and unreal. While the film communicates Beba as an unstable model through her multiple mirror images, the few instances of Dora’s reflections outside the apartment both confirm her imitation of Beba beyond her employment and suggest movement away from her former employer. Dora’s imitation suggests a potential equality between the women and subverts the labor relationship, perhaps explaining their path toward a more friendly relationship. The spaces in the film also speak to Dora and Beba’s relationship. In contrast to the mansion in Hilda, Beba’s apartment creates a claustrophobic atmosphere with its tight halls and dark lighting. When Dora is alone there, she is mainly shown cooking in the kitchen or cleaning the living room. The home’s established boundaries serve to reinforce class hierarchies between the women. Even when the labor relationship has ended and the two women embark on an informal friendship, Beba instructs Dora to come through the servants’ entrance into the kitchen, maintaining the appearance of distinction. While the other two films are shot primarily in the employers’ homes, a number of scenes in Cama adentro take place at Dora’s countryside house, which she gradually upgrades with new

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fixtures on weekends. The ability to leave Beba’s house for her own, even if on the weekends, is significant because it “means that the employer’s control is finite.”25 Despite the respite and independence that Dora may experience by returning to her own house, she displays selective imitation of Beba in her own space, perhaps to make it feel more like home.26 For instance, she picks only the best materials for it, a “refined” taste she acquired from living with Beba. Additionally, she adopts a maternalistic attitude toward her boyfriend Miguel, criticizing his taste, making him come home when he is playing soccer, and walking ahead of him as they return home. The end of the film is perhaps its most complicated scene: Beba visits Dora’s home with the pretense of giving her the extra furniture that does not fit inside her new modest apartment. Ultimately, she unloads her baby grand piano in the front yard and Dora’s twin bed from her room in Beba’s house. Dora invites Beba to have tea and then stay the night, after which the camera pans to the bed in the kitchen for its final shot. Whereas one can read this as a potential role reversal, such “an inversion would just leave the traditional understanding of class interaction intact.”27 Regardless, Beba’s gifts are a way to declutter her new living space, to keep her possessions, and to maintain an affective relationship with her maid without considering Dora’s desires or their effect on Dora’s lifestyle. As Triquell and Savoini remark, the piano (and I would add the bed) can be interpreted as an indicator of possible integration, but these out-of-place objects are also representative of Beba’s invasion of Dora’s space.28 Ros concludes that the affects between the two women exceed their economic relationship, thus possibly reconfiguring class relations beyond a dichotomy of dependence/imposition.29 Whereas I agree with Ros’s insistence on an affective remnant uncontained by the labor/capital relationship, I interpret these final gifts from Beba as evidence of the ways in which maternalistic affection stretches the boundaries of employment in the maid/mistress relationship. Despite the film’s suggestions of movement through mirrors and cohabitation, the real possibility of deconstructing social hierarchies remains open to debate. While Dora moves more freely in the film due to her interactions with different social classes, Beba lacks the same experience and turns to the only thing that remains familiar—her relationship with Dora—following her financial ruin.

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Hilda Hilda, an adaptation of a French play with the same title, portrays wealthy Susana LeMarchand. Susana hires Hilda, her gardener Francisco’s wife, as a short-term live-in domestic worker to take care of her grandson in her sprawling Mexico City home. Susana considers domestic workers to be replaceable objects rather than persons, as revealed in her comment, “Nunca he tenido una Hilda [I’ve never had a Hilda]” during an early conversation with Francisco as they discuss the possibility of Hilda’s employment. After realizing she has lost touch with her former political activism from her university years, Susana becomes obsessed with Hilda, who, unlike Raquel (La nana) and Dora (Cama adentro), never considers herself part of the employing family. Notwithstanding the film’s title, it focuses mainly on Susana’s psyche through her absurd behavior that ranges from darkly comic to extremely cruel. Hilda manages to break free from Susana’s reins at the end of the film, after Mr. LeMarchand leaves his wife and lets the workers go. However, the film ends similar to how it begins, with Susana shopping for another nanny, even though her grandson no longer lives with her. Early in the film, university students interview Susana for a documentary they are making about the Tlatelolco student protestors from the 1960s since there is an effort to build a new housing complex called Tlatelolco Elegance in the famous plaza. Enthusiastic about being the center of attention and revisiting her past, Susana accepts, only to later realize that the students present her negatively to highlight the disjunction between her past and her present. The mistress in Hilda becomes obsessed with the eponymous maid, who for her symbolizes the indigenous, working class that she claims to help. After realizing the contradiction of her previous activism and her current privileged lifestyle, Susana attempts to win Hilda over by giving her high-end food (caviar, champagne, pâté), clothes, private schooling for her sons, and readings of Marx. Susana also forgives some of the pagarés (IOUs) that Francisco owes her for some money she lent him. However, Hilda never gives in to the pressure to forge a close, emotional relationship with her employer. As the film progresses, Susana’s condescending attitude and maternalistic gift giving coupled with isolation result in Hilda’s listlessness and apparent depression. Although the house where the majority of Hilda takes place is not claustrophobic, Susana’s actions imprison Hilda in an oppressive atmosphere. This situation is exacerbated when Susana cuts off Hilda’s

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c­ ommunication with her family by confiscating her cell phone and intercepting calls from the landline. In fact, Hilda is only depicted on the LeMarchand property; in the rare instances when she is seen in her own room she is looking longingly out the window, trapped. In contrast with depictions of the maids’ living spaces in Cama adentro and La nana, the longest scenes in Hilda’s room occur when Susana intrudes. The modernist, architectural transparency of the house—the World Heritage Site, Casa Prieto (renamed El Pedregal) by renowned Mexican architect Luis Barragán—contrasts with the LeMarchand family’s oppressive words and actions. Both the location and mise en scène of the maids’ quarters separate the workers from their employers. These spatial divisions, in addition to Hilda’s silence and Susana’s verbosity, thus confirm Rollins’s observation that “the retention of greater distance suggests that the employer’s mental and physical privacy are more valuable and therefore should not be easily intruded upon.”30 Located downstairs, the mise en scène of the maids’ room strongly contrasts the upstairs portion of the house: the paint is chipping on the walls, the shower tiles are old and outdated, and cheap replicas of the Virgin Mary adorn a small dresser, as opposed to the modern art collection, elegant furniture, and large walk-in closet in Susana’s space. Only the upper-class family members are shown outside the home, moving freely yet clouded by hypocrisy. Susana claims to be a political activist but when she attends a protest at Tlatelolco she looks on from a distance; her son wants to be a poet and receives advice to write “de género, desigualdad social, de racismo, de migración [about gender, social inequality, racism, migration],” trending topics that will sell. Toward the end of the film he is kidnapped for ransom; after he is released he delivers a speech in which he states that he never knew misery or hunger until he was taken hostage, ignoring Hilda’s oppression in his home. Ironically, the son’s “cautiverio [captivity]” story is heard by the audience of the talk, but Hilda’s is not. In this way, the film approaches the family’s complicity in furthering the invisibility of domestic work in Mexican society through dark humor. Susana claims to want to erase differences between employers and employees, evidenced in a key scene when she gives Hilda an “indigenous” white dress. She wants Hilda to perform the role of indigenous Other so that she can remain what Homi Bhabha deems the “sympathetic colonizer.”31 When Hilda emerges from the bathroom in the dress, she realizes, with a mixture of surprise and fear, that Susana has also changed

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clothes so that they are now dressed alike, bringing attention to the violence of appropriating and romanticizing indigeneity. She then leads a silent Hilda to look in the mirror and remarks, “Parecemos gemelas, las dos Fridas [We look like twins, the two Fridas].” Frida Kahlo’s well-known painting Las dos Fridas depicts two versions of the artist in a double self-­ portrait; the two Fridas are depicted as mirror images, one clothed in European dress, covered in blood and holding scissors, and the other in traditional Mexican attire, containing the heart. What’s more, the two Fridas reflect the duality of Kahlo’s person; the two selves share a superficial resemblance that does not translate into identical interiorities yet are ultimately united. When Susana says that she and Hilda look like twins, she attempts to portray solidarity by dressing similarly and imposes her narrow vision of indigeneity to make Hilda into her “Frida,” as if a child or a doll, erasing the maid’s identity and history. Hilda, however, will never fulfill Susana’s desires or prescriptions since this is not her identity, and she lacks the interest, devotion, and affection toward her (temporary) mistress to imitate her. As opposed to the maids in the other two films, Hilda is largely indifferent toward Susana due to her established personal life and family outside of employment. On a theoretical level, as Rey Chow remarks, “If it is difficult for the ethnic to become a perfect imitation of the white man, it is even more difficult for her to become a perfect imitation of herself.”32 Applying this to the neocolonial institution of domestic labor, the employee’s refusal to adhere to her prescribed role as the ethnic Other reveals the socially constructed nature of the hierarchical relationship between maid and mistress (Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.3  Hilda and Susana dressed alike in Hilda

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The painting’s double image and Susana’s belief that she can control Hilda are continually recalled through other mirror shots and scenes at Susana’s dressing table. Another subtle reference to the painting is Susana’s weapon of choice, a pair of scissors. Susana simultaneously admires and attempts to control Hilda’s waist-length hair—a source of power and femininity. Despite Susana’s request that Hilda wear a ponytail, Hilda never complies until Susana asks Francisco to intervene. Indicative of social position, hair can be used to gain power and reject subordination, as when Hilda later lets her hair down to protest Susana’s threat to her children to make her stay through the weekend instead of returning home.33 By wearing her hair down, Hilda showcases her femininity and sexuality, challenging Susana’s infantilization of her. She also defies Susana by not responding when called on and “accidentally” burning Susana with soup. Coupled with silence, these acts are Hilda’s ways of maintaining autonomy and control over her body. Susana is not unaware of this, and she eventually cuts Hilda’s locks as a mode of punishment. Because sociocultural norms link female identity and power to appearance, destroying a woman’s hair is perceived as particularly violent, invasive, and demeaning. In one of the film’s most violent sequences, Susana stares into her bathroom mirror, stroking her own hair, then grabs the scissors before calling Hilda to the bedroom. As ominous music plays, Susana instructs Hilda to sit down at the dressing table where they had previously posed as Las dos Fridas. Hilda, petrified, tries to escape but fails, and Susana cuts a chunk of Hilda’s hair to her shoulder to remove part of what she believes makes Hilda attractive and powerful. This act reinforces the view of Hilda’s beauty tied to her race, making her “Other” or “exotic/erotic.”34 In addition, Susana recognizes the threat to her power that Hilda’s hair symbolizes as a source of resistance and independence. Scenes such as this one approximate the characteristics of a psychological horror film through the pronounced psychological and physical damage that Susana inflicts on Hilda. However, director Andrés Clariond explains that in order to critique the upper-class characters without recurring to clichés, he portrays them through absurd situations and humor, such as when Susana dresses as a maid for a business dinner with her husband’s important foreign clients and proceeds to hide under the table while the guests, student protesters, and Francisco begin to fight all around her.35 Following the chaotic dinner scene, Susana’s husband leaves her and lets all of the workers go. The moment of Hilda’s eventual escape due to Mr. LeMarchand’s departure is, notably, not the final scene. Both

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women are featured in a long shot in front of Susana’s mirror from a similar angle; Susana is drying her hair when Hilda, no longer dressed as a maid, enters, lifting a broom to hit her mistress. Hesitating, she instead steals the pagarés from Susana’s closet, then crosses in front of the camera in a blur, never to be seen again. Hilda’s revenge is symbolic rather than physical or material: the pagarés were Susana’s means of manipulation and power over Hilda’s family, so Hilda clears the debt and breaks Susana’s control. Hitting Susana would simply repeat the violence exercised throughout the film. In my opinion, Hilda’s active resistance ultimately hinges on the distance between her and Susana. She rejects the emotional attachment that Susana attempts to create because of the temporal nature of her job, her perception of Susana’s hypocrisy and condescension, and her established personal life. Although Hilda is the most rebellious of the three maid figures explored here, we know less about her life and person compared to Raquel and Dora or even Susana. It seems that Susana has not learned from this experience since Hilda ends similarly to its beginning: sitting in the plaza in front of the completed construction Tlatelolco Elegance, Susana shops for yet another maid, even commenting “Nunca tuve una Azucena [I never had an Azucena].” With this ending, the film connects the public erasure of the past, covering up the site of the Tlatelolco massacre and its memory, with Mexican society’s ignorance of inequality in the ongoing institutionalization of domestic employment. Although the film seems to pay more attention to Susana than its titular character, its conclusion suggests that the viewer reflect on society’s role in perpetuating both the historical and contemporary injustices portrayed and the voices unheard.

Beyond Employment In all three films, class distinction is established through the female body, whether through maternalistic gift giving, models of feminine womanhood, or spatial divisions. Consequently, the maids’ bodies are both the sites of tension between these contradictory discourses and the means through which they claim their agency, simultaneously accommodating and resisting the normative feminine models presented by their mistresses. Ultimately, the maids’ agency is most clearly expressed in movement through and beyond spatial divisions, emphasizing their transformations in contrast to their static employers. Significantly, each film ends with the maids not working even if still employed, as in the case of Raquel, who

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goes for a run outside to potentially repair some of the psychological damage incurred from years of employment and isolation; Dora independently establishes her home in the countryside and invites Beba to stay with her; Hilda leaves the prisonlike conditions of Susana’s employment, taking the pagarés with her. In these ways, the three maid characters reject their mistresses’ models of maternalism and familial rhetoric. By contrast, the dismantling of the hierarchical maid/mistress relationship results in a loss of control for each mistress: Pilar in La nana is no longer present at the end of the film, while in Cama adentro and Hilda, Susana and Beba return to what is familiar—a relationship with a domestic worker—to combat their losses. The mistresses are condemned to the perpetual cycle of domestic labor while the maids begin to experience life beyond both employment and normative womanhood. By placing change solely in the individual workers, these films fail to demand responsibility or change from the mistresses and to address the systemic inequalities behind domestic labor, thereby potentially leaving middle- and upper-class viewers unaffected. Even though the future of each worker is unclear from the films’ narratives and their endings, and ultimately the structure of domestic service remains undisturbed, individually the maids exercise some degree of autonomy, confirming that “open political resistance is far rarer than the informal, unorganized, and often covert forms of resistance embedded in everyday life.”36 The films’ insistence on a space for the maids beyond the employers’ home represents an opening where meaning/identity based on normative femininity and labor can be negotiated and transformed. Whether it is intentional or not, the films’ representations of maids and mistresses invite reflections on the complicit relationship between traditional models of womanhood and inequalities of race and class perpetuated by the policies of authoritarian governments.

Notes 1. Ruth Milkman, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2016), 228. 2. I use the term “maid” because of its use in the English translations of La nana and Cama adentro. I have translated the Spanish term patrona to “mistress” since this references the class structure and latifundia system underlying the domestic labor relationship. 3. Bridget Anderson, “Just Another Job? Paying for Domestic Work,” Gender and Development 9, no. 1 (March 2001): 31, JSTOR.

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4. Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum, Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 96–97. 5. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Jurema Brites,  “Feminization of Labor: Domestic Work Between Regulation and Intimacy,” Women’s Studies International Forum 46 (2014): 3, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. wsif.2013.07.009 6. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University, 1985), 192. 7. Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 33. 8. Kathy Deliovsky, “Normative White Femininity: Race, Gender and the Politics of Beauty,” Atlantis 31, no. 1 (2008): 57, http://journals.msvu. ca/index.php/atlantis/article/view/429 9. Stephen Buttes, “Huaso Romance as Neoliberal Reform in Sebastián Silva’s La nana,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesía 23, no. 4 (2014): 346–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2014.9581 42 10. Resha Cardone, “Maid in Chile: Domestic Workers and the Neoliberal Consensus in the Film, La nana.” Revista Boletín Redipe 830 (2013): 67, issuu.com/redipe/docs/boletin_830/64 11. Buttes, “Huaso Romance,” 351. 12. Sebastián Silva, “Interview with the Writer/Director of The Maid,” interview by Chris Tinkman, Under the Radar, Oct. 23, 2009, http://www. undertheradarmag.com/interviews/sebastian_silva1009/ 13. Débora Gorbán and Ania Tizziani, “Inferiorization and deference: The construction of social hierarchies in the context of paid domestic labor,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 46 (2014): 61, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.01.001. When employees successfully imitate their employers, they reveal their ability to be similar to those of another social class, “challeng[ing] the superior position in which the employer has placed herself and reveal[ing] the constructed nature of the differentiation between the two and the possibility of discovering, in the other woman, an equal.” 14. Karina Vázquez, “Corre, Muchacha, Corre: Estructura de clases y trabajo doméstico en La nana (2009), de Sebastián Silva,” Chasqui Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 432 (November 2014): 174, ProQuest. 15. Buttes, “Huasco Romance,” 352. 16. Megan Ratner, “The Maid,” Cineaste 35, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 63, JSTOR.

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17. Sebastián Silva, “‘La nana’: Una mirada a las interioridades oscuras del hogar: Entrevista a Sebastián Silva,” interview by Gregorio Belinchón, El País, April 26, 2010, https://elpais.com/cultura/2010/04/16/actualidad/1271368801_850215.html 18. Ratner, “The Maid,” 63. 19. Vázquez, “Corre,” 175. In an interview, Silva explains that his film is not a social critique nor is it political; rather, he sought to create a film that humanized Raquel and her need for genuine affection and love, as revealed in her friendship with Lucy (“La nana”). Despite the director’s minimalization of the film’s political aspects, its open and ambiguous ending has allowed various sides of the political spectrum to claim that it represents their view of Chile. For more on these political responses to the film see Buttes’s article, 357. 20. Ratner, “The Maid,” 63. 21. Clara Garavelli (42) reads this scene as another attempt by Beba to evade paying Dora’s wages, and instead compensate her with a larger bedroom. 22. Ana Ros, “Leaving and Letting Go as Possible Ways of Living Together in Jorge Gaggero’s Cama adentro / Live-in-Maid,” in New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, eds. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), 110. It should be noted that Beba gives Dora samples of the mud mask when she should sell them to pay her employee’s wages. 23. Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 136. 24. Ros, “Leaving,” 107. 25. Ray and Qayum, Cultures of Servitude, 162. 26. For more on both Beba’s and Dora’s relationships with their homes see Clara Garavelli’s article “Post-Crisis Argentine Films: De-localizing Daily Life through the Lens of Jorge Gaggero.” 27. Ros, “Leaving,” 110. 28. Ximena Triquell and Sandra Savoini, “¿Miradas de qué clase? Construcciones cinematográficas de los conflictos de clase,” Imagofagia: Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Estudios de Cine y Audiovisual 7 (2013), http:// w w w. a s a e c a . o rg / i m a g o f a g i a / i n d e x . p h p / i m a g o f a g i a / a r t i c l e / view/351/303 29. Ros, “Leaving,” 110. 30. Rollins, Between Women, 171. 31. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 122. 32. Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 104.

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33. Rose Weitz, “Women and Their Hair: Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation,” Gender and Society 15, no. 5 (Oct. 2001): 667–68, JSTOR. 34. Deliovsky, “Normative White Femininity,” 55. 35. Andrés Clariond, “Entrevista con Andrés Clariond,” interview by Anaid Ramírez, Time Out México, Sept. 1, 2015, https://www.timeoutmexico. mx/ciudad-de-mexico/cine/entrevista-con-andres-clariond. It is telling that in his interview Clariond addresses the representation of the upper class but not domestic service, which is also dominated by stereotypes. 36. Weitz, “Women,” 668.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. Happy Objects. In The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 29–51. Durham: Duke University Press. Anderson, Bridget. 2001. Just Another Job? Paying for Domestic Work. Gender and Development 9 (1): 25–33. JSTOR. Bartky, Sandra Lee. 1997. Foucault, Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power. In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy et al., 129–154. New York: Columbia University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Buttes, Stephen. 2014. Huaso Romance as Neoliberal Reform in Sebastián Silva’s La nana. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesía 23 (4): 345– 362. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2014.958142. Cama adentro. 2004. Directed by Jorge Gaggero. Argentina: Aqua Films. Cardone, Resha. 2013. Maid in Chile: Domestic Workers and the Neoliberal Consensus in the Film, La nana. Revista Boletín Redipe 830: 64–71. https:// issuu.com/redipe/docs/boletin_830/64. Chow, Rey. 2002. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Clariond, Andrés. 2015. Entrevista con Andrés Clariond. Interview by Anaid Ramírez. Time Out México, September 1. https://www.timeoutmexico.mx/ ciudad-de-mexico/cine/entrevista-con-andres-clariond Deliovsky, Kathy. 2008. Normative White Femininity: Race, Gender and the Politics of Beauty. Atlantis 31 (1): 49–59. http://journals.msvu.ca/index. php/atlantis/article/view/429. Garavelli, Clara. 2010. Post-crisis Argentine Films: De-localizing Daily Life through the Lens of Jorge Gaggero. Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 7 (1): 35–46. https://doi.org/10.1386/shci.7.1.35_1. Gorbán, Débora, and Ania Tizziani. 2014. Inferiorization and Deference: The Construction of Social Hierarchies in the Context of Paid Domestic Labor.

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Women’s Studies International Forum 46: 54–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. wsif.2014.01.001. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación, and Jurema Brites. 2014. Feminization of Labor: Domestic Work Between Regulation and Intimacy. Women’s Studies International Forum 46: 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2013.07.009. Hilda. 2014. Directed by Andrés Clariond. Mexico: Cinépolis. La nana. 2009. Directed by Sebastián Silva. Chile: Elephant Eye Films. Milkman, Ruth. 2016. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality. Urbana: University of Illinois. Ratner, Megan. 2009. The Maid. Cineaste 35 (1): 62–63. JSTOR. Ray, Raka, and Seemin Qayum. 2009. Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rollins, Judith. 1985. Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers. Philadelphia: Temple University. Ros, Ana. 2011. Leaving and Letting Go as Possible Ways of Living Together in Jorge Gaggero’s Cama adentro / Live-in-Maid. In New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, ed. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha, 97–116. Bristol: Intellect. Silva, Sebastián. 2009. Interview with the Writer/Director of The Maid. Interview by Chris Tinkman. Under the Radar, October 23. http://www.undertheradarmag.com/interviews/sebastian_silva1009/ ———. 2010. ‘La nana’: Una mirada a las interioridades oscuras del hogar: Entrevista a Sebastián Silva. Interview by Gregorio Belinchón. El País, April 26. https://elpais.com/cultura/2010/04/16/actualidad/1271368801_ 850215.html Triquell, Ximena, and Sandra Savoini. 2013. ¿Miradas de qué clase? Construcciones cinematográficas de los conflictos de clase. Imagofagia: Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Estudios de Cine y Audiovisual 7. http://www.asaeca.org/imagofagia/index.php/imagofagia/article/view/351/303. Vázquez, Karina. 2014. Corre, Muchacha, Corre: Estructura de clases y trabajo doméstico en La nana (2009), de Sebastián Silva. Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 432: 161–178. ProQuest. Weitz, Rose. 2001. Women and Their Hair: Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation. Gender and Society 15 (5): 667–686. JSTOR.

CHAPTER 4

Leftovers No More: Affect, Food, and Power in Recent Latin American Films on Domestic Work Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

A myth about the “perfect maid” ran through Argentine middle- and upper classes during the fifties. It was the story of a live-in maid who worked for a young, professional couple in the Northern Province of Santiago del Estero. The employers were enthralled by the maid’s dedication and efficiency; she was attentive to every detail and showed devotion to their children. One day, however, the wife called the maid to inform her that she and her husband were going to the movies and would return home late that night. She should feed the baby and leave dinner ready. Once back, the couple found their dining table set with a gleaming covered dish. When the wife took the lid off, the husband discovered the roasted body of their baby garnished with tomatoes and potatoes. The woman immediately lost her senses and never spoke again. There are two versions of what happened next: either the husband, a military man, killed the maid and then ran away, or the maid escaped and the husband committed suicide. In the 1960s, Marie Langer1 suggested that due to her maternal-like role, the maid in the myth was the object of the female K. E. Vázquez (*) University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_4

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employer’s repressed hate for her own mother. The maid’s monstrous side, revealed at the end of the myth, seemingly justified the employers’ mistrust and mistreatment. A less-psychological analysis suggests that the violence of myth reflects class conflict. Elizabeth Kuznesof notes a contrasting stereotypical figuration of the maid’s personality: docile and dependent, but also resentful, arrogant, and demanding. She explains this spectrum as the result of the historical construction of the category of domestic workers in Latin America after the conquest, particularly in relation to caste/race relations in class/gender subordination.2 Following this line of analysis, in his study on emotions and ideology in Argentina during the 1940s and1950s, Omar Acha suggests that in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, maids, as members of the working class, embodied resentment and hunger for revenge.3 According to the historian, in contemporary Argentine political history, the maid was the female counterpart to the unskilled male worker (called “cabecita negra,” a derogatory expression for rural migrant workers in Buenos Aires during that period). Acha observes that while male workers were characterized as violent and usurping, maids were described as haughty, violent, and lubricious. In both cases, such attributes fed the middle- and upper-class social imaginary to cover up the exploitation of these workers, which in the case of the female domestic worker was often accompanied by sexual abuse, unwanted pregnancy, and abandonment. This characterization of maids is related to the “perfect maid” myth; they both configure a narrative of middle- and upper-class female employers (housewives, mothers, sisters) who often ignored the harassment and abuse toward maids by men and other members of the house.4 The myth about the roasted baby helped justify all distrust toward maids and the need for demarcation within the domestic space. As portrayed in the myth, the figure of the maid condenses the contradictory aspects of material life at the intersection of the private and the public, intimacy and work, affect, and power. Both the psychological perspective and the social interpretation reveal the conflicts around paid domestic work, live-in maids in particular. As Inés Pérez and Santiago Canevaro propose in their analysis of disputes between employers and domestic workers before the Tribunal of Domestic Work (TDW) in Argentina, in domestic service, economy and intimacy are not always clearly separated spheres in which the personal characters of both workers and employers are precluded from judgment.5 The overlap between privacy and work, and isolation and invisibility characterize this type of

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­ ccupation.6 Pérez and Canevaro observe that “the worker has the private o knowledge of the household and the employer has the control over the worker in an isolated space,” and highlight the “affective ambivalence” that permeates the relationship between employer and worker and impacts the delineation of their duties and obligations.7 This affective ambivalence manifests in situations in which a language of rationality and labor relations alternates with that of affection and familylike bonds.8 Therefore the overlapping of intimacy and working spheres, the workers’ isolation and the employers’ controlling gaze, is the medium through which this relationship is shaped and where affect becomes a tool for regulating a working situation and producing narratives that will support or justify their views and actions. Thus, rather than probing the monstrosity of the maid, the roasted baby could be seen as the culmination of the maid’s emotional state for the abuse and inequality that she has been subjected to; the roasted baby then becomes an act of resistance. The relationship between maids and employers has received extended attention9 since their proximity in space and time is a distinctive aspect of a maid’s working situation and her ability to control it.10 The affective and emotional dimensions have been considered the root of the ambiguous character of the contractual relationship between live-in maids and employers.11 However, affect as a sense of feelings present in every moment in human interaction, including other types of jobs, may not necessarily be the distinctive characteristic of paid domestic work, but instead a means by which employers and maids negotiate the anxieties arising from overlapping private and public spheres in a working environment secluded from others’ gazes and other forms of regulation. The emotional materiality of the live-in maid experience is made of those moments in which words are made flesh and dwell in our bodies. As Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez proposes, “affects evolve within the dynamics and the ambivalent movements emerging out of material social conditions.”12 Affect is a tool that regulates class tensions between live-in maids and employers, who exercise power by imposing specific repertoires of demarcation or sets of rules regarding food, clothing, schedules, and so on. In this sense, “affects not only unfold content, but they emerge within a concrete historical and geopolitical context. While they emanate from the dynamics of our energies, impulses, sensations and encounters, affects also carry residues of meaning.”13 In this chapter, I propose to analyze a series of recent Latin American films that portray the conflict between class identities and affect by f­ ocusing

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on the working environments of live-in maids, and particularly on food as an affective and power situation between employers and employees. These films portray how employers implement a repertoire of demarcation,14 a set of ruling practices for basic aspects of a maid’s body and behavior, such as eating, clothing, and schedules, to set up boundaries and distinctions with their maids. The main purpose of my analysis is to explore how the representation of this relationship in these films offers a different perspective on the relationship between live-in maids and employers by revising the role played by affect. The films La teta asustada (2009) by Peruvian Claudia Llosa, La nana (2009) by Chilean Sebastián Silva and Que Horas Ela Volta? (2015) by Brazilian Anna Muylaert offer visual narrations of the tensions and conflicts that emerge from the irregular labor contract between live-in maids and employers. The films show women working as maids for wealthy families composed of middle-aged professionals. The domestic space synthesizes a relationship that unfolds daily in time/space, constantly redefining itself,15 and one that is deeply imbedded by affect.16 When read as a series, the films expose a cinematic progression17 in which, unlike the maid of the roasted baby myth, live-in maids decide to move away, emotionally and/or physically, from their employers, evidencing a shift in their relationship with them. This analysis focuses on how these films present a specular relationship between live-in maids and employers that is actually a critique of the role played by middle- and upper-class professional, educated, and progressive women in the perpetuation of neocolonial agendas of social exclusion and economic exploitation. The analysis concentrates on food as a language of class through which the employer’s repertoire of demarcation is spoken, setting up a system of recognition and rejection of the Other. The domestic workers’ contact with food crystallizes a “multilayered texture of oppression.”18 In these films, this oppression is transposed as gestures that imply different embodied contestations, both in domestic workers and female employers. To reaffirm their class, gender, and ethnic identity, employers delineate strict food regimes or commensality regulations for maids. However, in these films, live-in maids contest this power dynamic with a gesture that denotes an emotional and physical movement that triggers a shift in their working situation. By moving away from their employers by engaging in personal activities, maids present themselves to their employers as consumers and as equals, disrupting their employers’ emotional and symbolic economy within the patriarchal demands of their home.

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As an activity in which affect passes through in the immediacy of the senses, eating brings back memories and reenacts mental impressions. In her analysis of food and social classification among employers and domestic workers in Mexico, Abril Saldaña-Tejeda observes that “for domestic workers food took centre stage in the negotiation of working conditions with employers and in the narratives of women. The fact that food was privileged over many other labour benefits that are systematically denied (sick leave, holidays, working hours, etc.) might be related not only to the physiological need of caloric intake but also to the psychological need of self-respect and empowerment.”19 What makes food emotionally significant is the situation in which consumption takes places, making it part of an affective interaction.20 Food preparation and consumption is therefore a social situation through which affect and class are intertwined in the performance of power, class identities, and resistance. These films portray food situations as demarcations implemented by employers to keep maids at a distance and deny their identity as consumers capable of threatening the employers’ class identity within the social imaginary. As double spaces of production and consumption, kitchens and tables are contact zones for manipulating, mixing, and transforming.21 Food as a language of class through which a repertoire of demarcation is spoken and enacted thus makes domestic spaces sites of submission and/or resistance in which the gaze between employers and maids becomes meaningful. Food is part of an array of mechanisms through which affect gestures shape the encounter between the maid and her employer. At the same time, food regimes materialize strict racial lines and social aspirations whereby consuming certain food products and brands can become “whitening” and assimilating tools.22 Food mechanisms then materialize representations of distinction through taste. In this sense, affect relates to what Michel Serres has called “incarnated memories,” cognitive wires or mappings engraved on our bodies through the senses that are expressed through gestures that remind the films’ characters of their social place.23 Laura Mulvey sees in gestures an in-progress meaning resulting from the overlapping of contextualized meaning and incarnated memory.24 Facial and bodily gestures, as explicit or suppressed evidence of affect, may imply reaffirmation or contestation of assumed social values, gender/class roles, and expectations. When the camera captures the gesture and produces a “cinematic gesture,” a moment of suspension and reflection, it reveals the affect that regulates the interaction between individuals, and as such questions the audience’s cultural conventions by either exposing or contesting

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them.25 Food situations unfold a series of gestures and memories that materialize affect as a tool to regulate class tensions, confronting audiences with the moral aspect of social differentiation within the domestic walls.

You Are Not Eating My Pearls: Quinoa in La teta asustada

In her study of food, power, and resistance in the Andes, Alison Krögel notes that transculturation is a phenomenon that manifests in everyday rituals. She applies the notion of “food-landscapes” to connect the different instances in which food is present in an individual’s life.26 Considering this, the repertoire of demarcation among maids and employers should be contextualized by a food-landscape in which class distinction through food is part of the socioeconomic relations that determine access to food. In La teta asustada (2009), the symbolic value of potatoes and quinoa inscribe in the character’s body a memory that will turn fear, resentment, and submission into an act of justice. The film tells the story of Fausta, a young indigenous woman whose mother has passed away. A victim of rape while she was pregnant with Fausta during the Shining Path violence, the mother has passed on to her daughter the traumatic experience through a syndrome known as “la teta asustada” in their rural environment. The name of the affliction refers to the fear and sadness that mothers pass on to their children during breastfeeding. Afraid of being a victim of rape herself, Fausta buries a potato in her vagina. She finds a job as a maid for Aída, a recognized pianist, to save money for her mother’s burial. For years, the potato has been seen as a symbolic reference to Quechua resistance and resilience to violence and its transgenerational presence in the form of trauma.27 However, in Llosa’s film, it is not the potato but another Andean food, quinoa, that will prompt a reflection on the ways in which the employer-maid relationship reinscribes the colonial past. Having passed the cleanliness inspection performed by Aída’s housekeeper and changed her name to Isidra, Fausta starts her job as a maid in the fortress-­ like mansion located in the city of Lima. As her annual piano concert performance approaches, Aída, who has heard Fausta’s enchanting singing, asks her maid to sing for her, offering in exchange some pearls from a broken necklace. Fausta sees in this an opportunity to raise the money that she needs for her mother’s burial at sea. Meanwhile, Fausta’s health

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­ eteriorates due to the growth of the potato inside her. At the concert, d Aída performs Fausta’s song on the piano with no lyrics and receives a standing ovation. In an act of expropriating the song from Fausta, Aída fires her without paying her with the pearls. Upset about Aída’s theft and in extreme pain, Fausta goes back to her employer’s house, steals the pearls, and asks the gardener to take her to the hospital. The last scenes of the film show Fausta walking with her mother’s body to the sea, and later meeting the gardener, both signs of closure and reconciliation. Fausta’s relationship with Aída is part of a food situation that is symbolic of other structural situations, those of abuse, exploitation, and theft at the hands of the wealthy classes. As a structural situation, food appears in the film to re-mark the emotional scars of abuse and inequality. Quinoa is an ancient grain that, like the potato, constitutes a valuable source of nutrition and survival for the lower classes. The food markets and vendors that surround the house reinforce the extractive character of Aída’s class identity. Her devotion to her military ancestors and the somber ambiance of the house appear to Fausta as the specter of the historical oppression of her own ancestors at the hands of the Spanish encomenderos.28 Lines of separation are clearly drawn in the interaction between Fausta and Aída. In Llosa’s film, the emotions associated with this interaction are made visible through Fausta’s close-up. Fausta’s singing (to Aída) her own songs that recover traditional meanings of quinoa is both an act of service similar to providing food and resources to her masters under exploitative conditions, and also a gesture that raises her own voice. On her very first day on the job, Fausta was instructed to not remain next to Aída once she had finished serving a meal, and to return to the kitchen and wait for her employer’s call. Clean and neat, with no traces of any work, the kitchen shares the disciplinary air of the other rooms. In a house that was clearly inhabited by a military family, for Fausta the kitchen echoes past memories of violence and oppression. Aida’s suspicious request and Fausta’s mistrusting submission splice together with the past of the conquest and the colonial exploitation of indigenous communities and food resources. The clean, neat kitchen symbolizes the authority imposed on Fausta’s ancestors. In a sense, the potato buried in her body has a double purpose: to protect her from rape, both physical and systemic, and to preserve the potato as a source of resilience and resistance. The film does not show Fausta manipulating food or even utensils other than carrying the service tray. There is a strict class and racial line between Fausta and the family, and it can be trespassed only by the master upon his/her

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needs. For example, Aída enters the kitchen to tell Fausta that her food has become cold when in fact she wants to ask the maid about her singing. She sits next to Fausta, who is watching cartoons on a small television. Mirroring her own unequal situation, the scene that Fausta is watching shows a bird opening a refrigerator and finding hardly anything to eat. As with the bird, Fausta finds no material and spiritual resources within the confinement of the house, and the door opened by her work as a maid keeps her in a dynamic of exploitation and scarcity. Aída initially looks at Fausta with an unusually kind expression and asks her if she could again sing the songs she was singing while working at the house. Fausta, who does not dare to look at Aída, is visibly surprised by the request, and takes some time to respond. Aída sees the gesture as resistance and moves her eyes to the television screen, waiting for Fausta, who finally explains that songs do not come easily. Fausta’s explanation about the song as an emotion resonates with the fact that food is more than a resource to be expropriated: it is a situation that imprints meanings and memories that feed the soul (Fig. 4.1). Fausta decides to sing for Aída after she promises to give Fausta the pearls. While walking along one of the house’s corridors, a song in Quechua springs from her soul as embodying an incarnated memory. Aída, who can hear her from another room, approaches the corridor with

Fig. 4.1  Fausta and Aída in the kitchen in La teta asustada

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a gesture of accomplishment. Probably foreseeing that Aída will use her songs to prepare for the piano performance—after hearing a phone conversation in which the employer confirmed her participation in an annual concert—Fausta chooses a song that her mother used to sing about the anxiety felt by musicians before a performance and their secret pact with a sea siren to achieve success.29 The lyrics say that they have to pick a handful of quinoa grains from the fields and offer them up to the sea siren, and then she will count them. Each quinoa grain equates to one year, and the total number of grains will tell them how long they will last with that siren. But Fausta remembers that in the song, the quinoa grains are difficult to count; the sea siren grows tired and a musician ends up staying with her. There is an interesting power shift in this scene: the quinoa symbolizes the pearls, placing Fausta, as the receiver of Aída’s quinoa grains, in a situation of control. As the siren that represents the musician’s success, Fausta has the response that Aída needs. In her “consumption” of Fausta’s song, Aída has stripped away the lyrics, replicating the gesture of eliminating indigenous presence in a hegemonic culture. In the car that brings them back home from the theater, Aída affirms her success to her son. Seated in the backseat, Fausta dares to break the silence, leaning forward and adding that the audience liked “the” song very much. By using the definite article instead of the possessive “your,” Fausta reappropriates what Aída has taken from her and reminds the employer that there are some resources that cannot be completely extracted. Her intervention sparks Aída’s fury, and the employer throws Fausta out of the car. The sequence follows with Fausta running after the car, screaming that Aída has robbed her and that she’d promised the pearls as payment for the song. However, the most striking image is Fausta’s hand with the pearls that she recovers by entering the house, as the siren receives the ancient quinoa grains. Fausta’s revenge turns into an inverted theft, which in the end is an act of justice. She is able to subvert the systemic stealing to which maids are subjected. Despite Aída’s expropriation of Fausta’s food for the soul, the close-up of the maid’s face shows that food is a historical and cultural situation that goes far beyond the employer’s extractive appetite. Claudia Llosa’s film La teta asustada offers a progression of gestures that presents the maid in a different light: her resentment turns into a sense of justice. Race/class separation is visually sharp for Fausta, and being mistreated openly triggers in her the need to break the cycle. Aída does not want to pay for the service she receives, but her entitlement has

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a different connotation beyond racism and classism. She knows that her maid possesses resources and knowledge that she cannot access; Fausta has a culture of traditions that nurture her creativity in singing. In the maid-­ employer relationship of La teta asustada, the repertoire of demarcation drawn by Aída is subverted by Fausta. By claiming her cultural identity (quinoa grains) through the song and taking the pearls that were owed to her, Fausta moves away from her employer and articulates a sense of justice.

I Am Running Away from Your Love: Cakes in La nana

The film La nana (2009), by Chilean director Sebastián Silva, portrays the physical and emotional crisis suffered by Raquel, a live-in maid who has worked nonstop for a wealthy family from Santiago de Chile for twenty years. Despite an initial characterization as heinous and childish, Raquel’s conduct refracts the questionable behavior of her employer, a young literature professor (Pilar) who seems to maintain traditional class/gender roles and her expectations of independence. By her fortieth birthday, Raquel can no longer cope with a neuralgia that has become chronic, incapacitating her almost completely. Raquel feels burdened by having to customize her work to attend to the increasingly specific demands of each one of the family members—the professional couple, their young university-­ student daughter, one teenage boy, and two younger boys. Pilar micromanages Raquel’s housework, and neutralizes the pervasive effects of this control with a “like family” discourse. Raquel collapses and is forced to rest, prompting Pilar to temporarily hire another maid and then keep her on as Raquel’s helper. The plot unfolds in a series of situations in which Raquel rejects each one of the new maids until the arrival of Lucy. Like Raquel, Lucy is a middle-aged rural woman who migrated to the city in search of a job, and whose presence becomes crucial to Raquel’s emotional change. After some setbacks, her relationship with Lucy prompts Raquel to make major changes in her life that revolve around managing her work situation. The final scene shows Raquel jogging at night after finishing her duties in the kitchen. This physical movement implies the emotional change ignited in Raquel once she could control her workday. As the philosopher Michel Serres suggests, we learn as we move; there is nothing in our understanding that has not first been in the senses.30 Knowledge does

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not come directly from intellect but from the experience of the body.31 In this sense, the film’s final scene can be interpreted on two levels: a personal one because running means that Raquel is learning to manage her physical pain and stress, and a contractual one because it also indicates that she can control her working schedule. From her almost inhuman caricature to a female figure in full exercise of her senses, Raquel has been able to reconnect with her emotions and her body. Her rewiring has forced Pilar to reconfigure her repertoire of demarcation. Food scenes throughout the film indicate this shift in the power dynamic between maid and employer. The opening scene shows Raquel eating alone in the kitchen while the family is having their meal in the dining room. Although it can’t be seen if the maid is eating the same food as the family, eating in separate spaces at the same time denotes a class demarcation. Raquel’s facial rictus indicates a lack of enjoyment that contrasts with the family’s joyful dinner. As ordered by Pilar, the family calls in Raquel and surprises her with a birthday cake. Her body language expresses surprise, shyness, happiness, and a sense of being out of place, counteracted by Pilar’s ease as she asks the children to give Raquel their presents. Upon Pilar’s insistence, she sits at the table to eat the cake but finds herself awkwardly alone again because all the family members leave to go to their rooms, except Pilar, who stands looking at Raquel with a remorseful grimace. The “familiarity” is shown as a pantomime performed primarily for the employers’ own conscience. The celebratory cake becomes a bitter pill that Raquel is asked to swallow, as if part of her duties. A dry and falling apart slice of cake symbolizes Pilar’s affective manipulation and precedes Raquel’s neuralgia (Fig. 4.2). Raquel’s pain can be seen as the physical manifestation or the symptom of the tensions in her working situation: an already-heavy workload that is constantly intensified in character and quantity by the family members’ specific demands. Accommodating these requests is as painful and unbearable as a nerve oppressed by tensed muscles. There is no release for the increasing pressure from the family’s demands and Pilar’s controlling gaze. Raquel’s physical collapse unfolds in a series of scenes that connect her exhaustion to the family members’ requests: serving breakfast to the couple in their bedroom, having the children eat breakfast before school, and at the end drinking some coffee and eating a bowl of cereal alone. In spite of having internalized the always-changing rhythms of the family members,32 Raquel resists Pilar’s requests to accommodate the daughter’s needs more and more. To the maid, these demands constitute a basic threat to control her work and her ability to make decisions, whereas for

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Fig. 4.2  Raquel having dinner on her birthday in La nana

the employer, they are part of a repertoire of demarcation that reinforces class difference. The affective connection between Raquel and Lucy triggers a shift in Raquel’s attitude, which in turn shifts her relationship with Pilar. Different from Raquel, Lucy is not consumed by her work and stays connected with her desires and her body: she eats healthy food, tans, relaxes, laughs, and jogs. Raquel is disconcerted by Lucy as a peer; it is only when Lucy physically embraces her that Raquel finally releases the tension that is causing her pain. This affective gesture of understanding and empathy contextualizes Raquel’s dinner at Lucy’s home in the countryside. In contrast with the opening scene, a table full of simple dishes, glasses of wine, and, most importantly, laughing and embraces leads to a cinematic progression in which Raquel comes back to her employers’ house free of tension and pain. The film’s last scenes show cinematic gestures that evidence that Raquel has recovered movement and has reconnected with her emotions. Raquel is celebrating Lucy’s birthday with a cake she picked out herself. The children and Pilar gather at the kitchen table to surprise Lucy after she comes back from running. Seated all around the cake, Raquel controls the situation, setting a new boundary for Pilar, whose gestures toward the maid’s emotional looseness indicate a sense of surprise and displacement. When Pilar takes the sweater that Raquel gave to Lucy and suspiciously

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checks the label, confirming that it is from a fancy and expensive store, her grimace reveals an unpleasant class feeling. It is clear to Pilar that Raquel can not only control a situation related to her work and her emotional well-being, but she is also a female consumer of the same goods that she can afford, which makes Raquel potentially equal to her. Raquel’s unexpected autonomy turns into a menacing problem for her employer, who may feel that a different delimitation should take place. The film’s last scene synthesizes the cinematic progression that all the films in this series show: the workers’ movement toward their emotional independence sets up new boundaries and definitions of duties and obligations for their employers, who suddenly feel left alone and vulnerable. Visually, the series of gestures that show Raquel reappropriating her own private time and space demonstrates that she has been able to recover from physical and emotional pain. After feeding the children in the kitchen, Raquel leaves for a nighttime jog, which surprises everyone. She has recovered her mobility, reconnected with her emotions and her own family, and now has new friends. The running sequence shows her body progressively loosening, moving from a stiff, tense jog to an full-out run. Being on the move is a metaphor for her autonomy and the affective shift in her relationship with Pilar. Working on her own body through exercise, diet, and rest is a sign of a freedom that threatens her employer’s class and gender identity. Raquel has shifted affect gestures to a new direction, as if she were saying, “I am not eating your cake; my workday has ended.”

Finally, I Abandon You: Coffee, Salads, and Ice Cream in Que Horas Ela Volta? Que Horas Ela Volta? (2015), a film directed by Anna Muylaert, consummates the visual/cinematic progression of this series. It tells the story of Val, a woman who migrated from the poor northeastern area of Brazil to the more-industrialized and commercial São Paulo to work as a live-in maid for a wealthy, professional couple—a painter who has been suffering from depression for a while and a successful businesswoman, Barbara. Val has raised their son, Fabinho, to whom she has developed a strong attachment. Meanwhile, Val has left her daughter, Jessica, in Pernambuco to be raised by her family. Despite the fact that Val has provided Jessica with material support, a distance has grown between them due to Val’s absence. Her harmonious working situation is disrupted when Jessica announces

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that she will stay with her mother at her employer’s house while she looks for her own place in the city, where she plans to attend university to study architecture. Her habits destabilize Barbara’s repertoire of demarcation, particularly regarding food, revealing Val’s poor working situation. When Val knows that her daughter has passed the exam to start studying architecture, she decides to leave her job as a live-in maid and move with Jessica to her humble, small apartment. Once there, she learns that her daughter has a biracial child, and immediately proposes that Jessica bring him to live with them, assuring that this time she will be there for both her daughter and her grandson. Behind an ostensibly familiar relationship, there are rigid rules between Barbara and Val regarding food. Several scenes show the family eating dinner while Val waits in the kitchen for the family to call her to continue serving. Sitting or standing by the wall or the sink, Val does not eat while her employers have their meal. In fact, Val is only shown eating or drinking coffee in the company of other house workers, such as the gardener or the paid-per-hour maid, when Barbara has left the house. This dynamic is broken with Jessica’s presence and her more-independent eating habits, which push Barbara’s boundaries. The metaphoric and metonymic meanings of food scenes involving Jessica, Val, Barbara, and the rest of the family portray commensality as a daily practice that rewrites incarnated memories. Gestures that embody affect and emotions regulate the tension created by those fixed social boundaries. The film’s first sequence of scenes relates to the symbolic meaning of coffee. As a gesture of affection, Val gives Barbara a set of black-and-white coffee cups and plates, and shortly after asks Barbara her permission to bring her daughter Jessica to stay at the house until she finds a place of her own. Barbara exclaims how pretty the gift is, kisses Val, and replies that she is welcome to bring Jessica to the house because she is “like –family.” She then gives her instructions for a social gathering that she is hosting that night. Barbara reacts strongly and with disgust when she sees Val, now wearing a traditional maid’s uniform, serving coffee to guests with the new coffee cups that she gave her. Barbara intercepts Val and pulls her into the kitchen, where she tells her to use the family’s coffee set, one of “white wood” that she herself brought from Sweden. It is clear that Val’s taste does not fit within her employer’s living standard and class identity. The local taste materialized in the box containing Val’s coffee set, printed in Portuguese, seems to be racialized and used to mark Otherness in her employer’s strict instructions. By not allowing Val to use the b ­ lack-and-­white

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coffee set Barbara prevents her guests from perceiving an erasure of the racial and class boundaries or marks. Despite her “like-family” discourse, Barbara reaffirms her class distinction by distancing from Val through objects (such as the coffee set), food (such as the delicacies served), and clothes (Val wears a maid’s uniform.) (Fig. 4.3) The next scene shows Val sitting and looking sadly at the black-and-­ white coffee set. She has trespassed a social boundary by assuming that her choice of housewares was as good as her employer’s. Working in domestic spaces, maids move across boundaries; however, this movement does not imply proximity in terms of taste and consumption. Several scenes show that the family’s meals are not the same in quality or quantity as those of Val, Jessica, and the other house employees. The wooden salad bowls and the square plates on the family’s dining table highlight the class contrast with the house workers’ meals. Served in simple kitchenware on the small kitchen table, they eat potatoes, wheat bread, rice, and beans, and drink milk and black coffee. This is a more-traditional, starch-based diet to supply them with energy, while the abundant vegetables and salad on the family’s table suggest a light, healthy diet, and Barbara’s modern role as a businesswoman and wife/mother. Under her supervision, Val respects the family’s food regimes, but they are challenged when Jessica arrives. Val and Jessica are allowed to keep their food in the same refrigerator as the family. Despite this, they eat different food and/or a different quality of products, something that Val’s daughter sees as a form of mistreatment.

Fig. 4.3  Barbara saying thank you to Val for her birthday gift in Que horas ela volta?

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Her educational and social expectations are similar to those of the family, which means that she also shares their same taste in food, challenging those class distinctions that center around food. Instead of eating the ice cream reserved for the maid, Jessica chooses the one preferred by Fabinho, a small container with a better-designed label, which suggests a different or possibly more-expensive brand. Clearly, Jessica’s taste defies Barbara. Aware of class differences and how her mother has been exploited at work, Jessica’s presence threatens the family’s emotional stability and challenges Val, who feels ashamed of her daughter’s behavior in front of her employers. Here it is clear that affect, in the form of body language and gestures involved in food situations, challenges the employer’s social demarcation within the house. This can be seen in the scene where Barbara, who rarely enters the kitchen, finds Jessica eating the forbidden ice cream directly from the container. Standing next to Jessica, the employer looks at Val’s daughter’s face, and turns on the faucet to get a glass of water. Barbara’s anger at Jessica’s transgression cuts the air and prompts Jessica to close the ice-cream container and look down. After this encounter, Val’s daughter leaves the house to rent her own apartment. To Barbara’s surprise, Val decides to leave her job as a live-in maid and move in with her daughter. The last scene of the film recovers the metaphoric and metonymic meaning of food by showing Val and Jessica at their kitchen table matching the black coffee cups with the white plates. Jessica’s experience in Barbara’s home left Val in a state of shock, guilt, and, most importantly, cognizance of the irregularity of her working situation: not only had she lived far from her daughter most of her life, dedicated to another woman’s son, but she did it convinced that her working relation was based on reciprocal affection—as a mother for Fabinho and as an older maternal friend for Barbara. Jessica’s actions triggered a physical and emotional transformation in her mother. By abandoning her job, Val gained control over her body and set up different working expectations. Jessica’s presence showed that behind the apparent affection what underlay Val’s working relationship was exploitation at the cost of her personal life. The final scene in which mother and daughter look at the black-and-white coffee set is clearly a metaphor for how Val recovers control of her life by affirming her own taste as a consumer and managing her own space and time. While putting the coffee set on the kitchen table, Val makes a gesture to Jessica that implies she has stolen the set from Barbara. For Val, the mixed black-­ and-­white coffee cups symbolize a recovered dignity regarding her taste and her identity in reaction to her employer’s double standard and

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­ istreatment. At the end, Val integrates herself into the value system of m her daughter, who has developed expectations for better educational and job opportunities, creating a shift in the power dynamic that distances Val from her employer and reaffirms Jessica’s empowerment.

No More Leftovers, No Longer Alone: Recovering Visibility This series of films traces a physical and emotional progression in the situation of live-in maids that questions the autonomy of their female employers. Gestures of movement show that maids recover control over their bodies, shifting the power dynamic with their employers: by controlling their working situation, they challenge the employers’ repertoire of demarcation and their emotional economy. As in the myth of “the perfect maid,” these films show maids moving away from situations of stagnation. They embody the transformation of a crisis into a gesture of emotional and physical separation from their employers. Through these gestures, maids subvert and reconfigure incarnated memories, in both themselves and their employers, by gaining autonomy and control over their bodies and work situations that prevent them from being physically abused and emotionally devoured. In these three films, maids move physically and emotionally, reaffirming their identities through their tastes as consumers. By posing as consumers, they contest their employers’ material and symbolic economy. The maids’ willingness and capability to shift the power relation in their workplace indicates that affect and affective ambivalence between live-in maids and employers may not be the distinctive nature of this type of work, but a means to manipulate a noncontractual working situation. Fausta, Raquel, and Val defy the controlling gaze of their female employers, who remain in a motionless state. Food regimes are trespassed in these films to expose how affect engraves itineraries in workers and employers that stem from contexts of historical submission but also unprecedented situations of resistance and empowerment. Fausta steals the pearls (symbolizing the quinoa), Raquel selects and buys the cake she wants for celebrating Lucy’s birthday, and Val steals the coffee cups she gave to Barbara as a gift; these are all movements related to food that refer to the psychological, emotional need of self-respect and empowerment. Most importantly, the gestures involved in the cinematic progression of this series show that it is not the affective ambivalence that constitutes the

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nature of paid domestic work. Instead, affect as present in food situations is a means to control the tensions arising from a historical social inequality that is rewritten daily through a strict repertoire of demarcation. Using a language of class and affection, food situations regulate the tensions that emerge from class inequality. Like the myth of “the perfect maid,” these films show that affective situations such as food regulate tensions and guarantee the (re)inscription of the norms of social distinction. However, as the analysis of these films made visible, despite the employers’ language of affection in the form of familylike narrations, maids are capable of challenging the power dynamic with their employers not because of their class determination or their emotional detachment, but because in the absence of concrete labor regulation they renegotiate their affective response through the only possible gesture of reaffirmation: becoming visible to others and themselves, and recovering the autonomy of their bodies by running away from their employers’ controlling gaze.

Notes 1. Marie Langer, Fantasías eternas a la luz del psicoanálisis (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Horné, 1966), 79–103. 2. Elizabeth Kuznesof, “A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492–1980,” in Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, eds. Elsa M.  Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 31. 3. Omar Acha, Crónica sentimental de la Argentina peronista: Sexo, inconsciente e ideología, 1945–1955 (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2013). 4. Acha, Crónica sentimental. 5. Inés Pérez and Santiago Canevaro, “Languages of Affection and Rationality: Household Workers’ Strategies before the Tribunal of Domestic Work, Buenos Aires, 1956–2013,” International Labor and Working-Class History 88 (fall 2015): 130–49. 6. Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 2016). 7. Pérez and Canevaro, “Languages of Affection and Rationality,” 131. 8. Pérez and Canevaro, “Languages of Affection and Rationality,” 113. 9. Although recent academic research on paid domestic labor and live-in maids in Latin America has revealed changes in workers’ situations due to more comprehensive legislation, many experts still note the pervasive exploitation that predominates in this economic sector. After Chaney and García Castro’s seminal work (Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro, Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the

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Caribbean [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989]), two aspects have been prevalent in the study of live-in maids: the persistence of working situations akin to slavery, and the epistemological conflict that the topic presents for female researchers who must often use live-in maids themselves in order to accomplish the demands and goals of the academic field (Bruno Lautier, “Las empleadas domésticas latinoamericanas y la sociología del trabajo: algunas observaciones acerca del caso brasileño,” Revista mexicana de sociología 65, no. 4 [2003]: 810). In South America, paid domestic work and work as a live-in maid are still the first and second most common types of nonrural employment for females (Lautier, “Las empleadas domésticas”; Valenzuela and Mora, eds., Trabajo doméstico). Despite some recent advances in labor regulation, domestic workers still suffer from the lack of labor contracts and their positions are among the most precarious (María Gabriela Loyo and Mario Velásquez, “Aspectos jurídicos y económicos del trabajo doméstico remunerado en América Latina,” in Trabajo doméstico: Un largo camino hacia el trabajo decente, eds. María Elena Valenzuela and Claudia Mora [Santiago de Chile: OIT, 2009], 68). 10. Sarah Archer, “Buying the Maid Ricoffy: Domestic Workers, Employers and Food,” South Africa Review of Sociology 42, no. 2 (2011): 66–82; Helma Lutz, “At Your Service Madam! The Globalization of Domestic Service,” Feminist Review 70 (2002): 89–104; Debora Gorbán, “Empleadas y empleadoras, tensiones de una relación atravesada por la ambigüedad/Domestics and their Employers, a Relationship Cut Through by Ambiguity,” Reis: Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas 140 (October–December 2012): 29–48; Debora Gorbán and Ania Tizziani, “Circulación de información y representaciones del trabajo en el servicio doméstico,” El trabajo doméstico: Entre regulaciones formales e informales. Mirada desde la historia y la sociología. Cuadernos del IDES 30 (2015): 108–25. 11. Jurema Brites, “Afeto e desigualdade: género, geração e clase entre empregadas domésticas e seus empregadores,” Cadernos Pagu 29 (2007): 91–109; Gorbán, “Empleadas y empleadoras, tensiones”; Encarnación Guitiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor (New York: Routledge, 2010). 12. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, 5. 13. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, 5. 14. Gorbán, “Empleadas y empleadoras, tensiones,” 34–35. 15. Kofes 2001. 16. For the purpose of this chapter, it is important to note here the distinction between affect and emotion. Lisa Feldman Barrett defines affect as the

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general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day, “it is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how ­pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. … The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energized feeling of anticipating good news … [and] the fatigue after a long run … are examples of high and low arousal. … Even a completely neutral feeling is affect” (Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain [New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017], 72). Therefore, affect is understood here as outer expressions of feelings or as “our immediate bodily reactions and sensations with regard to the energies of others and our environment” (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, 95). The term refers to the energy or relational force that permeates the body resulting from our ability to feel, and imprints emotional meaning to situations. 17. Laura Mulvey, “Cinematic Gesture: The ghost in the machine,” Journal of Cultural Research 19, no. 1 (2015): 6. 18. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, 6. 19. Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, “‘Why Should I Not take an Apple or a Fruit If I Wash Their Underwear?’ Food, Social Classification and Paid Domestic Work in Mexico,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 33, no. 2 (2012): 132. 20. Korsmeyer 2002. 21. Angela Meah, “Extending the Contested Spaces of the Modern Kitchen,” Geography Compass 10, no. 2 (2016): 41–55. 22. Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, “‘Why Should I Not Take an Apple or a Fruit If I Wash Their Underwear?’ Food, Social Classification and Paid Domestic Work in Mexico,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 33, no. 2 (2012): 122. 23. Michel Serres, Variations on the Body (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2011), 78, 79. 24. Mulvey, “Cinematic Gesture,” 7. 25. Mulvey, “Cinematic Gesture,” 6. 26. Alison Krögel, Food, Power, and Resistance in the Andes: Exploring Quechua Verbal and Visual Narratives (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010), 11. In her analysis of Madeinusa (2010), also by Claudia Llosa, Krögel observes that the kitchen, recipes, and cooking are gestures of individual female resistance to paternal and societal power. 27. Rojas 2017, 298–300. 28. During the Spanish colonization of the Americas the Crown granted encomiendas to conquerors and individuals participating in the conquest enterprise, these consisted of ownership of land and a number of natives for labor. 29. Dicen en mi pueblo/que los músicos hacen un/contrato secreto con una sirena/Si quieren saber cuánto durará/durará el contrato con esa sirena/

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de un campo oscuro tienen que coge/un puñado de quinua para la sirena/Y así la sirena se quede contando/Dice la sirena que cada grano significa un ­año/Cuando la sirena termine de contar/se lo lleva al hombre y le suelta al mar/Pero mi madre dice, dice, dice/que la quinua es muy difícil de contar/y la sirena se cansa de contar/Y así el hombre para siempre se queda con el don./In my village they say that musicians have a/ secret contract with a mermaid. For their music to be heard more than always/more than ever./If they want to know how long the agreement lasts/from a dark field they must pick/a handful of quinoa/to the mermaid they must give./So she starts counting until it lasts./They say each grain means a year./So when the mermaid finishes counting/she takes the musician and throws him to the sea./But my mother says, says, says/quinoa grains are too difficult to count/and the mermaid gets worn out, so the musician, forever, can embrace their gift. (“Sirena,” music by Selma Mutal and lyrics by Claudia Llosa) 30. Serres, Variations on the Body, 68. 31. Serres, Variations on the Body, 70. 32. Karina Vázquez, “Corre, Muchacha, Corre: Estructura de clases y trabajo doméstico en La nana (2009), de Sebastián Silva,” Chasqui Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 43, no. 2 (November 2014): 161–78.

References Acha, Omar. 2013. Crónica sentimental de la Argentina peronista: Sexo, inconsciente e ideología, 1945–1955. Buenos Aires: Prometeo. Archer, Sarah. 2011. Buying the Maid Ricoffy: Domestic Workers, Employers and Food. South Africa Review of Sociology 42 (2): 66–82. Brites, Jurema. 2007. Afeto e desigualdade: género, geração e clase entre empregadas domésticas e seus empregadores. Cadernos Pagu 29: 91–109. Chaney, Elsa M., and Mary Garcia Castro. 1989. Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Feldman Barrett, Lisa. 2017. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Gorbán, Debora. 2012. Empleadas y empleadoras, tensiones de una relación atravesada por la ambigüedad/Domestics and their Employers, a Relationship Cut Through by Ambiguity. Reis: Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas 140: 29–48. ———. 2013. El trabajo doméstico se sienta a la mesa: La comida en la configuración de las relaciones entre empleadores y empleadas en la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Revista de Estudios Sociales 45: 67–79.

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Gorbán, Debora, and Ania Tizziani. 2015. Circulación de información y representaciones del trabajo en el servicio doméstico. El trabajo doméstico: Entre regulaciones formales e informales. Mirada desde la historia y la sociología. ­ Cuadernos del IDES 30: 108–125. Guitiérrez-Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2010. Migration, Domestic Work and Affect: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor. New  York: Routledge. Kofes, Maria Suely. 2001. Mulher, Mulheres-Identidade, Diferença e Desigualdade na Relaçao entre Patroas e Empregadas. Campinas: Ed. Unicamp. Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2002. El sentido del gusto. Comida, estética y filosofía. Barcelona: Paidós. Krögel, Alison. 2010. Food, Power, and Resistance in the Andes: Exploring Quechua Verbal and Visual Narratives. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Kuznesof, Elizabeth. 1989. A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492–1980. In Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro, 17–35. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Langer, Marie. 1966. Fantasías eternas a la luz del psicoanálisis. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Horné. Lautier, Bruno. 2003. Las empleadas domésticas latinoamericanas y la sociología del trabajo: algunas observaciones acerca del caso brasileño. Revista Mexicana de Sociología 65 (4): 789–814. Loyo, María Gabriela, and Mario Velásquez. 2009. Aspectos jurídicos y económicos del trabajo doméstico remunerado en América Latina. In Trabajo doméstico: Un largo camino hacia el trabajo decente, ed. María Elena Valenzuela and Claudia Mora, 21–70. Santiago de Chile: OIT. Lutz, Helma. 2002. At Your Service Madam! The Globalization of Domestic Service. Feminist Review 70: 89–104. Meah, Angela. 2016. Extending the Contested Spaces of the Modern Kitchen. Geography Compass 10 (2): 41–55. Momsen, Janet H. 1999. Victim or Victor. In Gender, Migration and Domestic Service in Global Context, ed. Janet Momsen, 1–20. London/New York: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 2015. Cinematic Gesture: The Ghost in the Machine. Journal of Cultural Research 19 (1): 6–15. Pereira, Andrés. 2009. La nana. Algunas consideraciones sobre esta ficción. laFuga. http://www.lafuga.cl/la-nana/277. Accessed 1 Aug 2018. Pérez, Inés, and Santiago Canevaro. 2015. Languages of Affection and Rationality: Household Workers’ Strategies Before the Tribunal of Domestic Work, Buenos Aires, 1956–2013. International Labor and Working-Class History 88: 130–149.

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Rojas, Adriana. 2017. Mother of Pearl, Song and Potatoes: Cultivating Resilience in Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada/Milk of Sorrow (2009). Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas 14 (3): 297–314. Romero, Mary. 2016. Maid in the U.S.A. New York: Routledge. Saldaña-Tejeda, Abril. 2012. Why Should I Not Take an Apple Or a Fruit If I Wash Their Underwear?’ Food, Social Classification and Paid Domestic Work in Mexico. Journal of Intercultural Studies 33 (2): 121–137. Serres, Michel. 2011. Variations on the Body. Minneapolis: Univocal. The Maid. 2009. Directed by Sebastián Silva. Chile: Elephant Eye Films. The Milk of Sorrow. 2010. Directed by Claudia Llosa. Spain/Peru: Olive Films. The Second Mother. 2015. Directed by Anna Muylaert. Brazil: Sundance. Vázquez, Karina. 2014. Corre, Muchacha, Corre: Estructura de clases y trabajo doméstico en La nana (2009), de Sebastián Silva. Chasqui Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 43 (2): 161–178.

CHAPTER 5

Serious Camp: Juan Gabriel’s Queer Repertoire in ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? Olivia Cosentino

Camp, Katrin Horn tells us, subverts “insider and outsider by way of recoding ‘who is in on the joke.’” 1 As a “consciously exclusionary gesture,” camp is the crucial theoretical paradigm to understand the simultaneous appeal and illegibility of ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? (Teresa Suárez, Mexico, 2014) for varying Mexican social groups.2 Horn offers a broad definition that shapes my reading: “Camp is defined as a parodic device that uses irony, exaggeration, theatricality, incongruity, and humor to question the pretext’s status as ‘original’ or ‘natural.’”3 Although camp has historically been theorized as denaturalizing the pretexts of gender and heteronormativity through gay male subculture,4 Horn delves into mainstream culture to reconsider camp’s “neglect of women and of the serious.”5 This aperture creates room for another pretext: the gender, race, and class-based divisions of household labor. Horn’s re-reading of pop-culture camp functions particularly well for analyzing the female-­ centric ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? because its commercial, mainstream vibe disguises the progressive, even transgressive politics in its campy musical numbers. O. Cosentino (*) Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_5

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Loosely shaped around fourteen songs by popular Mexican singer Juan Gabriel, ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? tells the story of two domestic workers, sisters Martina (Gina Vargas) and Lupita (Olinka Velázquez), who disobey their wealthy employer, Marcela (Érika de la Rosa). The sisters escape Mexico City to attend a wedding in their hometown outside of Puebla, taking with them a selection of Marcela’s most ostentatious clothing and jewelry.6 Marcela enlists the help of her best friend, Marifer (Mar Contreras), to track down the sisters. Although Lupita’s boyfriend Pepe (Víctor García) is appalled to learn that she stole from Marcela, the pair makes up and gets married just as Marcela and Marifer’s marriages end due to Marcela’s affair with Marifer’s husband, Santiago (Mark Tacher). The film’s illegibility becomes distinctly clear in Mexican reviews that misread the film as offensive and lacking substance. Perhaps Mexico’s most famous film critic, Jorge Ayala Blanco denigrates the constant “euforia [euphoria]” in “la estereotipada gracia frívola sin pretensiones mayores [the frivolous, stereotyped joke without greater ambitions/aspirations].”7 Ayala Blanco is flabbergasted by ¿Qué le dijiste’s “racismo descarado [blatant racism],” supposedly the worst in the history of Mexican cinema, which he claims makes prietos (darker-skinned Mexicans) the butt of all jokes.8 However, despite the hyperbole of his own review, Ayala Blanco seems to miss the fact that these campy exaggerations purposefully name and counter the prevalent racist, classist, and sexist discourses that circulate in Mexican society. Ayala Blanco’s paternalistic finger-wagging at the film’s missed opportunity to condemn racism in fact seems about as hypocritical and misguided as when Marcela’s Harvard-educated husband, Héctor (Alejandro de la Madrid), writes an article on Mexican poverty from his mansion in Lomas de Chapultepec.9 This scene, among others, is a tongue-in-cheek nod to viewers that writer, director, and producer Teresa Suárez is well aware of Mexico’s racism, ethnic bias, and rampant inequality.10 Operating under the guise of an unassuming musical comedy, Suárez weaves a critique of domestic work and female relationships into some very serious camp, a strategy that seems to confound critics like Hugo Lara who presumes generic limitations. Lara writes, “Cierto que es imposible pedirle peras al olmo y esperar sesudeces de una comedia musical como ésta, pero también hay rangos mínimos de inteligencia y sensibilidad que se deben exigir por un boleto de cine [It’s true that one cannot ask the impossible and expect deep insights from a musical comedy like this one, but there are minimum amounts of intelligence and sensitivity that one

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should demand when purchasing a movie ticket].”11 It is precisely this glib attitude toward popular genres, from the musical comedy to the telenovela, that renders Suárez’s radical political vision unreadable to critics, especially middle-class, highly educated, elitist men, and others who do not “get” the film. Both Lara and Ayala Blanco conclude their reviews with comments about uncomfortable, involuntary laughter, which they write off as a natural reaction to a film that is just that bad. But perhaps on some level, this inexplicable laughter intimates their uneasy realization that ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? is not meant for them, and that they are the target of this camp’s mockery. In further evidence that he misses the point, Lara declares the film an unworthy homage to Juan Gabriel and is particularly disappointed that the script has “no tiene nada qué ver con la vida y obra del Divo de Juárez [nothing to do with the life and work of el Divo de Juárez].”12 On the contrary, I contend that this film borrows deeply from Juan Gabriel’s queer “repertoire,” Diana Taylor’s term for “ephemeral … embodied practice/knowledge,” which opposes the material, textual archive.13 Famous for evading the question of his sexuality and refusing to define himself during interviews (“lo que se ve, no se pregunta [what is seen doesn’t need to be asked]”), Juan Gabriel’s queerness thus evades the archive and remains absent from “official” sources like cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis’ account of the performer in Escenas de pudor y liviandad.14 Rather, his queerness exists within his repertoire; present in whispers, knowing looks, anecdotes, and, most importantly, Juan Gabriel’s performance, voice, and other embodied practices.15 His queerness is and was, as Alejandro L. Madrid puts it, a “secreto a voces [open secret, lit. vocal secret].”16 Suárez is wise to utilize a purely Juan Gabriel soundtrack to draw from the Divo’s queer repertoire. What’s more, Juan Gabriel as a figure ties well to (queer) camp via his career’s dehierarchizing, genre-­ mixing, and even gender-fluidizing efforts. Madrid points to “a certain camp sensibility” and “a sense of excess” as salient characteristics of Juan Gabriel’s performance.17 Specifically citing his final concert at El Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Madrid notes that Juan Gabriel’s performances enact a “desacralization of … elite, highbrow tradition,” not unlike how Suárez brings the telenovela into cinema.18 After placing ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? within relevant Mexican cinematic and televisual contexts, I discuss how formal choices of mise-en-scène (setting, acting style, props, and costumes) give significant subjective depth to the typically one-dimensional domestic employee that populates ­neoliberal

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cinema. I then unpack the very serious possibilities that musical comedy, camp, and Juan Gabriel’s queer repertoire offer to ¿Qué le dijiste’s politicized representation of female domestic workers. ¿Qué le dijiste’s camp, namely the exaggerated, theatricalized performances of roles in the household and ironic humor, coupled with the retooling of the queer Divo’s pop-culture soundtrack, serves to denaturalize and question domestic labor norms, gender roles, and the power relations between women within the household. I hone in on two key musical sequences, “Debo hacerlo” and “Yo no nací para amar,” to show how the film emphasizes missed opportunities for female solidarity and underscores the hypocritical biocontrol that female employers wage over their domestic employees. ¿Qué le dijiste draws on and deviates from the success of the contemporary Mexican comedy, and the romantic comedy more specifically. Of the top ten Mexican films with highest attendance from 2000–2017, comedies occupy the top two places, while four of the remaining eight are romantic comedies.19 In 2014, ¿Qué le dijiste was the fifth most-seen Mexican film in Mexico, with almost 1.7 million spectators.20 Ignacio Sánchez Prado has documented this boom, claiming that the consolidation of the romantic comedy genre “best represents the neoliberalization of Mexican commercial cinema.”21 The genre’s rise in the late 1990s points to overall transformations in the target audience (the middle class) and aesthetics that Sánchez Prado traces in his second chapter of Screening Neoliberalism.22 Protagonists in romantic comedies of the 2000s “mostly existed in fabricated middle-class bubbles,” which purposefully invisibilize members of other social classes.23 Looking to appeal to its middle-class audiences, the neoliberal romantic comedy often relegates the domestic worker—if she is even present—to a supporting role that lacks any subjectivity. To cite two brief examples: in Sexo, pudor y lágrimas (Sex, Shame & Tears, Antonio Serrano, Mexico, 1999), Ana’s (Susana Zabaleta) unnamed domestic employee is merely a foil or prop, to be laughed at by audiences who align themselves with Ana and her friends.24 Similarly, in Amar te duele (Love Hurts, Fernando Sariñana, Mexico, 2002), Mimi (Lucía Pailles), the domestic worker for Renata’s (Martha Higareda) family, exists completely in the background. Her story is wholly absent despite acting as a visual referent for impoverished, darker-skinned Mexicans, including wealthy Renata’s forbidden love, the working-class Ulises (Luis Fernando Peña). ¿Qué le dijiste forms part of a newer generation of romantic comedies (2012–2015) that mark

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a “gradual diversification of techniques and thematics” in which “some films are more directly engaged with Mexico’s social inequalities.”25 Although certainly riding the wave of neoliberal cinema, the cognizant representation of social-class politics within ¿Qué le dijiste hearkens back to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema.26 The prevailing ideology is exemplified by Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor, Ismael Rodríguez, Mexico, 1948), which glorifies the hardworking carpenter Pepe el Toro (Pedro Infante) and the noble working class, and brands wealthy Mexicans as morally corrupt. ¿Qué le dijiste cleverly cites Nosotros los pobres; when Lupita’s boyfriend, Pepe, calls, her ringtone is unmistakably Pepe el Toro’s iconic whistle that he uses to communicate with his lover. As the primary vehicle for the State’s hegemonic, patriarchal system, Golden Age films sought to maintain the status quo of social class relations, and thus Nosotros los pobres ends exactly where it begins. After a brief stint in jail after being wrongfully accused of murder, Pepe el Toro is released and returns without protest to his life in the impoverished arrabal.27 Unlike Golden Age cinema, the final, nondiegetic dance number featuring Juan Gabriel in Suárez’s film resists narrative containment or an easy return to the status quo. ¿Qué le dijiste utilizes popular music, a practice that dates back to the Golden Age’s trusty urban melodrama and comedia ranchera but is also evident in other Mexican modes. Teen rock’n’roll films from the 1950s and 1960s, which foregrounded young singers like Angélica María, Enrique Guzmán, and Alberto Vázquez, often revolved around a romantic subplot and incorporated musical numbers into the diegesis. The 1980s iteration—the Televisa Youth Film—similarly relied on pop songs, teen love, and multiplatform (music, television) stars like Lucerito, Pedrito Fernández, and Luis Miguel to garner enormous box-office receipts through strategic cross-promotion.28 Typical of twentieth-century musical comedies, ¿Qué le dijiste takes up popular Mexican music (through Juan Gabriel), disregarding the current, neoliberal trend of using “Americanized pop music and even songs in English.”29 Atypical of the aforementioned films is the fact that ¿Qué le dijiste is not a Juan Gabriel star vehicle; he does not appear in the film until the final musical number and it is other actors who interpret his songs.30 However, ¿Qué le dijiste does rely on established televisual star power in order to draw small-screen audiences to theaters. The casting choices and representation of female domestic workers within ¿Qué le dijiste show a keen awareness of the Mexican televisual

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landscape, engaging with and departing from telenovelas.31 All of the main actors of the film are largely known for their participation in telenovelas.32 Likely the most well-established telenovela stars are Mark Tacher and Alejandro de la Madrid, who play the absent and neglectful wealthy husbands.33 A cast filled with television stars allows Suárez, in essence, to bring the telenovela to the big screen in order to merge “high” and “low” culture and reclaim cinema for the working class. Yet borrowing from telenovelas does not stop at the level of casting; Sánchez Prado observes that the film “brings into Mexican cinema codes of popular culture marked as lower class” and “deploys well-worn tropes from the telenovela mediascape,” specifically the Manichaean moral divide between good and evil.34 We see this division through the juxtaposition of the evil Marcela with the good Martina and Lupita. A truly innovative feature of ¿Qué le dijiste is its subversion of what Sofía Ríos calls the “made-up maids” of the Mexican telenovela.35 While female domestic workers in Mexico typically hail from “one of Mexico’s poorest sectors” and have darker skin and indigenous features, in telenovelas fair-skinned, phenotypically European actresses are cast in the roles of the beautiful, rags-to-riches domestic employee.36 This unacknowledged privileging of whiteness and erasure of indigeneity in these “maid-up maids” within televisual culture supports Mexico’s unspoken pigmentocracy that reproduces identity myths that do not correspond to social realities. Whereas in a telenovela an actress who looks like the blonde, light-eyed Marcela would likely play the heroic domestic employee, this film purposefully casts darker-skinned actresses with slightly indigenous features in the roles of Lupita and Martina. Although I acknowledge Velázquez’s and Vargas’s appearances comply with some European-­ American standards of beauty—somewhat tall; slim, hourglass figures; fairly straight hair—they are still marked by racial difference that remains overlooked in telenovela casting. On the whole, Ríos affirms that telenovelas “rarely deliberately set out to confront audiences with the oppressive reality of the lower class or to display the dissimilar social realities in Mexico.”37 In its intent to represent, challenge, and denaturalize given racial and class norms in Mexican media and reality, ¿Qué le dijiste ultimately parts ways with the telenovela’s tradition of maintaining the status quo. The animated opening credits sequence cues viewers to recognize domestic workers as central to the narrative and active agents of the plot. Set to the song “Buenos días señor sol,” a purple female silhouette wakes

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up and readies herself through extensive preparation; she lounges in a bubble bath, blow-dries her hair, and gazes at her reflection in the mirror. The smiling woman, wearing a dress, pearls, and matching gloves, exits the front door and the scene morphs from animation to live action. The woman, who we assumed to be the señora of the house, turns out to be Martina, dressed in a pink domestic worker’s uniform. She leads Marcela’s five-year-old son, Nicolás (Alek Fernández), by the hand to the school bus. The twist in this unorthodox introduction gestures toward the film’s prioritization of the domestic worker. Resisting representational norms, specific aspects of the mise-en-scène imbue domestic workers with an inner life and set the stage for queer camp’s work. One such way that Suárez establishes Martina and Lupita’s interiority is by exposing viewers to spaces that typically remain offscreen, such as their family home in a small town near Puebla. The domestic workers, rootless, with no identity or history, often seem to appear and disappear from their employer’s house, yet Suárez is careful to show the lengthy journey from Mexico City to their small town in order to underscore Martina and Lupita’s origins. Suárez even centers an entire musical sequence (“Insensible”) around the sisters’ mother laundering the designer clothing stolen from Marcela on washboards at the river. The humorous incongruity of a sequined, dry-clean-only shirt being rubbed against a metal washboard, implicitly calling attention to the impracticality of such delicate clothing, is pure camp—but more on that later. A short scene also takes place within the domestic employees’ small, shared room inside Marcela’s grandiose mansion. This space, excluded and isolated from the rest of the house, gives viewers a chance to visualize the lifestyle of a domestic worker. The initial medium close-up of a dresser presents prized possessions: two religious figurines, a wooden cross, and a framed photo of Pepe top lit by a small lamp. Lupita lovingly clutches the picture frame, indicating to viewers her sentimental attachment to Pepe, and the camera cuts to a medium long shot, offering a more-complete yet still-claustrophobic image of the room (Fig. 5.1). Immediately following this shot is another medium long shot of Marcela and Héctor’s bedroom. The humble appearance of Martina and Lupita’s bedroom juxtaposed with the lavishness of the Lomas de Chapultepec home registers the stark inequality between employer and employee. Within the confines of their room, Martina and Lupita reveal aspects of their personalities that they typically hide within the household. This character development, achieved through acting style and props, works to

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Fig. 5.1  Martina (Gina Vargas) and Lupita (Olinka Velázquez) ’s small shared bedroom in ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? (Teresa Suárez, 2014)

undo the conflation of domestic workers by clearly differentiating between the sisters. The subdued, love-struck, religious Lupita—whose name is a diminutive of Guadalupe, a clear reference to Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe—contrasts with Martina’s realist brashness. As Lupita models the dress, hoping to impress Pepe at her cousin’s wedding, Martina sits on her twin-sized bed and smokes a cigarette, the only time we see her do this in the entire film. Martina laments, “Yo quisiera ser ella [Marcela], con toda esa ropa [I wish I could be her, with all those clothes],” to which Lupita responds: “La va a castigar Dios [God will punish her].” Martina counters: “Ah, si castiga, es a ti y a mí. Aquí de gatos, ganando una miseria [Well, if He punishes anyone, it’s you and me. Here, like cats, earning next to nothing],” one of the discursive critiques regarding the low wages they earn as domestic workers.38 Lupita rebukes her: “Ya párale y da gracias por lo que tienes [Stop it already and give thanks for what you have].” Their interaction confirms that the religious figurines belong to the traditional, Catholic Lupita, who often keeps Martina in line. Yet the film avoids a simplistic good versus bad binary between the sisters; Martina instigates the “bad” behavior (like stealing Marcela’s clothing), but Lupita eagerly participates with little hesitation.

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One aspect of mise-en-scène that drives the plot and plays a foundational role in the film’s camp is the costumes/wardrobe.39 In essence, ¿Qué le dijiste’s chain of causes and effects revolves primarily around clothing. Martina gets distracted while ironing Marcela’s costly Chanel blouse, accidentally burning it as she imitates fashion models she sees on television. Marcela notices that her blouse has gone missing and forbids the sisters from leaving the house to attend a wedding until they relocate it (“trabajando toda la vida no me podrían pagar … ¡es carísima! [working their entire life they couldn’t pay for it… it’s so expensive!]”). Martina and Lupita steal Marcela’s most extravagant wardrobe and accessories and take off for the wedding, spurring Marcela and Marifer to “kidnap” the sisters’ friend Elodia, another domestic worker in the neighborhood, to track them down. The costumes themselves play an important role in visualizing Martina and Lupita’s transformation throughout the film. They shed their pastel domestic employee uniforms, a symbol of subordination, in two instances: at night in their private, shared room when they instead wear nightgowns, and when they decide to disobey Marcela. At first, their interaction with Marcela’s clothing is playful; Martina wears a floor-length brown fur coat over her pink uniform, jumping out to scare Lupita. She goads Lupita into trying on a red silk gown on top of her blue uniform (“te queda bien padrote [it looks so badass on you]”). The combination is visually incongruous, parodic, and humorous, but it is their genuine delight in rule breaking that prevents the audience from laughing at them. The sisters then raid Marcela’s closet during the dance number that follows, “Debo hacerlo.” Donning an absurd assortment of Marcela’s clothing in a bus station bathroom, Suárez demonstrates how this clothing is a costume used to perform class status and hyperfemininity. Lupita and Marcela teeter through metal detectors, balancing on their sky-high heels. Their pink and blue uniforms have now been transformed into fancy dresses of the same colors, topped with furs. The ostentatious dress appears out of place and the shot scale emphasizes this—an extreme long shot of the sisters passing through security creates a comparison of their outlandish clothing with what typical working-class Mexicans in a bus station might wear (Fig. 5.2). That the women “come out” of Marcela’s closet to present their liberated selves does not seem unintentional. Since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, the figurative—and literal—space of the closet has been closely linked to the foundations of queer theory. Leaving the closet is precisely about making visible that which has been kept a secret,

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Fig. 5.2  Martina and Lupita pass through the bus station security in ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios?

in this case, the sisters’ desire to perform Marcela’s class status and reject societal expectations of domestic laborers. Wardrobe ultimately allows the film to theatricalize (a key feature of camp) the employer-employee relationship, calling attention to the artificiality of the power divide between the women who are just playing their assigned roles. Martina and Lupita bring attention to Marcela’s—and most wealthy Mexicans’—rampant materialism: the desire to have it all. The two literally wear it all: lavish gold jewelry, elegant dresses, furs, and heels. However, rather than ridicule Martina and Lupita the sequence reads as ironic—high fashion is socially incongruous with the bus station. As they board the bus, the shot dissolves into the next scene: a snooty auction fundraiser where their clothing would be read as appropriate. The sisters gleefully flout norms by taking pleasure in wearing clothes they must care for but are not allowed to wear. In spite of this joy, Martin and Lupita never quite occupy this new social position, signaling that they are in on camp’s joke, laughing with us at the absurdity of Marcela’s lavish life(style). Beyond using the mise-en-scène to call attention to the constructed nature of power dynamics, at the apex of its critique, ¿Qué le dijiste parodies and denaturalizes aspects of domestic labor through diegetic,

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e­ xcessive, highly choreographed musical sequences. Suárez employs queer camp to reconsider the nature of the work that domestic employees perform and to question the naturalization of feminine domestic labor and the resulting power relations within the household. This serious, politicized queer camp depends heavily on the established understanding of Juan Gabriel in the Mexican imaginary as both safe and radical. Madrid explains that the Divo “is culturally remarkable in that his songs have gained a special place in the hearts of Mexican fans by reinforcing expected gender roles and dichotomies, while his performance style and musical persona could be easily read as a powerful challenge to heteronormativity.”40 Implicitly, we see a divide between the archive and the repertoire in the meaning-making surrounding Juan Gabriel. Textually, his songs about love, sacrifice, loneliness, and heartache fit within the confines of heteronormative patriarchy, but aspects of Juan Gabriel’s embodied performance of queerness allow for his music to be read against the grain. Thus, the soundtrack to ¿Qué le dijiste enables the film to tap into his unspoken, queer repertoire to create layered meaning, subversively questioning labor, class, race, and gender relations while “passing” as heteronormative and apolitical. I take up queerness not in terms of sexuality but rather in the manner proposed by Moe Meyer in The Politics and Poetics of Camp: Queerness can be seen as an oppositional stance not simply to essentialist formulations of gay and lesbian identities, but to a much wider application of the depth model of identity which underwrites the epistemology deployed by the bourgeoisie in their ascendency to and maintenance of dominant power. As such, the queer label contains a critique of a more vast and comprehensive system of class-based practices of which sex/gender identity is only a part.41

Opposing foundational critics of Camp like Susan Sontag, Meyer makes it crystal clear that “Camp” (capitalized) is political and “gains its political validity as an ontological critique.”42 Unlike Horn, however, Meyer believes that pop culture is not “Camp” but rather “camp,” an “un-queer, apolitical” appropriation of Camp.43 His understanding delimits “Camp” to only radical subculture, and thus I follow Horn, who makes a case for politicized Camp within mainstream, commercial culture of the twenty-­ first century. Instead of questioning compulsory heterosexuality, this queer camp questions the compulsory power dynamics of patriarchal

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c­ apitalism that deem domestic labor to be naturally feminine, and as such allow the middle or upper-middle class to maintain their power by continuing to participate in capitalism without the impediments of domestic work. The following analysis of “Debo hacerlo” and “Yo no nací para amar” focuses on how women—domestic employees and employers—take up and transform Juan Gabriel’s songs to question the expectations of their lives and the power structures thrust on them within the domestic space. The “Debo hacerlo” sequence addresses rigid obligations for women and begins with a clever match-on-action. After verbally expressing a desire to be as white as Marcela (“me gustaría tener la piel más clara [I would like to have lighter skin]”), Martina and Lupita use her skin-­ bleaching cream. The hyperbole of literally burning one’s skin to lighten it underscores the deeply problematic, pigmentocratic attitude toward skin color in Mexico. This critique is not direct but floats among the campy exaggerations of the scene: Martina and Lupita, in Marcela’s lacy underwear, perch on her extravagant vanity in her closet as they apply the cream. Lupita whines, “¡Me pica! ¿Y esto lo hace uno por amor? [It stings! And this is what one does for love?]” Martina responds with snark, “Y por sexo [And for sex].” Lupita fans herself and the scene cuts to Marifer in the salon waiting for her foils to process. She exclaims, “¡Me pica! [It stings!]” and waves her hands in the same motion as Lupita. To comfort her, Marcela says, “Quieres verte guapísima, ¿no? [You want to look gorgeous, right?]” Marifer snaps, “¿Para quién? [For who?]” and Marcela responds with a superficially feminist, empty answer: “Para ti, por amor a ti [For you, for love of yourself].” The notion that these bodily sacrifices (personal upkeep) are somehow self-care juxtaposes with Martina’s humorous yet brutal honesty. Both actions, bleaching skin and hair, demonstrate an internalization of particularly oppressive beauty norms that task women with unrealistic and unachievable appearance goals. Instead of accepting this painful regimen as self-love, Marifer pauses and says, “Tal vez me consigo un amante [Maybe I’ll find a lover].” With a forceful strum of the guitar, the song begins. The choreographed, diegetic dance number that accompanies “Debo hacerlo” creates a campy atmosphere, connecting the salon with the closet and the problems that women and queer men face. A spotlight suddenly illuminates the left side of Marifer’s face: “Necesito buen amor, porque ya no aguanto más, veo la vida con dolor, quítenme esta soledad [I need a good love because I can’t stand it anymore, I see life with pain, take away

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my loneliness].” There is no acknowledgment of her song until Marifer draws out the last word, “soledad [loneliness],” and then all of the women in the salon simultaneously swivel their chairs to face the center aisle. While still sitting in the salon chairs, a visualization of being entrapped by heteropatriarchal beauty norms, the women move/dance in sync. The sequence begins to cut back and forth between Marifer and Marcela in the salon and Lupita and Martina in Marcela’s closet. A slew of gay men emerge from the salon’s backroom dancing with hairdryers and other salon tools. Lupita and Marcela model a selection of Marcela’s most extravagant clothing on the staircase, each look with different hair and makeup, in a series of quick cuts. The women and men in both sequences move with dramatic, exaggerated movements. Implicit solidarity is created between the domestic employees, their female employers, the salon men, and el Divo de Juárez as the lyrics say they are all bound by socially imposed solitude. Textually, Juan Gabriel’s “Debo hacerlo” could simply be read as an expression of desire for someone (a woman) to remedy the pain of his loneliness. Yet reading the song through the Divo’s repertoire, noting its lack of pronouns or (gender) specificity and taking into account his yelps and other vocal excesses, the queerness emerges.44 “Debo hacerlo” is born of societal restriction in which Juan Gabriel mourns his solitude due to an inability to freely have a same-sex partner in homophobic, heteronormative Mexican society. His lyrics are then reinterpreted to consider other disciplinary institutions in the context of ¿Qué le dijiste. Martina and Lupita face another form of solitude because of their limited ability to leave the house. This practice, inherent to live-in domestic employees but exacerbated by Marcela’s particular cruelty, inhibits their capacity to participate in romantic relationships. Alternatively, Marifer experiences solitude because her husband emotionally abandons her. Due to monogamy’s failure to satisfy her needs, Marifer flirts with the idea of an “amante [lover],” an inherent rejection of the institution through which the heteronormative, Mexican nuclear family (and capitalism) thrives. The film recodifies Juan Gabriel’s song, taking advantage of its multifaceted meaning and beneath-the-surface critique by pulling from aspects of his repertoire. Madrid argues that Juan Gabriel “offers a sense of intimate security” to fans and creates a place where “they can freely let go of the emotional restrictions imposed by social discipline” or “constraints.”45 In this way, the intimacy of “Debo hacerlo” opens a safe space for viewers to question the status quo and imagine what an alternative might look

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like. This denaturalization of gender and labor norms ends with a twist. Martina and Lupita, once again dressed in pastel uniforms, carry garbage bags out of the house and deposit them not into a trash can but a taxi. Unbeknownst to viewers, these bags are filled with clothing and accessories they took from Marcela’s closet. They “come out of the closet” and make themselves and their needs visible. Perhaps a more paradigmatic example of queer camp is the opening dance number, “Yo no nací para amar.” Suárez frames this song around a conversation on the street between a group of domestic employees. Lupita hopes to attend her cousin’s wedding even though it has been fifteen days since Marcela gave them time off. Martina snorts, teasing that Lupita only wants to go to see Pepe, her boyfriend. A friend asks Martina if she’s ever had a boyfriend and the song functions as her reply, “No, yo nunca he tenido novio. Yo creo que no nací para amar [No, I’ve never had a boyfriend. I think I wasn’t born to love].” Both the original song and the film’s version are power ballads, or “songs that grow bigger, louder and more fervent on the way to impassioned finales.”46 Juan Gabriel’s “Yo no nací para amar” has a slower tempo, utilizing a bass guitar, drums, and piano to highlight his iconic vocal stylings. More like a rock ballad, the film’s arrangement opens with a catchy pickup or anacrusis, increases the tempo, and relies on a guitar and drums combo to maintain the beat throughout.47 Martina sings from her chest with deep resonance, creating a tone of resistance and denunciation. She marches with determination into the middle of the street and remains in the center of the action, always facing forward and singing (or speaking?) to an off-screen listener. This is a declaration of injustice and a foreshadowing of the well-deserved revenge that is to come. She rips out her hair band, allowing her tidy ponytail to fall as she belts out the chorus. A group of domestic workers in blue, purple, and gray uniforms, an important part of the stylized color palette, chauffeurs dressed in suits, and gardeners in jumpsuits surround Martina in her pink uniform and provide the harmony for the chorus. The excessive number of characters who break into song are all coded as “in on the joke” while we see the clueless “outsiders” (their employers) committing adultery in the bedroom. This vision of solidarity among domestic employees suggests that Martina speaks not just for herself but as the voice of the oppressed multitude, camp’s in-group (Fig. 5.3). The setting here is important in the launch of the camp’s critique. The dramatized musical performance on the quiet streets of the stuffy, elitist neighborhood with perfectly manicured landscaping emphasizes the

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Fig. 5.3  Domestic employees perform “Yo no nací para amar” in the streets in ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios?

incongruity that defines camp. Here the street functions as a freeing space that queers domestic labor. By removing them from domestic space, Suárez deterritorializes domestic employees and enables viewers to consider domestic labor outside the confines of expectations. The women and men dance with brightly colored brooms and feather dusters; the irony of work tools becoming props along with the overdone choreography of the sequence gestures toward the performative nature of their labor. Isn’t all housework just a choreographed set of tasks performed by people who have been (artificially, racially) assigned those roles? The campy dance number denaturalizes and parodies labor, creating a critique of the unnatural expectations of the domestic employee. Precisely because of its superficial aestheticism, this queer camp very seriously questions why these people (with this appearance) do this labor while others are free to pursue pleasure and capital. Cross-cutting between the street and Marcela and Santiago’s sexual encounter emphasizes this inequality. The film carefully juxtaposes image and sound. Recycling Juan Gabriel’s reference to the solitary nature of homosexuality to address the plight of the domestic employee, we hear Martina sing, “Una soledad, cada vez más triste yo viví [I lived a loneliness, sadder every day],” but we see Santiago kiss Marcela. What gives

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Marcela the right to freely pursue a romantic relationship when she denies the domestic workers their right to leave the house and pursue the same sexual and romantic liberation? The editing technique emphasizes Marcela’s hypocrisy and widens the gap between classes. Colors play an important role in assigning a racial factor to this inequality. Santiago tears off Marcela’s cream colored  Chanel blouse (one that Martina later ruins) and his white dress shirt. Close-ups of their truncated bodies highlight the whiteness of their skin and Marcela’s bleach-blonde hair.48 The walls, bedding, and curtains of the bedroom are taupe, as is Marcela’s lingerie. This visually contrasts with the glossy, black hair of the domestic employees, their dark skin, and the asphalt. The pastel colors of their uniforms and the vibrant oranges, yellows, greens, and blues of the cleaning supplies seem unnaturally bright and out of place on the street. The color palette and “costumes” suggest an inherent artificiality to domestic work. It gestures toward the societally constructed division of labor based on skin color, pointing to race itself as a construct.49 Historian Marie Eileen Francois asserts that in contemporary Latin America “housekeeping is now seen as exclusively the domain of women, done by ‘housewives’ and hired help with few alternatives, both groups female, the latter often of color … That this situation seems ‘natural’ represents a double victory for patriarchy and racism.”50 The fact that ¿Qué le dijiste resists telenovelas’ “made-up maids” allows the film to visually register the racial dynamics of the Mexican household labor regime that can be traced back to colonial times. Casting choices allow the film to exaggerate this division: dark-skinned women work, light-skinned women manage their work. The film exposes how rigid racial and class structures separate women and pit them against each other, making them enemies rather than allies, a classic strategy of the patriarchy to maintain male domination. In this sense, ¿Qué le dijiste is problematic because it validates the revenge that Martina, Lupita, and Marifer seek to inflict on Marcela, excluding the husbands from the female-female conflict. Martina and Lupita do not feel the same rancor toward Héctor, who is also their employer, and although Marifer divorces Santiago it is Marcela she shoots and abandons on the side of the road in a fit of rage. While the film makes strides in an ontological critique of domestic labor, it ends on a low note in terms of representation. Yes, we are given resolution—albeit heteropatriarchal—to Lupita and Pepe’s storyline with their marriage, but what happens next for the brazen and now-­unemployed Martina who seemed like the heroine of the tale? Instead, ¿Qué le dijiste

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focuses on Marifer’s newfound independence (singing “Déjame vivir” to the scorned Santiago) and Marcela’s painful separation from her husband and child.51 The very last musical sequence, in which the cast and Juan Gabriel himself sing “Pero qué necesidad,” seemingly erases the hierarchical structures that the film critiques. Here staging and camerawork are of utmost importance. In the privileged, front-row positions just behind Juan Gabriel, dressed in a purple velvet suit and a flowery scarf, are Martina and Marifer. Lupita is largely hidden from sight, especially when the camera takes a low angle to frame Juan Gabriel in medium long shots. The sequence incorporates many close-ups—the first of Marifer, the second of Marcela, and then Pepe, perhaps because he is eye candy for the camp’s insiders. Lupita and Martina remain in the background of these close-ups, out of focus. The smiling cast seems both in and out of character in confusing ways: Pepe wears the mariachi suit from his wedding while Martina and Lupita are dressed similar to Marifer and Marcela, in extravagant gowns, jewelry, and full hair and makeup. At one point, we get a cutaway of Héctor lovingly twirling Marcela around the dance floor, an action that is incongruous given their bitter separation that ends the film. Importantly, the choreographed dancing here is understated, messy, and almost mechanical rather than theatricalized. In contrast to the previous dance numbers, it does not give the feeling of camp, most likely because this empty, saccharine ending curbs the political potential the rest of the film has built. The lyrics to the song serve to ameliorate the tension of social difference: the repetition of “¿Pero qué necesidad? ¿Para qué tanto problema? [But what is the need? What’s the big fuss about?]” in the chorus implicitly questions why there must be interclass strife when all can exist happily together. As opposed to what critics may suggest, we must take ¿Qué le dijiste seriously because of the efforts it makes to imbue domestic workers with interiority and expose the performative nature of domestic work through queer camp. In essence, both efforts lead back to subverting the overarching structure of domestic biopower that governs the household. In the advent of Latin American cinema that portrays more-nuanced domestic employer-employee relationships, domestic biopower as a category of analysis offers a potential framework for taking queer camp’s critique one step further. Domestic biopower underscores household power dynamics in terms of gender, race, and class, and also indicts the total absence of state regulation and protections of workers in the domestic space. Thus, the camp in ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? is also biopolitical, appealing to those

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who are oppressed by domestic biopower and exclusionary to those who reinforce existing (bio)power dynamics, identifiable by their uncomfortable, nervous laughter.

Notes 1. Katrin Horn, Women, Camp, and Popular Culture: Serious Excess (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 25. 2. Horn, Women, Camp, and Popular Culture, 25. 3. Horn, Women, Camp, and Popular Culture, 6. 4. Richard Dyer, “It’s So Camp as Keeps Us Going,” in The Culture of Queers, ed. Richard Dyer (New York: Routledge, 2002): 49–63. 5. Horn, Women, Camp, and Popular Culture, 2. 6. I call characters by their given names unless I am underscoring their social position, but terminology is emphasized on an extratextual level. ¿Qué le dijiste created two specialized trailers: one lists all the slang terms for domestic workers, and the other for female employers. 7. Jorge Ayala Blanco, La lucidez del cine mexicano (Mexico City, Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017), 262. 8. Ayala Blanco, La lucidez del cine mexicano, 263. 9. Ayala Blanco is particularly critical of the film’s use of the term “chacha” (instead of empleada doméstica or sirvienta) to describe Martina and Lupita, yet he himself—without irony—uses “chacha” throughout his review. 10. This is not the first time Suárez has incorporated societal critique in her work. Rosana Blanco Cano discusses how Así del precipicio (On the Edge, 2011), also written and directed by Suárez, develops intimate lesbian subjectivity and creates “espacios de poder que dislocan la compulsión heterosexual.” “Intimidad, deseo lesbico y representacion en el nuevo cine mexicano: Así del precipicio (Teresa Suárez, 2006),” Ámbitos feministas 1 (Fall 2011): 32. 11. Hugo Lara, “Crítica: “¿Qué le dijiste a Dios”? … ¿pero qué necesidad?” Corre Camara, January 17, 2014. http://www.correcamara.com.mx/inicio/int.php?mod=noticias_detalle&id_noticia=4809 12. Lara, “Crítica.” 13. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003), 19. 14. Carlos Monsiváis, “Instituciones: Juan Gabriel,” in Escenas de pudor y liviandad (Mexico City, Mexico: Debolsillo, 2003): 279–99. 15. One such anecdote is that famous variety show host Raúl Velasco supposedly convinced Televisa’s conservative CEO to allow Juan Gabriel to per-

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form on the Siempre en Domingo in spite of his homosexuality. This anecdote, missing from archival accounts, is recounted in the blog El Abogado del Diablo and cited as such in Pablo Arrendondo Rodríguez, “Juan Gabriel: los acicates del fervor,” in ¡A divo vida! Queremos tanto a Juanga, ed. José Antonio Farías Hernández (Mexico City, Mexico: Arteletra, 2017), 16–17. 16. Translation included in original. Alejandro L.  Madrid, “Secreto a Voces. Excess, Performance and Jotería in Juan Gabriel’s Vocality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 24, no. 1 (2018): 91. 17. Madrid, “Secreto a Voces,” 95. 18. Madrid, “Secreto a Voces,” 94. 19. The romantic comedies listed on the top-ten list are as follows: (1) No se aceptan devoluciones (Instructions Not Included, Eugenio Derbez, 2013), (2) Nosotros los nobles (The Noble Family, Gary Alazraki, 2013), (3) ¿Qué culpa tiene el niño? (Don’t Blame the Kid, Gustavo Loza, 2016), (5) No manches Frida (Nacho G. Velilla, 2016), (6) Hazlo como hombre (Nicolás López, 2017), and (9) Cásase quien pueda (Get Married If You Can, Marco Polo Constandse, 2014). IMCINE, Anuario estadístico de cine mexicano 2017 (Mexico City, Mexico: IMCINE and Secretaría de Cultura, 2018), 82, https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/anuario-estadistico 20. IMCINE, Anuario estadístico de cine mexicano 2014 (Mexico City, Mexico: IMCINE and Secretaría de Cultura, 2015), 48, https://www.imcine.gob. mx/cine-mexicano/anuario-estadistico 21. Ignacio Sánchez Prado, “Humorous Affects: Romantic Comedies in Contemporary Mexico,” in Humor in Latin American Cinema, eds. Juan Poblete and Juana Suárez (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 203–204. 22. Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2014). 23. Sánchez Prado, “Humorous Affects,” 204. 24. Andrea (Cecilia Suárez) asks Ana if Carlos “was big.” Ana responds, “His IQ was” and the domestic employee chimes in, “Señora, what’s an IQ?” The camera immediately cuts away, making the domestic employee’s lack of knowledge the butt of the joke. 25. Sánchez Prado, “Humorous Affects,” 204. 26. Whereas Golden Age Mexican Cinema was exclusively state sponsored, ¿Qué le dijiste has a mixed basket of funding, including Suárez’s private production company (Agárrate del Barandal), FIDECINE (governmental), the state of Puebla (for filming on location), and assorted corporate sponsorships with Cervecería Modelo, Jumex, José Cuervo, and Cinépolis that provide tax breaks to the companies through EFICINE 226.

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27. For more see Anne Doremus, Culture, Politics and National Identity in Mexican Literature and Film, 1929–1952 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 172–76. 28. See Olivia Cosentino, “Televisa Born and Raised: Lucerito’s Stardom in 1980s Mexican Media,” The Velvet Light Trap 78 (Fall 2016): 38–52. 29. Sánchez Prado, “Humorous Affects,” 215–16. 30. Three Juan Gabriel “star vehicle” films do exist, however. En esta primavera (Gilberto Martínez Solares, 1979), El Noa Noa (Gonzalo Martínez Ortega, 1981), and Es mi vida (Gonzalo Martínez Ortega, 1982) are briefly discussed in Madrid, “Secreto a voces,” 96. 31. Sánchez Prado notes that in the 1990s, “the working classes kept defining their affective experience in connection with the romance discourses already constituted by melodrama, which were then recycled in their near omnipresence of telenovelas on the airwaves and in the constant broadcasting of Golden Age cinema in the primetime spaces not covered by soap operas.” Screening Neoliberalism 78. ¿Qué le dijiste mines both sources to achieve a register that is familiar and legible to the working class. 32. Velázquez and Vargas, who play the domestic employees, appeared in Como dice el dicho (2011–2018) and La rosa de Guadalupe (2009–2015), respectively. Érika de la Rosa, the wealthy, fair-skinned employer, played a leading role in La Patrona (2013) while Mar Contreras previously appeared in Mar de amor (2009–2010), Teresa (2011), and La que no podía amar (2011–2012). 33. Exceptions to this trend in casting include Amorita Rasgado (Elodia), fellow domestic employee and cousin to Martina and Lupita; and Victor García, Lupita’s love interest. These two actors are not telenovela stars and appeared only in small filmic roles prior to ¿Qué le dijiste. 34. Sánchez Prado, “Humorous Affects,” 215–16. 35. Sofia Ríos, “Representation and Disjunction: Made-up Maids in Mexican Telenovelas,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 21, no. 2 (2015): 223. 36. Ríos, “Representation and Disjunction,” 223. 37. Ríos, “Representation and Disjunction,” 225. 38. “Gata” is a derogatory term for female domestic employees in Mexico; gato/a means cat in Spanish. 39. Suggesting all women are connected by their obsession with clothing is clearly an essentialized understanding of gender, yet it does connect well to the Divo, who also relies on clothing and appearance for his performance of queerness. 40. Madrid, Secreto a Voces, 90. 41. Moe Meyer, The Politics and Poetics of Camp (New York: Routledge, 1994), 2.

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42. Meyer, The Politics and Poetics of Camp, 1. 43. Meyer, The Politics and Poetics of Camp, 17, note 2. 44. Although only a portion is used in the film, “Debo hacerlo” runs 9:20, significantly longer than the three minutes of the average pop song. Even the song’s duration pushes listeners to question the rigid expectations of pop. 45. Madrid, “Secreto a voces,” 98. 46. David Metzer, “The Power Ballad,” Popular Music 31, no. 3 (2012): 437. 47. I am grateful to Brian Price for providing the musical vocabulary to describe the opening of the remix. 48. Erika de la Rosa dyed her hair for this production; she is actually a brunette. 49. Anibal Quijano demonstrates that “the idea of race … grant[ed] legitimacy to the relations of domination imposed by the conquest” arising in conjunction with the problem of labor in the colonial era. Thus, “race became the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the new society’s structure of power.” “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 534–35. 50. Marie Eileen Francois, “The Products of Consumption: Housework in Latin American Political Economies and Cultures,” History Compass 6 (2008): 227. 51. Suárez seems to idealize Marifer because of the (politically correct) sympathy she shows for the domestic employees throughout the film, but falls into the trap of shifting the narrative focus from the domestic workers to the wealthy, light-skinned housewife.

References Ayala Blanco, Jorge. 2017. La lucidez del cine mexicano. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Blanco Cano, Rosana. 2011. Intimidad, deseo lésbico y representación en el nuevo cine mexicano: Así del precipicio (Teresa Suárez, 2006). Ámbitos feministas 1: 25–43. Cosentino, Olivia. 2016. Televisa Born and Raised: Lucerito’s Stardom in 1980s Mexican Media. The Velvet Light Trap 78: 38–52. Doremus, Anne. 2001. Culture, Politics and National Identity in Mexican Literature and Film, 1929–1952. New York: Peter Lang. Dyer, Richard. 2002. It’s So Camp As Keeps Us Going. In The Culture of Queers, ed. Richard Dyer, 49–63. New York: Routledge. Farías Hernández, José Antonio, ed. 2017. ¡A divo vida! Queremos tanto a Juanga. Arteletra: Mexico City.

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Francois, Marie Eileen. 2008. The Products of Consumption: Housework in Latin American Political Economies and Cultures. History Compass 6: 207–242. Horn, Katrin. 2017. Women, Camp, and Popular Culture: Serious Excess. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. IMCINE. 2015. Anuario estadístico de cine mexicano 2014. Mexico City: IMCINE and Secretaría de Cultura. https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/ anuario-estadistico ———. 2018. Anuario estadístico de cine mexicano 2017. Mexico City: IMCINE and Secretaría de Cultura. https://www.imcine.gob.mx/cine-mexicano/ anuario-estadistico Lara, Hugo. 2014. Crítica: “¿Qué le dijiste a Dios”? … ¿pero qué necesidad? Corre Camara, January 17. http://www.correcamara.com.mx/inicio/int.php?mod= noticias_detalle&id_noticia=4809 Madrid, Alejandro L. 2018. Secreto a Voces. Excess, Performance and Jotería in Juan Gabriel’s Vocality. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 24 (1): 87–111. Metzer, David. 2012. The Power Ballad. Popular Music 31 (3): 437–459. Meyer, Moe. 1994. The Politics and Poetics of Camp. New York: Routledge. Monsiváis, Carlos. 2003. Escenas de pudor y liviandad. Mexico City: Debolsillo. Quijano, Anibal. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South 1 (3): 533–580. Ríos, Sofia. 2015. Representation and Disjunction: Made-Up Maids in Mexican Telenovelas. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 21 (2): 223–233. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. 2016. Humorous Affects: Romantic Comedies in Contemporary Mexico. In Humor in Latin American Cinema, ed. Juan Poblete and Juana Suárez, 203–222. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014. Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988– 2012. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Defamiliarizing the Maid: Alicia Scherson’s Play Susana Domingo Amestoy

The subject of this chapter is the female Mapuche care worker at the center of Alicia Scherson’s first film Play (2005).1 What follows is a three-part reflection on the filmic representation of domestic labor in Play, an example of the Chilean Cine Novísimo, and the ways in which the film defamiliarizes the maid not only to abandon the family as a central figure in social relations but also to foreground the role that class consciousness may play within the neoliberal city. In the first part, I focus on how the film locates the maid within the global city and its landscape. In the second part, I argue that by defamiliarizing the maid—that is, by taking the domestic worker out of the contexts with which she is typically associated— Scherson’s film defies normative representations of the maid as represented, for example, in the later film La Nana (The Maid) (2009) by Chilean film director Sebastián Silva. Here I argue that while Silva’s film presents the family that employs the maid as the idealized figure of social relations in Chile, Scherson’s Play transforms the city into the domestic worker’s object of desire. In the third part, I propose that Scherson’s representations of spectatorship, and particularly the film’s interest in what S. Domingo Amestoy (*) University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_6

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can be described as a virtual gaze, conflates neoliberal cosmopolitanism with freedom. Ultimately, this essay aims to understand how Scherson’s film extends and even challenges what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible” that determines “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception.” Rancière describes the way in which the meaningful fabric of the sensible is disturbed as “heterology,” when an image or “an expression does not find its place in the system of visible coordinates where it appears.” For Rancière, a work of art is political only if it disrupts the “relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable.”2 Through content and form, Scherson’s work disturbs gender and class categories associated with the domestic worker within the sphere of Chilean society and cinema. As the first digital film produced in Chile for wide distribution, Play considers the kinds of freedom and agency that living within the globalized capital of Santiago affords by way of its main character, Cristina Llancaqueo (Viviana Herrera), a young Mapuche woman. Cristina lives and works in the house of Milo (Francisco Copello), a sick, elderly Jewish Hungarian immigrant. Exploring the Mapuche domestic’s life and the invisibility and anonymity she embodies, Play portrays Cristina moving through Santiago much like a detective, mapping social boundaries within the neoliberal landscapes of the city. Critics have tended to see Scherson’s character as a version of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, the urban stroller whose observations offer insight into the nature of modernity. More specifically, Scherson’s character is a version of the female flâneur, the flâneuse, who possesses the freedom to roam the city on her own, and who, as Anne Friedberg reminds us, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a symptom of “new configurations of consumer culture.”3 The twenty-first-­ century postmodern city of Santiago and its consumer culture have been the subject of many recent Chilean films such as Alberto Fuguet’s Se arrienda (2005) and Velódromo (2010), but where these films depict Chilean elites enjoying the privileges of class that the city affords, Play instead focuses on the question of class inequality. At the same time, Scherson’s domestic-­flâneuse transgresses this social divide to construct a cinematic display of image and time in constant friction, laying bare the contradictions of modern spectatorship and its distribution of the sensible. By using filmic techniques that express the uncanny nature of what I describe below as an aesthetic of defamiliarization, Scherson disrupts this distribution of the sensible with an eye to empowering the marginalized care worker. If for Rancière having a particular occupation determines

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“the ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community,” this distribution of the sensible also defines “who is able to take charge of what is common to the community,” and therefore what can be seen within a common space.4 In the case of Scherson’s film, the care worker takes center stage in the common space of cinema. She is framed by a narrative that disrupts the linear development of events through a montage that returns to and revisits those events from different perspectives. In Play, this unusual cinematographic aesthetic has a democratizing function, presenting a strong working-class and indigenous female character in opposition to the weak upper-class male counterpart. This aesthetic has also helped Scherson receive, first, international recognition and later recognition, if not from mainstream audiences, then at least of film critics in Chile. During the last FEMCINE8 in Santiago, Chile, a film festival showcasing work by women filmmakers, Alicia Scherson was recognized with an award for her career as a leading figure in Chilean cinema. The festival organizers praised the distinctive style of her films and their defiant look at social and gender structures, as well as her work as scriptwriter, producer, and professor at the Universidad de Chile, where she teaches a new generation of Chilean filmmakers. In addition, Play was supported by the Chilean CORFO Film Fund as well as by the International Rotterdam Film Festival’s Hubert Bals Grant, and won the Best New Tribeca Narrative Filmmaker award. The film was produced with funding from national and international organizations and first achieved critical acclaim outside of Chile.

From Nuevo Cine to the Neoliberal City of Novísimo Cinema Play has been considered one of the pioneering works of the Novísimo Cine Chileno. Ascanio Cavallo and Gonzalo Maza, who originally coined the term, explain that this wave of filmmakers was not widely received at home but gained a wider audience for their films at international festivals. The list of filmmakers associated with the Novísimo wave includes Alicia Scherson, Sebastián Lelio, Matías Bize, Fernando Lavanderos, and Alberto Fuguet. As Cavallo and Maza point out, these filmmakers acquired a self-­ reflexive form associated with their works within the academic environment of film schools, and benefited not just from national and international funding but also from new networks of distribution thanks to the emer-

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gence of Web platforms. These critics applied the term to this new generation of filmmakers to highlight their relationship with the previous generation known as the Nuevo Cine Chileno, which includes filmmakers such as Sergio Bravo, Miguel Littin, Pedro Chaskel, Patricio Guzmán, and particularly Raúl Ruiz. According to John King, the Nuevo Cine Chileno developed from the Universidad de Chile’s Cinema Club in the 1950s and extended in 1959 to the Centro de Cine Experimental under the direction of Sergio Bravo, who aimed to implement a new cinematic language closer to a critical realism that broke with the conventions of official Chilean cinema.5 The 1973 coup and its violent aftermath during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship drastically reduced national film production, and most Chilean filmmakers were forced to continue their careers in exile. The link between these two cinemas is their shared rejection of commercial cinema in favor of creative freedom. Yet, where the Nuevo Cine Chileno sought to affirm “una conciencia política, y la defensa de su conexión cultural con su propio pueblo, [a political conscience, and the defense of their cultural connection to their own people],” the Novísimos suggest that the idea of a collective community has disappeared into the landscape of neoliberalism.6 Particularly relevant to Play are two films by Raúl Ruiz—Palomita blanca (1973), which portrays a female character strolling the class-divided neighborhoods of Santiago, and was released only after the transition to democracy in 1992, and the 16-mm short film Ahora te voy a llamar hermano (1971), which focuses on the Mapuche question during Salvador Allende’s government. Depicting the political crisis and class conflict surrounding the presidential elections of 1970, Palomita blanca satirizes through a rich/poor love story how soap opera spectatorship grounds the sentimental education of its main character, a seventeen-year-old working-­ class girl. In Ruiz’s film, the maids working in the house of the Chilean upper class remain in the background. When the film does focus on one of them, a young maid who in one scene shares her bed with the son of her employer, it infantilizes her and shows her hitting the walls with dolls that the son has given her. In Ahora te vamos a llamar hermano, Ruiz recounts the historical injustices committed against the indigenous peoples of Chile. This is marked by the hope for a government that will allow them to recover their lands. The title refers to the efforts on the part of Salvador Allende’s government to incorporate the Mapuche community into the larger national project by identifying them as “hermano.” By the end of Ruiz’s film, we see the Chilean president promising a form of restitution

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by way of agrarian reform. The dictatorship would eventually put an end to the Unidad Popular’s reforms, and instead enact an antiterrorism law in 1984 that continues to target Mapuche communities today. Three decades later, Scherson’s film tells the story of a young woman from one of these communities and her experiences in the capital city of Santiago. As Scherson’s film suggests, since the 1980s, the migration of this community to urban centers increasingly comprised women seeking employment in the service sector (primarily domestic service), forms of employment that renders them socially invisible.7 In this sense, Play is animated by concerns that were just as central to previous Latin American cinema, including the questions of uneven modernity and class inequality. Nevertheless, Scherson’s film distances itself from naturalist dramas that sought to denounce such conditions in favor of a fragmented postmodern narrative that by featuring decentered notions of identity remains more subtle in its critique of similar issues.8 In other words, Scherson allows her character to bypass marginality and claims what appears to be a kind of agency that she believes working as a care worker in the city might provide. To this end, Scherson provides her protagonist with the opportunity to play with different identities: Cristina disguises herself as a virtual avatar, a flâneuse, a detective, a nurse, and even a member of the upper class, identities that end up giving her the ability to move freely through the city. In doing so, Scherson not only repurposes the domestic worker’s invisibility as a source of freedom but also defamiliarizes common portrayals of domestic workers in cinema that are central, as we will see, to a film like Silva’s La Nana. The identification of invisibility and freedom as a version of going incognito that Play stages are central features of the film’s aestheticization of a neoliberal urban setting. Cristina embraces the idea of staying in the city as opposed to the countryside, which she identifies with cold and poverty. For this reason, she ends up rejecting the romantic proposal of Manuel (Juan Pablo Quezada), a gardener who works in her neighborhood and idealizes the south that Cristina rejects. The narrative subsequently follows her daily routine—strolling the streets, window shopping, and playing the video game “Street Fighter” or “los flippers” in arcades. While working in the house, she finds a briefcase belonging to Tristán Greenberg (Andrés Ulloa), an architect and member of the Chilean upper class whose wife, Irene (Aline Kupperhein), has left him, causing him to suffer an existential crisis. Intending to return his briefcase, Cristina eventually tracks down the architect, but ends up following him through dif-

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ferent, socially divided neighborhoods, observing from afar his daily life and interactions. The film then follows Tristán into other spaces where he encounters his aloof wife, his blind mother (Coca Guazzini), and her opportunist Argentinian lover, Ricardo (Jorge Allis). Cristina appears to have few opportunities for human, verbal interactions in the city outside of the neighborhood where she works and lives, limiting herself to the role of an active observer throughout most of the film. Nevertheless, her agency as a viewer allows her to map the city and her own space within it. The possibility of a romantic relationship between Tristán and Cristina at the end of the film, similar to the one between her and the gardener, is abandoned in favor of presenting a character that searches for her own independence within the city. In lieu of a dramatic ending, Scherson concludes the film with Cristina looking at the city from above, atop the hospital building, where, thanks to her, Tristán and his ex-wife are reunited. In the last scene’s long panning shot of Santiago, we see Cristina by herself, assertively whistling and insisting on her place within the space of the city. In the end, Cristina does not stand outside the global system of late capitalism, represented by McDonald’s golden arches, but rather faces it. Her whistling recalls our first encounter with Cristina as she strolls through the city during the opening credits scene, suggesting a return to her initial self, the flâneuse in the city. As José Cademartori explains, Chile has one of the more-permissive legislation concerning foreign investment since many Chilean companies belong to multinationals. As is well known, such economic policies find their origins in the dictatorship’s free market militarism, itself designed by a group of economists from the University of Chicago—trained technocrats whose goal was to open Chile to the world economy through a neoliberal economic program.9 Even the Concertación period (1990–2010), when the country was governed by a coalition of center-left parties, extended the neoliberal economic policies of the Pinochet era. While the effects of such policies were softened during this same period by welfare programs aimed at poverty reduction, by 2004, Chile had one of the worst income distribution records in Latin America. From the film’s opening credits on, Cristina traces the city, going, as Vania Barraza Toledo explains, from the mall in Estación Central, across footpaths in Puente and Calle Huérfanos, and to the neighborhood of Yungay. Far from seeming obscure or dangerous, Cristina’s itinerary is displayed in bright daylight and vivid colors thanks to the film photography and use of a pristine digital recording.10

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Both Cristina and the city are portrayed as highly photogenic, and in this way, Scherson defamiliarizes stereotypes of urban chaos and poverty. The city of Santiago appears as a bright modern metropolis and the maid as a stylized care worker, distancing both from images of abject spaces and subjects. As Sarah Wright explains, Play views Santiago through a sanitized lens as part of Scherson’s project was to depict the city cinematically: “The portrayal is leafy, with wide boulevards and buildings drenched in oranges and blues.” Wright also notes that the gated communities with pools of Las Condes and the Mercado Central are “lovingly reproduced,” adding that this sanitized view presents “plazas tended, the gardens manicured.”11 This depiction could not be more distant from the adjectives used by Tomás Moulian to describe the neoliberal Chilean city: “Hoy día Santiago es una ciudad violenta, descontrolada, desordenada [Nowadays Santiago is a violent, uncontrolled, and disorderly city].”12 While Cristina asserts her gaze as a voyeur throughout the film, surveilling urban space and those who inhabit the city, she is presented as possessing a strong presence as she moves through bright streets. Cristina’s character thus contrasts with the film’s presentation of the upper-class character Tristán and his walk through the city. He appears depressed, drunk, dehydrated, the victim of an attack on the street at night, and his fall from a construction building marks his symbolic fall from class privilege. Turning gender and class relations on their head, Scherson challenges what Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.”13 Scherson allows her character to be in charge of her own gaze. She provides her main character, Cristina, with the tools to surveil the city, so that instead of being a marginalized maid under the surveillance of an employer/family, she is in complete control of her walk through the city. In Scherson’s work the film’s portrayal of the city also involves a depiction of everyday experiences that Wright analyzes by drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of “pedestrian speech act,” whereby distant neighborhoods appear visually linked, a linking that Tristán and Cristina perform as they walk around the city: “From mall to market, opera house to cemetery … We find a performed linking between Las Condes and La Cisterna, Providencia and the Mercado Central, centre and periphery, affluent and deprived areas.”14 For the Chilean critic Valeria de los Ríos, moreover, Scherson’s project is more an attempt to produce what Fredric Jameson has described as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping capable of giving rise to a form of class consciousness.15 Cristina collects and organizes the architect’s lost belongings, mapping where he lives and works, and crossing

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between Santiago’s socially stratified neighborhoods, and in so doing, locates herself within a vast, unrepresentable totality. For Jameson, such attention to space is an ideological operation, one that “will have as its vocation the invention and projection of global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as spatial scale.”16 The film’s concluding scene gestures toward this aesthetic of cognitive mapping that the figure of Cristina, the neoliberal flâneuse, comes to embody. However, in Play the viewers see signs of potential forms of resistance to such inequality: wall banners that appear throughout the film and a workers’ strike demonstrate a resistance to the disappearance of the commons within the city. Indeed, in the first scene on the construction site where Tristán works as an architect, he is made aware of the workers’ strike. Tristán later learns that the workers have decided to end the strike, even though the company has not accepted their demands for higher wages. Nevertheless, a previous shot intended to contrast with those scenes in which characters related to Tristán’s life enjoy the benefits of the upper class under neoliberalism shows Cristina in front of the striking workers who are demanding “Sueldos dignos ya [Fair wages now].” Here the workers are portrayed as a united community: cooking for each other, eating together, creating banners, playing, and talking to Cristina, who, for a few seconds, is filmed in front of the strike as a silent witness (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1  Cristina in front of the striking workers in Play

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This community is seen not as a given but rather as a work in progress, that is, as a figure for future alliances and social movements that will strengthen workers’ unions.17 Ultimately, this workers’ strike is a failure as many return to work without having their demand for better wages met. This can be contrasted to the various forms that other conflicts take in the film, for example, a scene showing the workers fighting in the streets is contrasted to Cristina’s reenactment of the video game “Street Fighter II,” in which she imagines herself as the character Jin Lu, occupying a virtual space within the city. Indeed, the “virtual” identity Cristina assumes, an identity afforded by global technologies, plays with some of the leitmotivs of Scherson’s film. This scene relates to the opening scene in the film where we are shown an extreme close-up shot of Cristina’s hands playing in the arcade; in one of her many walks through the city, Cristina uses the game to craft/create an imaginary self that allows her to bypass a position devoid of agency as a doubly marginalized Mapuche/domestic care worker. She does this by defending a young girl who is being beaten on the street by an older woman; in the scene, the image becomes pixelated, as if to suggest that she occupies a hybrid space between the video game screen and the filmed images. In the end, Cristina runs away, scared of her own actions. This scene of defamiliarization produces self-rejection in Cristina, and we do not see her again in the arcade or acting out the video game. According to Sigmund Freud’s account of the uncanny, such defamiliarization is produced “by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality, such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions and significance of the thing it symbolizes.”18 This scene consequently lends itself to a critique of the forms of alienation produced by technology but also to a kind of self-awareness. Cristina is presented within a virtual reality that undermines the difference between reality and semblance, and therefore allows her to feel the violence of an empty imaginary field. Unlike other moments when she is strolling through the city filmed with a deep focus image, Cristina appears in this scene defamiliarized by the video game. Its effects create a shock in Cristina after the flood of feelings caused by the hyperstimulation of the video game. Thus, the effects of the game as an allegory of media effects in spectatorship and consumerism are not far from the waning of affect that Fredric Jameson describes as a symptom of the postmodern subject who has lost the active ability to create a sense between past and future, and therefore only reduces his/her cultural

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­ roduction to “heaps of fragments.”19 This is also counteracted by the p haptic images in the film in which smelling, listening, and touching work to overcome this waning of affect.20 However, in this scene Cristina appears hyperbolically framed in the logic of the perpetual present of postmodernism through simulacra. Nevertheless, viewers see how this happens just after she looks from afar at Tristán and his ex-wife getting closer. After the scene in which she impersonates a video game character, she chooses to develop a closer tie with the gardener, although she rejects the idea of any formal relationship as she expresses her desire to remain in Santiago.

Defamiliarizing: Between the Private and the Public Space Drawing on Carole Pateman, Judith Squires argues that the social contract that generated liberal politics and established the political freedom of individuals also entailed the sexual subordination of women in marriage and in the private sphere. The liberal state also takes for granted that those engaged in waged work rely on the support and care of someone at home.21 Thus, in the case of home care workers and maids, the division between private and public space becomes blurred due to the degree to which their job security and flexibility depends on giving up their private lives. Family/employer relations develop within the private space of the house, where the care worker in Play and the maid in Sebastián Silva’s film La nana work and live. But unlike Cristina who takes control of the house where she lives and works until Milo’s death, in La nana Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), who has been the live-in maid for the Valdes family for decades, feels threatened when Mrs. Valdes (Claudia Celedón) hires additional maids to take pressure off of her. Raquel has suffered from dizzy spells due to overexposure to cleaning chemicals, and this oversanitizing process itself becomes the symbolic effect of oppression that gives rise to the resentment Raquel feels toward the new employees that threaten her place in the house. Nevertheless, in the first shot in Silva’s work, Raquel appears inside the kitchen as if segregated from the rest of the house, in the only space where she feels adequate when they are celebrating her own birthday. Unlike Cristina, Raquel only leaves the house to buy clothes, to visit the countryside, and to jog at night in the final scene of the film.

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In Play Cristina is depicted first outside and then inside the house, marking the importance of her identity in relation to the public sphere of the city and beyond the private sphere of the house. The inside is presented with a shot of a domestic’s robe hanging on the door and another close-up of a tiny plant next to her bed on top of a chair. In this scene of scarcity, the camera pans over her body and objects, making her central to the viewer’s focus but without stealing her privacy, suggesting that she is in control of her own image as she gazes at herself in a mirror. The film does not present her as an object of desire within the house nor for the spectator. Sitting on her bed, she changes her shoes as the camera develops a portrait of her routine with a main shot of her bare feet, which she immediately places into light-blue working sandals, before the camera moves toward her head with a close-up shot in which she ties up her hair. In this scene Cristina does not gaze at the camera but rather at her own self in her mirror, displaying the importance of searching for and constructing her own image. This scene inverts Laura Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure; here there is no cinematographic equivalent of the pleasure that comes from seeing the split between active/male and passive/female that Mulvey ascribes to woman as image and man of bearer of the look in cinema.22 Cristina is portrayed as a care worker possessing an active gaze, which she uses to defamiliarize herself and her identity. The mirror scene is recreated in two more scenes in her bedroom: one in which she wakes up and starts moving around as the female character of the video game Street Fighter, and another in which she smokes cigarettes she has found in Tristán’s suitcase. In a later scene at the mall, Cristina follows Irene, Tristán’s ex-wife, and gazes timidly at her. In turn, Irene gazes at herself in a store mirror with confidence while trying on a dress that Cristina will later steal from her, as a way of playing with Irene’s identity. This scene draws a parallel between La nana and Play since both of these characters emulate their upper-class counterparts by dressing as them. However, where Play’s cinematography indicates that the gaze belongs to Cristina, in La nana, Raquel’s employer/family constantly scrutinizes her behavior, suggesting the opposite. As a care worker, Cristina also looks after Milo, but her job affords the flexibility and free time to explore Santiago. Cristina does not speak in the first four minutes of the film. It is only in minute seven that the spectator hears her voice, when she addresses Milo, who answers by nodding his head. Importantly, all extradiegetic soundtrack music disappears once Cristina walks into the house for the first time, and this calm silence is a

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consistent element of her interactions with Milo.23 She gently wakes him up, takes his pulse, and props him up so he can eat the breakfast that she has prepared for him. She reads him an issue of National Geographic devoted to Las tribus ocultas de la Amazonia, but no sign of identification is presented between the ethnic description and her Mapuche origin, which she later defamiliarizes through a linguistic code-switching. After this opening sequence, there are only five more intercalated sequences in which Cristina is filmed inside Milo’s house. Cristina wears the light-blue uniform that looks like the stylish, hipster-like vintage clothing from the 1950s inside and outside of the house.24 Play also draws our attention to the apparent invisibility of affective labor (or care work) in relation to value production within the contemporary economy. This is further underlined later when Cristina tells the gardener that nobody knows her in the city even though she has been living there for a while. Cristina takes advantage of this anonymity to play with identities. We can therefore understand the pervasive need for individualism that Cristina portrays in the film. As Joanne Page explains, “The affective and sensorial dimensions of film, and its strong formal, generic and narrative investments in the individual, lend a particular force to the exploration of new affective regimes and the new responsibilities of self-care and self-­ authorship that fall to the individual under neoliberalism.”25 In other words, for Page, Cristina has only herself in order to survive in the portrayed neoliberal city of Santiago. Cristina ultimately reaches out to her mother in the countryside after she discovers that Milo has died. In this dramatic, one-shot, short sequence, the spectator sees Cristina crying after hearing her mother’s voice. There are only two sequences in the film in which she contacts her mother over the phone, and both are in Milo’s house. Before we delve into the content of this first exchange, it is worth noting that the visual aesthetic of this phone conversation is full of recurrent motifs related to the film’s techniques of defamiliarization that distance Cristina from her Mapuche origin and her role as care worker. The hat, the puzzle, and especially the mirror and the map of “El Gran Santiago” reflected in it are visible throughout this sequence (Fig. 6.2). While talking to her mother Cristina distracts herself by building a puzzle, as she constructs “another self” reflected in the mirror. Wearing Milo’s old Gatsby-style cap, Cristina here prefigures the later sequence in which she imitates Tristán’s estranged wife by wearing her makeup and black dress, the same dress we see Cristina wearing at Milo’s funeral. Wearing

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Fig. 6.2  Cristina’s reflection in the mirror with the map of Santiago in Play

Milo’s cap can be read as Cristina’s efforts to empower herself as caregiver in a house where she does not have anyone governing her daily routine. At the same time, Scherson’s domestic has a relaxed relationship with her employer, Milo; that relationship could be considered an inverted image of the maid in Silva’s La nana, whose relationship to her employers turns bitter when the sentiment of belonging to the family is threatened by the introduction of new maids into the household. In Cristina’s case, her position within her employer’s house is presented not as the fantasy of belonging to Milo’s family but rather as the fantasy of having a right to the space and freedom that the city is thought to provide. Indeed, her appreciation of the city can be explained by a kind of mirage that the Chilean sociologist Tomás Moulian associates with the false sense of possibility precipitated by a pseudocosmopolitanism of consumerism in postdictatorship Santiago. Moulian criticizes the inaccurate impression that poor and rich have the same right to access the city, in particular, the mall: “En el mall lo kitsch cumple la función de hacer creer en la igualdad transclase del consumo. Este genera la impresión de que pobres y ricos pueden pasearse con igual derecho [In the mall the kitsch fulfills the function of making us believe in the transclass equality of consumerism].”26 Returning to Cristina’s first phone conversation with her mother, we can see how she defamiliarizes her linguistic code in the city as a possible

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step toward assimilation. In her conversational code-switching, Cristina speaks in Mapudungun (subtitled in Spanish) when talking about her cousins and her job; her mother’s responses are only implied by Cristina’s answers because the viewer does not hear her. At one point during this conversation Cristina says, “Por qué dice eso. Cómo se me va a morir si yo lo cuido bien. Pero usted sueña cualquier cosa. Recuerda cuando soñó que yo parí pollitos. [Why do you say that? How is he going to die if I take good care of him? Do you remember when you dreamt that I gave birth to baby chicks?]” The point is not only that Cristina defends her role as care worker, symbolically rejecting the idea of motherhood, but also that the rigid relationship between employer and employee is softened by a shot of the well-cared-for plant in Milo’s room, drawing a parallel between the innocuous plant and the unthreatening nature of Milo’s relationship to Cristina. We should also note that Cristina’s point-of-view shots inside the house allow the character to create a hypersubjective gaze whereby the female gaze gains control of the narrative. In this scene, Cristina insists on remaining in the city. Her mother wants her to come back home to the countryside, but Cristina replies in Spanish as she looks out the window, insisting that she likes Santiago and expects her family to understand this. During the conversation Cristina switches to Spanish again only when referring to money, such as when she mentions the money she has sent her mother to buy presents for relatives, pushing aside the identity in Mapudungun that her mother wants her to embrace. In his discussion of the differences between various generations of immigrant Mapuches, Nicolas Gissi observes that while previous generations only preserved their culture/language inside their home, today Mapuche seems to be more accepted as an identity in the city. Gissi also notes that the national census now includes the category of “Mapuche urbano,” a label that risks separating the group from their extended communities and erasing a collective history belonging to their ethnic identity.27 Nonetheless, in Play, Cristina prefers the city over the countryside, so much so that she remains unmoved by her aunt’s decision to sell a plot of land. This is unlike what we see in a later film like La nana. In his analysis of Silva’s film, Steve Buttes examines how it presents temporary employment in the city as an imagined solution to the difficult realities of the rural-­ labor sector due to the flexible labor structures emerging from Chile’s first neoliberal reforms. Not unlike its criollista antecedents, for Buttes, La nana suggests that what makes the maid ill and unhappy is a hypocritical

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urban social order and that only a return to the countryside offers “both respite and happiness.”28 However, in Play the countryside is a source of neither respite nor happiness. Thus, when the gardener, Manuel, expresses concern for Cristina’s future after Milo’s death, she replies that she will look for another job and that “la señora” (Milo’s daughter) has allowed her to stay a few more days in the house. At this point, the viewer understands just how much of Cristina’s relationship to her employers Scherson has left out of the frame. More importantly, the film also emphasizes Cristina’s insistence on remaining in the city as opposed to the countryside—the south where having children and living in poverty seem to be the only options available to her, as suggested by Manuel. In this way, Play evokes, only to abandon, the very family values that were central to the allegory of the nation under Augusto Pinochet, here subverted by various elements that comprise the film’s narrative. We can again contrast this with Silva’s film, which, as the director himself has suggested, centers on the close relationship between the Chilean domestic worker and the family. As Silva himself puts it in recalling his own childhood, “The maid was a third parent rather than someone serving [me].”29 Whereas this intimacy is central to Silva’s film, which the director recorded in his childhood home, it remains absent from Play largely because Scherson is more interested in defamiliarizing its urban characters as if all were foreigners in their own city. In Scherson’s film, the main character is portrayed as a postmodern individual living in consumer society—even if she doesn’t get to consume much—who claims a certain freedom from the poverty that reproductive labor in the south demands, a freedom that the city might allow. The city as the domestic worker’s object of desire comes to replace the family as the idealized figure for social relations. In Play, the promise of the family seems to be replaced by the promise of a certain kind of illusory freedom that the city affords. Following the phone conversation sequence the viewer sees a shot of the floor in Cristina’s room where she is observing and analyzing Tristán’s belongings after emptying his suitcase. Having classified the items, Cristina tries to put together clues that might help her better understand Tristán’s life while defamiliarizing herself by playing with Tristán’s identity by means of his lost objects. She tracks his address on the map, listens to his music, smokes his cigarettes, organizes his credit cards and IDs, and later in the film, reads his agenda and develops his photographic film. In a sense, she assumes the role of a film director by tracking and recording the subject’s life, just as a director constructs a narrative. This parallel is made

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even more explicit when later, at the photo shop in the mall, the film director herself makes a cameo appearance. Between the displayed objects of Tristán’s suitcase, we see a flyer for a real estate project clearly designed for Santiago’s elite. The flyer reads “Encuentro familiar,” symbolically foreshadowing a later sequence in the film when Tristán returns to his mother’s house. This house is one of the few spaces in the film that Cristina cannot enter although the viewer follows Tristán into his mother’s house, making the link between what is visible and what is not explicit. Far from the happy portrait presented on the flyer, the scene at Tristán’s house dramatizes the unraveling of a family. Not unlike Cristina who reaches her mother in a moment of crisis, Tristán tries to reach out to his own mother, though this contact does not provide any solutions. Here we see how Tristán’s blind mother pays attention to a comment about how Spanish multinationals are taking over Chilean local firms, but her younger Argentine lover, a magician, is a symbol of the empty promises of globalization, or as Page and Nie point out, “a spokesperson for the neoliberal discourse.”30 While we are briefly introduced to Tristán’s life and his work as an architect before Cristina opens the ­suitcase, the objects she finds there trigger different lines of inquiry for her and for the viewer (Fig. 6.3).

Fig. 6.3  Cristina organizing Tristán’s objects in Play

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A Redistribution of the Sensible: The Neoliberal Cosmopolitan and the Domestic’s Virtual Gaze In one of her many incognito walks through the city, Cristina enters Tristán’s apartment while Irene is home. Once the upper-class woman leaves the apartment, Cristina puts on Irene’s dress and takes her purse before leaving, but only after the camera pans to a book on a table. Published in 2000, the book, Un-fashion, is a curated work of visual anthropology by Tibor Kalman, a graphic designer and editor-in-chief of Colors, a magazine that celebrates multiculturalism. Colors is a Benetton publication, the same company that faced criticism over its purchase of Mapuche lands in Argentina. This detail indicates that Scherson’s portrayal is marked by an awareness of the underlying contradictions in a type of multiculturalism that perpetuates class inequalities. Indeed, as Patricia Richards has noted, “Multicultural policies work well with the neoliberal agenda because they promote cultural recognition without the economic and political redistribution that would lead to greater equality.”31 Thus, Cristina undergoes a process of self-estrangement and defamiliarization by playing with other identities, yet by the end of the film becomes aware of her own limited options, thereby acquiring a form of class consciousness. Elaborating on the notion of cosmopolitanism, Anthony Appiah observes that “cultural purity is an oxymoron”—a fact that Cristina’s character seems to embody—and that anyone, culturally speaking, already lives a cosmopolitan life.32 Nevertheless, a cosmopolitanism that accepts cultural differences while ignoring economic inequality misses the point by accepting a distribution of the sensible that perpetuates such inequality. This is, in other words, a neoliberal cosmopolitanism. “Artistic practices,” according to Rancière, are “ways of doing and making” that intervene in the general distribution of “modes of being and forms of visibility,” we might say that Scherson’s film reconfigures the distribution of the sensible.33 Drawing on cinematic montage while creating a virtual gaze that reminds us of the flâneur’s encounter with modernity, Scherson’s Play presents a type of spectatorship that, following Friedberg, we can describe as allowing the flâneuse to assume “new identities to be worn and discarded.”34 Scherson also juxtaposes this virtual gaze with an intradiegetic spectator, a girl in a school uniform that stares at the camera while touching a scar. This girl appears in three scenes as a ubiquitous presence without taking a clear diegetic part in the narrative: in the arcade, in the park, and in a bar, though we only glimpse her for a few

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seconds. Gazing out from within the film, the girl’s presence functions as a cautionary motif of the dangers of privileging postmodern play and spectatorship over sociohistorical inequalities.35 In Play, the encounter between the domestic care worker and Santiago ultimately defamiliarizes both, potentially reconfiguring the neoliberal city’s hidden power relations within the space of fiction and on the screen.

Notes 1. I am extremely grateful to Steve Buttes and the editors of this volume, who generously offered comments on this article at its different stages. 2. Jacques Rancière, The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (London: Continuum, 2007), 63. 3. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 37. 4. Rancière, The politics of aesthetic, 18. 5. John King, Magical Reels, A History of Cinema in Latin America (London: Verso, 2000), 169–75. 6. Ascanio Cavallo and Gonzalo Maza, El novísimo cine chileno (Santiago: Uqbar Editores, 2010), 13. 7. More recent films like Paola Castillo’s documentary Genoveva (2014) and Claudia Huaiquimilla’s social-realist film Mala junta (2016) have portrayed the pervading issues of discrimination suffered by Mapuche communities in Chile, though they have distanced themselves from the aesthetic of the Novísimo Cine Chileno. 8. Carolina Urrutia Neno, Un cine centrífugo: ficciones chilenas 2005–2010 (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2013), 1205, Kindle. Carolina Urrutia has studied this type of cinema that seems to move the political to the backstage. She views Play as an example of what she calls “cine centrífugo.” Urrutia explains that Play belongs to a trend in a Chilean cinema of the 1990s that seems to suggest rather than openly denounce social inequality. 9. José, Cademartori, “The Chilean Neoliberal Model Enters into Crisis,” Latin American Perspectives 30, no. 5 (2003): 81. 10. Vania Barraza Toledo, “Play, de Alicia Scherson: la flâneuse, la ciudad y los otros,” in Fronteras de la memoria: cartografías de género en artes visuales, cine y literatura en las Américas y España, eds. Bernardita Llanos and Ana M. Goetschel (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2012), 118. 11. Sarah Wright, “Everything to play for: Renegotiating Chilean Identity in Alicia Scherson’s Play,” in Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference, eds. Parvati Nair and Julián D. Gutiérrez-­ Albilla (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013), 235.

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12. Tomás Moulian, Chile Actual, Anatomía de un mito (Santiago: Universidad Arcis/LOM, 1997), 125. 13. Rancière, The politics of aesthetic, 18. 14. Wright, “Everything to play for” 236. 15. Valeria De los Ríos, “Mapas Cognitivos de Santiago del Nuevo Siglo. Aquí se construye de Ignacio Agüero y Play de Alicia Scherson,” Revista Chilena de Literatura, Sección Miscelánea (April 2010): 2. 16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 54. 17. Merike Blofield, Care Work and Class: Domestic Workers’ Struggle for Equal Rights in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 128. In her study on domestic workers’ struggle for equal rights in Chile, Blofield sees the difficulty of mobilizing the working class in the fact that only 8 percent of workers in the country are unionized. According to Blofield, it was not pressure from domestic workers themselves but rather through “sympathetic left-wing politicians,” (128) especially under Michelle Bachelet’s Administration, that incremental legal reforms improved the rights of domestics in Chile. 18. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4 (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 396. 19. Jameson, Postmodernism, 25. 20. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durhan, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 139. Another way to analyze the insistence on the body and the senses in Play would be in relation to theorizations of a haptic aesthetic. This aesthetic derives from corporeal-focused analyses to overcome impasses associated with ocular-­ centric theories. Marks argues that Western scholarship on tactile epistemology derives its theories and critiques from the apparent atrophy of sensuous knowledge in industrial and postindustrial societies, and demonstrates the degree to which Karl Marx understood the way in which senses are formed within a social context. 21. Judith Squires, “Public and Private,” in Political Concepts, ed. Richard Bellamy and Andrew Mason (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 135. 22. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 835. 23. The music in the film is mainly used to identify different characters; Cristina plays and listens to Tristán’s music but also returns to her own first tune in the last scene of the film. 24. This idea of dressing Cristina in such a way as to make her fit into consumer culture has also been pointed out by Sarah Wright, Philippa Jane

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Page, and Nadia Lie in relation to another dress that Scherson’s protagonist wears in the film with the logo of Quaker, a North American company headquartered in Chicago. See Philippa Jane Page and Nadia Lie, “(Re) Writing with the feet: The Flâneur as Urban Cartographer in Alicia Scherson’s Film Play (Chile, 2005),” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 25, no. 4 (2016): 543. Drawing on Nelly Richards, Wright sees this as a type of imported clothing that dresses the urban poor with no apparent coherence of style (232). Nevertheless, the photogenic portrait of Cristina can be said to obscure such poverty by celebrating the multicultural diversity of neoliberal Chile. 25. Joanna Page, “Neoliberalism and the Politics of Affect and Self-­Authorship in Contemporary Chilean Cinema,” in A Companion to Latin American Cinema, eds. Stephen Hart, Maria M. Delgado, and Randal Johnson, 381 (Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2017). 26. Moulian, Chile Actual, 114. 27. Nicolas Gissi, “Los Mapuche en el Santiago del Siglo XXI: Desde la ciudadanía política hasta la demanda por el reconocimiento,” 9. http://cultura-urbana.cl/pdf/los-mapuches-en-el-santiago-del-siglo-xxi-gissi.pdf. Accessed May 5, 2018. 28. Stephen Buttes.“Huaso Romance as Neoliberal Reform in Sebastián Silva’s La nana.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 4. 29. Sebastian Silva and Christian Viveros-Fauné, “Sebastian Silva,” BOMB 115 (2011). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/sebasti%C3%A1n-silva/. Accessed May 5, 2018. 30. Philippa Jane Page and Nadia Lie, “(Re)Writing with the feet” 543. 31. Patricia Richards, Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 102. 32. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), 113. 33. Rancière, The Aesthetics of Politics, 13. 34. Friedberg, Window Shopping, 185. 35. In this way, Play appears to have in mind Deleuzian notions of the time-­ image, an autonomous expressive image that is also recreated by a wandering that elicits a contemplative stance. De los Ríos’s reading of Play highlights aesthetic references to Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema and the French nouvelle vague. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s idea of timeimage, de los Ríos concludes that Play follows a similar pattern of diegetic spectatorship that one perceives in the cinema of the 1960s. De los Ríos, “Mapas Cognitivos de Santiago del Nuevo Siglo,” 13.

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References Appiah, Kwame Anthony Appiah. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton. Barraza Toledo, Vania. 2012. Play, de Alicia Scherson: la flâneuse, la ciudad y los otros. In Fronteras de la memoria: cartografías de género en artes visuales, cine y literatura en las Américas y España, ed. Bernardita Llanos and Ana M. Goetschel, 117–137. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio. Blofield, Merike. 2012. Care Work and Class: Domestic Workers’ Struggle for Equal Rights in Latin America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Buttes, Stephen. 2014. Huaso Romance as Neoliberal Reform in Sebastián Silva’s La nana. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 23 (1): 345–362. Cavallo, Ascanio, and Gonzalo Maza. 2010. El novísimo cine chileno. Santiago: Uqbar Editores. Cademartori, José. 2003. The Chilean Neoliberal Model Enters into Crisis. Latin American Perspectives 30 (5): 79–88. De los Ríos, Valeria. 2010. Mapas Cognitivos de Santiago del Nuevo Siglo. Aquí se construye de Ignacio Agüero y Play de Alicia Scherson. Revista Chilena de Literatura, Sección Miscelánea. 1–15. Freud, Sigmund. 1959. The Uncanny. In Collected Papers, vol. 4. New  York: Basic Books. Friedberg, Anne. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gissi, Nicolas. Los Mapuche en el Santiago del Siglo XXI: Desde la ciudadanía política hasta la demanda por el reconocimiento. http://cultura-urbana.cl/ pdf/los-mapuches-en-el-santiago-del-siglo-xxi-gissi.pdf. Accessed 5 May 2018. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. King, John. 2000. Magical Reels. A History of Cinema in Latin America. London: Verso. La nana. 2010. Directed by Sebastián Silva. New York: Oscilloscople Pictures. Marks, Laura. 2007. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press. Moulian, Tomás. 1997. Chile Actual. Anatomía de un mito. Santiago: Universidad Arcis/LOM. Mulvey, Laura. 1999. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 833– 844. New York: Oxford University Press. Page, Joanna. 2017. Neoliberalism and the Politics of Affect and Self-Authorship in Contemporary Chilean Cinema. In A Companion to Latin American Cinema, ed. Stephen Hart, Maria M. Delgado, and Randal Johnson, 269–284. Malden: Wiley.

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Page, Philippa, and Nadia Lie. 2016. (Re)Writing with the Feet: The Flâneur as Urban Cartographer in Alicia Scherson’s Film Play (Chile, 2005). Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 25 (4): 533–553. Play. 2005. Directed by Alicia Scherson. Chile, Argentina, France: Parox. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Aesthetics of Politics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London/New York: Continuum. Richards, Patricia. 2013. Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Silva, Sebastián, and Christian Viveros-Fauné. 2011. Sebastian Silva. BOMB 115. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/sebasti%C3%A1n-silva/. Accessed 5 May 2018. Urrutia Neno, Carolina. 2013. Un cine centrifugo: ficciones chilenas 2005–2010. Santiago: Cuarto Propio/Kindle. Wright, Sarah. 2013. Everything to Play for: Renegotiating Chilean Identity in Alicia Scherson’s Play. In Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference, ed. Parvati Nair and Julián D. Gutiérrez-Albilla, 229– 240. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Beyond Tropes: Otherness and the Identity of the Brazilian Maid in Domésticas-O Filme and Doméstica Maurício Sellmann Oliveira

A woman on a bus looks up to the camera above and addresses the audience: Nasce e morre, nasce e morre. Cada vez que a gente nasce é um tipo de gente. … Por que que eu é que tinha de nascer assim desse jeito: pobre, preta, ignorante? … A minha bisavó foi escrava; a minha avó foi doméstica. A minha mãe quando eu nasci, ela disse que preferia me ver morta do que empregada doméstica. Eu sou doméstica. We are born and we die, we are born and we die. Every time we’re born, we are someone different. … Why did I have to be born this way—black, poor, and ignorant? … My great-grandmother was a slave; my grandmother was a maid. When I was born, my mother said that she’d rather see me dead than becoming a maid. I’m a maid.

With this opening monologue, Fernando Meirelles and Nando Olival set the tone for their first feature film, Domésticas, O Filme (2001), a comedy about domestic workers in São Paulo, the largest Brazilian city.1 It is a M. Sellmann Oliveira (*) Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_7

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portmanteau narrative that follows the lives and mishaps of five domestic servants—Créo (Lena Roque), Rai (Claudia Missura), Quitéria (Olivia Araújo), Roxane (Graziella Moretto), and Cida (Renata Melo, also coscreenwriter). Throughout the film, they share their thoughts through monologues like the one above, that is, they are allowed to tell their stories with their own voices. These scenes also betray the theatrical origins of the screenplay—by Melo with Olival, Meirelles, and Cecília Homem de Mello. It is based on a play by Melo, who drew her text from approximately two hundred interviews with actual maids.2 The film also includes the stories of other typical menial workers in Brazilian cities: the porter, the courier, the car washer, and the chauffeur. Thus, the title morphs into a synecdoche for a chronicle of lower-class, low-skilled workers in São Paulo. Eleven years later, Gabriel Mascaro employed the same title word for another production.3 Doméstica (2012) is a documentary whose goal was also made clear in its opening monologues: Oi. Meu nome é Luis Felipe e eu recebi essa camera pra gravar um documentário sobre a minha empregada doméstica, Lucimar. Ela já trabalha com a gente faz muito tempo, mais ou menos desde que eu tinha um ano de idade. Já tá aqui há uns 16, 17 anos. Hi. My name is Luis Felipe and I received this camera to shoot a documentary about my domestic servant, Lucimar. She has been working here for a long time, more or less since I was one. It’s been some sixteen, seventeen years now. Bom, a moça que trabalha aqui em casa, o nome dela é Helena, mas todo mundo chama ela de Lena. E ela já tá com a gente há quase 16 anos, quase 10 do meu irmão. Well, the girl who works here, her name is Helena, but everybody calls her Lena. And she’s been here with us for almost sixteen years, almost ten for my brother.

These teenagers—Neto, Perla, Alana, Joana, Bia, Jennifer, and Luís Felipe, in order of segments—are credited as cinematographers on the end titles. The director had proposed a challenge to them: they should start closely watching the person who had been watching them for their whole lives.4 For one week they followed the lives of their nannies, the women and one man who had been taking care of them since they were little—Vavá, Dilma, Gracinha, Lena, Flávia, Sérgio, and Lucimar, in order of appearance in the

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film. Mascaro is the main editor with no direct access to the maids. His documentary narrative embraces its title subjects but also their employers and the family nuclei that surround them in big cities across Brazil— Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. Although the filmmaker does not introduce the maids’ voices at the start, his teenage cinematographers confirm what Créo explains in Domésticas: the existence of an unofficial caste system that constrains social mobility as if it were fate. Housemaids work for a family “for a long time,” “sixteen, seventeen years” and more. Doméstica sheds light on the lives and thoughts of the servants at the same time that it probes their mediators behind and in front of the camera. There are other examples of the ways in which these two productions dialogue with one another in spite of the decade-long gap between them. In terms of language, Domésticas, a fictional feature based on a stage play, and Doméstica, a documentary, could not be more different. Yet, as we shall see in this article, their approaches complement one another as they revisit previous views of Brazilian domestic work. Both films focus on the maids’ voices, their subjectivities, and idiosyncrasies through the testimonials that inspired the script of Domésticas, and the interviews with real-life servants in Doméstica. Because of their multiple subjects, they thread the line between the portmanteau and the Altmanesque narrative—several storylines that may or may not meet but still coalesce into the same social tapestry. In addition, the filmmakers’ choice of genre was crucial for them to tackle their themes effectively. Meirelles and Olival deploy the comedic register with which Brazilian audiences have been long familiar, while Mascaro uses techniques of ethnographic cinema to examine the maids within their spaces. In order to understand the impact of these two productions, we start by contextualizing domestic work in Brazilian society. Following that, we take a brief look at previous examples of Brazilian cinematic ethnography and traditional housemaid images in popular culture before we explore how Domésticas and Doméstica reassemble these languages and representations.

Born This Way: What Maids Are Made Of A quick view of the critical reception of Domésticas and Doméstica shows how much domestic help remains a socially and culturally charged issue in Brazil. A positive review of Domésticas in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo assures the reader that the filmmakers created a nice entertain-

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ment that does not offend the maids.5 Inácio Araújo thinks otherwise in his scathing piece for Folha de S. Paulo: the film’s maids are clumsy, ignorant, and stupid, that is, exactly the stereotype that mistresses would adopt. He spends half of his review recounting recent news about brutalized lower-class individuals in Brazilian society to contend that the film’s comedic tone is offensive.6 Latin American viewers outside Brazil thought otherwise. In the following year, the Sindicato de la Indústria Cinematográfica Argentina (SICA) honored the film with an award at the Festival de Mar del Plata for its social values and its profoundly sympathetic handling  of  the  characters.7 Ten years later, José Geraldo Couto reviewed Doméstica favorably against Domésticas: the comedy was the quintessential ideological construction that was meant to reinforce stereotypes and turn the aimed social category into folklore. Conversely, he continues, Mascaro’s film is sensitive without trying to indoctrinate; latent tragedy underlines its moments of humor.8 In O Globo Consuelo Lins writes in the first-person plural to categorize her middle-class readers (and the film’s target audience). She offers that we can all identify with the situations portrayed in the film, we could all have been doing the same things, and those teenagers could be our sons.9 Almost like a tradition, Folha de S. Paulo pans another film about maids. This time Sergio Alpendre comments that Doméstica’s Labor Day (May 1) weekend release was perfect for reaching an audience of noble, well-meaning people who are constantly reaffirming their social-justice position on Facebook.10 These reviews seem to repeat a certain undercurrent that film researcher Laurent Desbois had previously identified. He argued that the negative critical reception of Cacá Diegues’s Orfeu (1999)11—due in large part to its unusual depiction of favela dwellers as “people like us”—revealed more about schematic views and the power of middle-class and intellectual biases than about the film itself.12 In a similar vein, Domésticas and Doméstica seem to have hit too close to home, even among middle-class critics with their own entrenched perspectives about the topic. Housemaids touch a raw nerve in debates over class, power, and Otherness in Brazil. The doméstica (the Portuguese word for the live-in maid) is a standard figure in Brazilian middle- and upper-class households. Although she usually lives in her workplace, her quarters are located apart from the family’s, at the rear of the house—the quartinho dos fundos (small backroom). Their employers may describe them as “similar to family” but not as “family.” Despite the proximity, the emotional bonds that employers and employees form—and sometimes proudly display—after many years

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together can easily be dissolved by a single professional slip. At the end of the day, the maid is still an employee from a different social group. We can apply Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s explanation of Otherness and power to the maid: she is the second side who “depends on the first for its contrived and enforced isolation.”13 The need to classify or segregate supports social structures: the assignment of differential elements to one group helps to outline another if only by exclusion. As far as opposites go, one category or group of individuals defines the other so that this one category has the dominating narrative.14 When it comes to live-in maids, their stepping into the boundaries of another group’s intimacy defies categorization—are they family, almost family, or employees? Ambivalence generates discomfort. Domestic workers replaced black house slaves as markers of class differences and power in Brazilian society. After the official abolition of slavery in 1888, the lack of policies for integrating former slaves in civil society meant that menial jobs continued to be their most likely destiny. At the end of the nineteenth century, as Brazil struggled to form its own positive identity against the backdrop of racial purity and scientism that dominated Western society, maids were the Other in hand. Against this group, the elites could feel safer in the purity to which they aspired. They signaled toward a social structure based on concepts of race (maids were predominantly black) and innate superiority. Maids’ centrality to nationalist discourses of purity spilled into their literary and theatrical representations, which “borrowed from mainstream scientific and political discourses.”15 Since they remained an intrinsic aspect of Brazilian domestic life for middle and upper classes, those tropes transitioned to radio, films, and television.

The Path Toward the Cinematic Maids of Mascaro, Meirelles, and Olival The Stock Maid In Brazilian popular culture, maids have usually been stock characters, which are always a safe representation of the Other. They function as a plot device to advance conflicts or as a Greek chorus. As such, their psychological traits are kept to the bare minimum. Olímpia, the clumsy housekeeper from the comedy of errors Trair e Coçar, É Só Começar (1986), a stage play by Marcos Caruso, epitomizes maid tropes. Olímpia works for an

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upper-middle-class couple in São Paulo. As she helps her mistress prepare for her fifteenth wedding anniversary party, she keeps misinterpreting signs and jumping to the wrong conclusions about nonexistent love affairs. It is her misunderstanding—and mishandling—of situations that moves the action forward, allowing for several gags and comic repartees. The elaborate setup highlights the nuances in the relationships of the different couples while it manages to keep Olímpia restricted to being the conduit of the narrative: she is in the spotlight but invisible at the same time. This type of character has proven very popular among Brazilian audiences. Trair e Coçar is still the longest-running play in Brazil; more than five million people have seen it since 1986. Its simple structure has also translated successfully into a feature film (2006) and a cable sitcom (2014–2015) with the same title. Olímpia has been the same throughout all these iterations: the nosy, well-meaning, but ultimately clueless doméstica that conjures storms out of ignorance. Olímpia is far from being a novelty in Brazilian cinema. Decades earlier, there was the eponymous character in Eurípides Ramos’s musical comedy Cala a Boca Etelvina (1959), which was also based on a stage play. Etelvina takes the identity of her mistress in order to help her squandering master please a visiting rich uncle. The comical situations arise from the fact that she is a simpleton attempting to impersonate a bourgeois wife. True to its time, the film presents other stock characters, such as the shrill mother-in-­ law and her submissive, philandering husband. Given this roster, Etelvina is just another addition to a vaudeville narrative, but the joke is ostensibly on her. When she impersonates her mistress, Etelvina behaves like a petty caricature—she is the outsider that defines the group of middle-class characters by failing to be one of them. Two other maids, another mixture of plot device and Greek chorus, set the record straight and free Etelvina to marry the rich uncle, which leads to another trope: the Cinderella servant. According to several radio and television narratives, marriage with a wealthy man was the only way for a maid to stop being a maid. In fact, the marrying maid carries the plot of entire telenovelas. Ivani Ribeiro’s A Moça que Veio de Longe (1964) was a melodrama about the naive domestic worker who falls in love with her rich master. Anjo Mau (1976) developed the same basic plot with a twist: Nice is a nanny who schemes to marry her mistress’s brother. Cassiano Gabus Mendes, the screenwriter, made it clear from the start that marriage was just her ticket to the top of the social ladder. When the show introduces her, she is admiring the pool at her employer’s house and asks her father, “Será que um dia eu vou poder

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tomar banho nela? [Will I ever be able to swim there?]”16 Eventually, Nice gets everything she desires and falls in love with her rich husband, but she must pay the price for ambition: in the last episode, she dies after giving birth to a child. The remake (1997–98) follows Gabus Mendes’s main storyline closely, but Nice gets her happy ending thanks to changed times and a female showrunner. In the finale, writer Maria Adelaide Amaral even has the character say: “Pra ser um de vocês, eu preciso me tornar uma pessoa—não a babá ou a Cinderela—uma pessoa com uma identidade, com uma função, uma pessoa que não esqueceu o que foi, de onde veio [To be one of you, I need to become a person—not a nanny, not Cinderella—a person with an identity, a function, a person who hasn’t forgotten who she was, where she came from].”17 Thus, the remake acknowledges the limitations of Nice as a representation of lower-class women. Earlier, in 1987, Bruno Barreto gave the Cinderella archetype a naturalist spin in Romance da Empregada (1987). The film’s main character—poor, ignorant, brutalized—is shaped by her miserable environment, while her Prince Charming arrives in the form of a much older human billboard. In any case, these Cinderella stories contain the same proverbial elephant in the room: in a country in which 63 percent of all domestic workers are black,18 all these fairy-tale heroines were white. More recent telenovelas changed this trend, albeit through minor characters. Zilda in Manoel Carlos’s Mulheres Apaixonadas (2003) and Sabrina in Aguinaldo Silva’s Duas Caras (2007–2008) are black. However, these characters play to the male fantasy of the sensual housemaid that arouses the sexual desires of the master’s young son. Noticeably, Domésticas eliminates the trope of the young master’s lust by keeping all employers offscreen without ignoring its maids’ sex lives altogether. Alas, neither of its black maids—Quitéria nor Créo—is given a romantic storyline.19 As these examples show, there is a long tradition of maids in Brazilian popular culture. It is against these tropes, which have evolved in these films and television shows across decades, that Meirelles and Olival shape their main characters in Domésticas. No Intermediaries: Modes of Portraying Socially Charged Relationships Capturing the nuances of the maid and her social universe poses an even greater challenge for documentary filmmakers. After all, relations between maids and their employers vary according to place and social mores. They

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cannot be easily reduced to a single sample. Moreover, these relations are intimate by nature: they take place within homes, usually far from probing eyes, and mostly closed to outsiders. A film crew might unsettle their delicate balance. Mascaro’s early documentary efforts display a more conventional style: Um Lugar ao Sol (2009) and Avenida Brasília Formosa (2010) examine ordinary lives in two different social classes. In the former, owners of penthouses in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Recife talk to the director-­ interviewer and take him on a tour of their homes. The latter is a collage of scenes of everyday lives in a fishermen community that is enclosed in an upper-class area of Recife; its apparent looseness results in the narrative of a place. Doméstica, which closes a sociological triptych that started in Um Lugar ao Sol, required an additional set of cinematic tools to explore the sensitive nature of its subjects’ relationships. Other contemporary filmmakers pioneered ethnographic strategies that were helpful to Mascaro. Marcelo Pedroso, a fellow Pernambuco-state filmmaker, put together his Pacific/Balsa (2009) from footage taken by tourists on a cruise ship heading to the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, offshore from the northeastern Brazilian coast. It translates into a kind of direct cinema that, as Mariana Souto notes, is “filmado de dentro das relações, por pessoas nelas apanhadas por outros motivos que não somente a decisão de filmar [shot from within relationships by people who were caught in them for other reasons than just the decision to record scenes].”20 Different from Mascaro’s setup for Doméstica, though, Pedroso did not know anything about these tourists or what they were filming before approaching them to ask for their recorded material. Doméstica’s cinematographers still receive basic instructions from the film director. This aspect plus the film’s subject connect it more closely to Paulo Sacramento’s O Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferro (2003), a documentary about a group of outsiders. The director and the prisoners at the Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo shot the film a few months before the penitentiary’s demolition. Sacramento’s crew was allowed into some common areas but could not capture images inside prison cells and more dangerous pavilions. Accordingly, the director trained twenty inmates in a workshop and gave them digital video cameras to register everyday scenes in prison. Doméstica repeats this cinema of chance. Mascaro proposes an even more radical version of Sacramento’s strategy: he did not participate in the process of image capture. As he told an interviewer a few years later, he was interested in the ability to tell a story

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about the negotiation of the image between the teenagers and their maids, each in their own manner.21 To do so, he needed to make explicit the power relations between teenager and housemaid without tilting the balance of these relationships. This is why, the filmmaker claims, the cameras were handed to the teenagers rather than to the maids themselves.22 By having the participants in focused relationships negotiate and shoot their own footage, Mascaro chose to forgo the immediacy of an encounter with his subjects in an attempt to remain faithful to their dynamics.

Domésticas: Leading Maids and Their Types Laughing at or with Domésticas: Reworking Tropes As previously noted, Domésticas and its source stage play originated from actual maids’ testimonials. The film not only uses the play to build its narrative but also brings the original stage actresses to the screen along with approximately twenty real-life domestic workers, who play minor roles or tell their own stories in interspersed testimonials. This effort invests the maids’ cinematic voices with a certain authenticity. However, Meirelles and Olival’s film follows a popular narrative structure, which demands a straightforward denouement. In an interview during the shooting of additional scenes, Meirelles explained that he thought that the script needed to be tweaked to wrap it up more smoothly and clarify the plot a little more.23 The film navigates the tension between the real-life stories and the needs of a conventional cinematic narrative. In order to find a balance, the filmmakers negotiate the Brazilian tradition of audiovisual maids. The film’s five main characters have very distinctive traits: Quitéria, the clumsy one who is always losing jobs; Créo, the pious evangelical at odds with a rebellious daughter; loud-mouthed and nosy Roxane, who dreams of a modeling career; Cida, the unhappy wife who embarks on an extramarital affair; and Rai, the marrying type that may have finally found her proletarian husband. Some of these outlines recall the tropes we have previously seen—the prying maid, the Cinderella, the trouble magnet—while others already suggest an effort to ditch the maids’ Otherness. There is an effort to humanize these types, as Meirelles explained during film production: “[Estas] são histórias e desencontros que independem da condição social, acontecem com qualquer um [(These) are stories and mishaps that don’t depend on social condition; they could happen to anyone].”24 Some

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of these storylines help us understand how far the filmmakers went in that direction. Roxane is given the film’s most complex story arc, which allows the filmmakers to play with different tropes. She may be defiant but she also likes to ridicule those that she deems to be in a hierarchically lower position, such as a pizza-delivery boy or any of the employees in the building where she works. She treats them in a rude manner that echoes the caricature mistress impersonated by 1959 Etelvina. Interestingly, there is another character behaving in a similar fashion in Domésticas: the janitor (Eduardo Estrela) in his interactions with other building workers. These characters’ repeated scenes of power assertion throughout the narrative convey a clearer meaning than Etelvina’s caricature impersonation. Roxane and the janitor may exert their shred of power onto people of lower status as both a reflexive response to internalized oppression and self-defense— the janitor always acts in a hesitating manner as if he were being watched, while Roxane lashes out at the pizza-delivery boy in moments of vulnerability. The maid’s brisk manners, as we shall see, conceal other facets of the character. Eventually, Roxane’s bluster and street-smart credentials are exposed as another impersonation. After she is hired by a questionable modeling agency, the maid receives a call asking her to meet her first client. When she arrives at the assigned address, she realizes that her portfolio was meant to sell her services as a call girl. The staging of the sequence elicits compassion even though the setup is a typical comedy of errors. Guided by the dialogue (“Você não é virgem não, é? [You’re not a virgin, are you?],” the client asks her) and the set decoration (an ordinary middle-­ class house with no photographic equipment in sight), the audience realizes what is happening long before Roxane does. Moretto starts playing the scene with the character’s usual mannerisms and a star-struck gaze. Charles Paraventi, who plays the customer, is chubby and short with long, unruly hair. His physical type evokes the typecasting of the lusty client that the audience has learned to identify from numerous comedies. From here on, the filmmakers and the actors confound expectations: when Roxane understands the true nature of her job, she recoils in ill-disguised horror. Moretto’s performance is subtle: her face struggles between humiliation and the need to maintain a facade of composure while she tries to find a dignified way out. Rather than forcing himself on her, the customer also grasps what is happening; he apologizes and tries to comfort her. The

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scene ends with the camera zooming in on her anguished face. The ­resulting effect is poignant. At this point, it seems that Domésticas is gearing up to exploit another cliché, the victimized young woman. However, Roxane is not crying on a friendly shoulder in the next scene: she is confiding to the pizza-delivery boy that she accepted the job, and for good reason: “Melhor que fazer faxina [It beats cleaning].” If this is her only way of escaping the maid role, she will take it. Still, the film does not dismiss her feelings, causing another trope switch in the third act. During a scene in which she dances by herself in a seedy nightclub, we learn from a voice-­ over phone conversation that she has not lost faith in starting her modeling career through the call-girl agency. Roxane’s journey takes her from loudmouth to naive, dreamy girl. Even though her aspiration of becoming a model is ripe for comic fodder, the film reworks it as a mirror facing its middle-class audience. When the film was released, Roxane’s modeling dream was common across all social layers.25 For those viewers, laughing at her would mean laughing at their own. In this sense, Roxane was similar to any girl or young woman of the time, but her chances of realizing those shared dreams were much smaller due to her social condition. Thus, the resolution of her story arc elicits identification and compassion instead of laughter. As a drama character in a comedy, Créo could not be more different from Roxane and the other maids. She is an evangelical single mother of a young adult (Roberta Garcia); the film never clarifies what happened to her daughter’s father. Her dreams are projected on her daughter, whom she wants to keep away from the streets and in a steady job, preferably as a maid. The character certainly represents a cinematic type, but it is not the surrogate mother—Créo is the selfless parent, who transcends class markers. Her dogmatic beliefs play a larger role when she learns that her daughter plans to travel with her boyfriend, a rapper. To avoid that, Créo forces her to take a job as a nanny. In the only scene in which we see members of the upper class, Créo’s daughter is mechanically pushing children on a playground swing. She stands there as their negative image in social class and skin color. She is also the only nanny in the film. Racionais MC’s politically charged Capítulo 4, Versículo 3 plays on the soundtrack as she decides to quit her job and walk away: Sessenta por cento dos jovens de periferia sem antecedentes criminais já sofreram violência policial. A cada quatro pessoas mortas pela polícia, três são negras.

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Fig. 7.1  Créo breaks the fourth wall in Domésticas Nas universidades brasileiras apenas 2% dos alunos são negros. A cada quatro horas, um jovem negro morre violentamente em São Paulo. Sixty percent of young people from the block with no criminal record have already suffered police violence. Out of four people shot dead by the police, three are black. Only 2 percent of Brazilian college students are black. Every four hours, a young black man dies violently in São Paulo.

Créo spends the rest of the film trying to find her missing daughter. Her dramatic storyline was ignored or downplayed by most reviewers, which is all the more baffling if one considers her opening monologue and the denouement of Domésticas. By having this deeply religious and conservative black mother make explicit the dividing lines of class and race in the beginning of their film, Meirelles and Olival present a clear political statement. Créo’s conflict with her daughter shakes her entrenched views but also illuminates her introductory words with some didacticism. Her quest functions as a framing storyline whose conclusion gives the film a sort of general coda, especially when the other black-andwhite monologues that punctuate the film are taken into consideration (Fig. 7.1).

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The Black-and-White Sequences: Breaking the Fourth Wall and Breaking with Otherness The black-and-white sequences fill a gap in the sketchy structure of the film. These monologues give the characters more psychological depth. Mostly shot in close-ups with few props to clue the audience about the surroundings, they cause a pausing effect. Enhanced by the ethereal black-­ and-­ white cinematography, they interrupt the diegetic continuum of the film. These scenes generally take the main characters beyond their initially assigned types at the same time that they outline a collective voice. Cida, whose sex life drives her storyline, delivers her own critique of class society: “A gente vive nesse sistema: primeiro, a gente arruma as coisas dos outro, depois a gente vai ver o que a gente pode fazer pra nós mesmo [That’s the system we live in: first, we tidy up their stuff, then we see what we can do for ourselves].” The move from small town to the big city permeates another common thread. Roxane foreshadows the development of her storyline: “Eu pensava assim: ‘Um dia, eu hei de ir a São Paulo nem que seja pra chegar de dia e morrer de tarde.’ Minha mãe chorava e meu pai dizia: ‘Juízo, juízo.’ [I used to think like this: ‘One day, I shall go to São Paulo even if it’s just to arrive there in the morning and die in the afternoon.’ My mother cried and my father said: ‘Be careful, be careful.’]” These memories, which are told in a nostalgic tone, highlight the undercurrent of shattered dreams. In view of this, Quitéria makes a bleak assessment: “Eles ficam trocando de carro, de geladeira, então eu pensei: com doméstica deve ser a mesma coisa. Eu vou ficar pulando de galho em galho até morrer. Na hora que eu morrer, eu fico lá, parada onde cair. [They keep changing cars, fridges, then I thought: it must be the same with housemaids. I’ll keep jumping around until I die. When I die, I’ll just stay where I dropped.]” The comical effect of the deadpan delivery is mitigated by shock. After all, it is the supposedly airhead character who seems to be deeply aware of her commodified condition. It is to the credit of the script and the actors that these lines do not sound out of character but are rather an organic follow-up in the exploration of these women’s inner lives. Noticeably, after opening the film, Créo has no other black-and-white monologues. However, her story provides the film’s closure, a chance reunion with her daughter when they run into one another on a footbridge:

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Créo: Como é que cê tá? Daughter: Tô bem, mãe. Tô trabalhando. C: Em casa de família? D: Não, mãe. Numa firma. C: How’re you doing? D: Good, mom. I’m working. C: In a family’s house? D: No, mom. For a company.

Créo’s dream future for her daughter is renewed even if not in the way that she expected. Her daughter seems to have broken free from the vicious circle that has trapped her family for generations, according to her opening monologue. With this ending, Meirelles and Olival propose a possible future away from the domestic work system. “[Ser doméstica] não é um desejo que a pessoa tem; é uma sina mesmo [(Being a maid) isn’t something you wish to be; it’s fate really],” Roxane comments in her final monologue. The dialogue between Créo and her daughter offers a laconic but hopeful reply to Roxane’s and Quitéria’s last lines. These black-and-­ white intermissions have taken the audience away from the storyline and into these characters’ feelings, to be integrated into the larger narrative only in the end. The monologues and the removal of the employers from the screen evince the filmmakers’ commitment to humanizing these maids. Still, the absence of the masters costs their characterization. In Domésticas, they pay meager salaries, forget the names of their employees, and dismiss their maids unfairly. Throughout all the storylines, they are judged in absentia. Doméstica fills this gap.

Doméstica: Subject on Subject Relationships in Multiple Combinations If Domésticas plays with storytelling, Doméstica aims at history. Mascaro’s inspiration for the documentary came from his British wife, who refused to have nannies after their child was born. Her decision surprised him because he had never reflected much on live-in maids. “Vivíamos em um processo de escravidão legitimado que precisa acabar [We were living in a legitimized slavery system that must end],” he stated.26 Despite never mentioning the weight of slavery in the evolution of the Brazilian maid,

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the documentary does not forget it. Gracinha reveals that she started working as a maid when she was eleven; Lucimar began at fourteen. Lúcia, Joana’s mother, recalls how Lena came to work for them: “Tinha Lena e tinha outra pessoa também de outro trabalhador da gente lá na fazenda. … E minha irmã chegou e falou assim: ‘Olha, eu acho melhor levar Lena, certo, a gente conhece mais assim a família de Cristóvão que é o pai de Lena…’ [There was Lena and another person too, the daughter of another worker at our farm. … Then my sister came and said: ‘Look, I think you’d better take Lena, right, we know her father, Cristóvão, and his family better…’].” Luis Felipe’s mother tells her son that Lucimar was the daughter of her great-grandmother’s foreman. The stories of Lena and Lucimar share rural roots and the class division that stems from archaic mechanisms. Also, in Lúcia’s case, the use of the verb levar (to take) instead of contratar (to hire) reveals how these colonial mechanisms still underlie the modern relationships between masters and maids. Yet, Doméstica cannot be reduced to a clear-cut sociological critique of a troubling historical issue. Mascaro’s editing privileges the ethnographic details of his material. There is a multiplicity of places, background stories, and class levels that complicates the historical exploitation dynamics. Lúcia may reproduce a certain centuries-old attitude toward her maid, but she also takes care of Lena’s daughter as if she were her own granddaughter. There are scenes in which Lúcia plays nanny while Lena cleans Lúcia’s home. Lucimar and Luís Felipe’s mother were best friends during their childhood. Joana stresses that Lena eats her meals with the family in the living room. Flávia is a nanny who works for another maid in a lower-class home. Sergio was abandoned by his own family and adopted/hired by his neighbor; it is a peculiar story that sets him apart from the tiny male housekeeper subgroup in Brazil, which comprises 7 percent of all maids in the country.27 Familial bonds appear prominently and variedly across all segments. Vavá, Gracinha, Helena, Flávia, and Sérgio have or had children. Flávia had a miscarriage before she started working as a maid, and Gracinha’s son was murdered. Both Vavá and Sérgio have a difficult relationship with their sons; Sérgio’s son is estranged from his father. Dilma, Sérgio, Flávia, and, it is implied, Vavá, enjoy working as a manner to forget the pains of rough relationships in their past. A phone call suggests that Vavá’s relationship with her son may echo the strained relation between Créo and her daughter in Domésticas—Vavá also likes to listen to religious radio shows. Motherhood reflects on the way that many of these maids approach their work, which brings to mind the second-mother fictional type. Flávia

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takes care of Bia’s brother, a boy with special needs, as if he were her own. “[A mãe dele] não confia deixar ele com ninguém [(His mother) doesn’t trust him with anyone else],” Flávia explains. Gracinha regrets having seen her son so rarely in the months before his death, but she also prefers to be at work these days since “ultimamente quando chego em casa tem tanto problema [lately I’ve got so much trouble at home].” Like Gracinha, Lena is a single mother; similar to Créo in Domésticas, there is no information about their children’s fathers. On the opposite end of these relations is Lúcia acting as a surrogate mother to Lena’s daughter. Jennifer and her mother display protective behavior toward Sérgio, especially when Jennifer’s mother discloses that his son does not care for his father. During this scene, Jennifer’s mother speaks at length and righteously about the neglect by Sérgio’s family while he sits silently beside her in what is presumably her bedroom. His head hangs low, and his shoulders are arched. He looks less like an obedient servant than an obedient son. Marco Antonio Gonçalves notes how the radical subjectivity that the film proposes invites us to reflect on the manner in which Brazilians build their sociability.28 As each segment shows, the relationships between maids and their employers run the spectrum of intimacy that blurs the lines between the personal and professional, the historical legacy, and the different needs to accommodate. It is an uneasy equilibrium that Doméstica renders more explicit in the formal preferences of each segment (Figs. 7.2 and 7.3).

Fig. 7.2  Lucimar and her mistress chat in the kitchen in Doméstica

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Fig. 7.3  Flávia performs for the camera in Doméstica

Forms of Seeing and Performances of Truth Along with their presence on camera, the cinematographers’ composition choices help codify their personalities and connections with their maids. Jennifer and Perla are the most self-aware when it comes to their own image. The viewer is introduced to Perla by way of a long take in which she ties and unties her hair, unsure of how to present herself. Jennifer first appears in full makeup for an extreme close-up in which she tells Sergio’s story clearly and thoroughly. They want to be seen in the most favorable light. Helped by Mascaro’s editing, Luís Felipe approaches his task in the most calibrated manner. Distance permeates his segment, the last one. It starts professionally, with the teenager approaching Lucimar and explaining that he is shooting a documentary. He asks her if it is okay for him to follow her with a camera for a week or so to learn more about her life. When she agrees, he asks her to sign an image-use agreement for the film’s producers. This late disclosure of bureaucratic information about the film within the film is only fitting: Luís Felipe’s segment establishes a remove between the audience and the images through the mise-en-scène. He follows Mascaro’s instructions rigorously. His framing is consistently rigid and displays a preference for negative spaces, which evoke isolation. Lucimar sits on the far left side for her interview, while, for another scene,

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Luís Felipe frames himself playing guitar on the right edge. Intriguingly, for her interview his mother is perfectly framed in the middle of the screen. In his medium and long shots, he interferes as little as possible with his subjects’ routines. Even so, both his mother and Lucimar look stiff—one might even recall the janitor watching over his shoulder in Domésticas. Such distancing contrasts with the nature of Lucimar’s background story with his mother, but it is precisely this stiffness that illuminates the conspicuous silence in two crucial moments. During Luís Felipe’s final interview with Lucimar he asks her if she feels uncomfortable working for her childhood friend. After some hesitation she answers, “Não, acho que não. Da minha parte, a relação vai amadurecendo [No, I don’t think so. The relationship, for my part, grows more mature.],” and then repeats these words. She does not elaborate on that and there is no follow-up question. In another scene, Luís Felipe’s mother enters the kitchen to serve herself lunch while Lucimar is working there. She asks her maid about a scene from a telenovela’s latest episode. The chat lasts as long as the two share the kitchen. Lucimar always replies respectfully, but there is never direct eye contact between them. Moreover, this is the only time that the audience sees the two women interacting. It hints that the old friendship, which is later glimpsed in old photos, survives as everyday chat between employer and employee when they run into one another. In both scenes, the distance between the camera and its subjects emphasizes the distancing between Lucimar and Luís Felipe’s mother, between their past and present. In the middle of all this, there are uncomfortable silences. Other cinematographers captured personal revelations from their maids by flaunting Mascaro’s general rules, as detailed by Luís Felipe—they let the maids be in charge. Neto sets off the first segment by following Vavá everywhere: she irons and folds clothes, she talks sternly to her own son on the phone, she shows Neto her bedroom closet, they talk while she drives him and his sister to school. The sequence resembles an average school essay rather than ethnographic filmmaking. Then Neto leaves for school and lets Vavá keep the camera on her way back home—a long cut to and from black draws the viewer’s attention to this transition. What follows is a long take in which the action consists mostly of Vavá driving. The camera faces her from behind the wheel. Vavá sings along as the radio plays Reginaldo Rossi’s O Mal pela Raiz, a popular romantic song. Vavá never loses sight of the traffic but her voice starts faltering, tears roll down her cheeks. The cathartic nature of this scene becomes evident when she replies to the singer, “Mas eu me machuquei [But I got hurt].” When the

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song, a live recording, ends, Vavá mumbles through the applause on the radio: “É muito difícil você gostar, amar, não ser correspondido, não ser tratado, não ser valorizado. E não sofrer por isso, é difícil [It’s very difficult to like, to love, and not be loved, not be treated, not be valued. And not suffering for that, it’s really hard].” It is a variation of the song’s lyrics. She wipes her tears and pulls herself together—her eyes locked on the traffic ahead and beyond the camera—while the next song plays on, and the segment ends. This accidental performance provides Mascaro with a symmetrical closure for the segment. It starts with Vavá listening to a preacher talk about love on the radio while she executes her duties undisturbed, and ends with an emotional burst that was buried in the previous scenes. If Vavá had not taken control of the camera, her identity would have amounted to her role as a maid. Her lone drive home resignifies her in front of the viewer by temporarily taking her away from that role. Flávia commands Bia’s segment through a conscious performative turn in front of the teenager’s camera. Flávia does not seem intimidated. Quite the contrary, she speaks openly about her tumultuous marriage and miscarriage. Later we see her lovingly taking care of Bia’s younger, mentally disabled brother. Next, Flávia does some awkward dance moves in front of the boy and they play with Bia. The teenager—and Mascaro in his sparse editing—let these scenes unfold for several minutes. If there is a stagy atmosphere to the proceedings, it appears to be of Flávia’s own volition. Invariably, Bia positions her nonintrusive camera in the corner of a room and lets Flávia talk and move at will. As a result, the maid behaves on-­ screen as someone who is perfectly aware that there will be an audience. She is attempting to stir a set of emotions with which she believes these viewers will identify. The resulting scenes can be encapsulated in the different roles that they exhibit: the surrogate mother, the dedicated professional, the playful companion, the loyal maid, but also the suffering woman who survived all her hurdles with a winning smile. Flávia implodes these roles by playing them all at once. Consequently, she cannot even be reduced to being the maid’s maid, her role in the larger narrative of the documentary. Her performance generates such a level of ambiguity that it challenges assumptions and categorization. Flávia provides a summarizing comment to all the mini portraits in Doméstica: her inner life, like those of the other people featured in the documentary, is too complex to fit in the single role of a maid. The audience has no choice but to gaze at Mascaro’s subjects as fellow human beings.

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Bridging the Gap and Opening Ways Seen together, Domésticas and Doméstica short-circuit long-held assumptions and traditional maid representations. Although these works break with teleological narrative cinema, they play with what Ismail Xavier calls, in reference to Cinema Novo29 filmmakers, the experience of a “wrong turn” in the passage from the archaic to modernity.30 As they stand, these cinematic maids symbolize the slow and erratic progress of Brazilian society, but they also complicate cultural tropes or schematic sociological readings. Domésticas offers a social critique through the language of popular culture rather than against it. A string of films and television shows would later adopt a similar strategy: the rags-to-riches telenovela Cheias de Charme (2012), in which three maids climb the social ladder because of their efforts rather than romantic entanglement; the sitcom A Diarista (2004–2007), in which the employers become the clichés while the professional cleaning lady is the sane voice in each episode; or Anna Muylaert’s dramatic comedy Que Horas Ela Volta? (2015), whose maid-daughter relationship develops themes found in Créo’s storyline. Doméstica unveils different snapshots of master-maid relations that make categorizations very hard at the same time that it dialogues with Domésticas. Whereas Mascaro’s work—due to its ethnographic nature— chronicles the present as a comment on the past, Meirelles and Olival point at coming transformations with their comedy’s ending. Conversely, the documentary’s final scene functions as a comment on the monologues of the fictional feature. When Luís Felipe asks Lucimar if she considers herself happy working as a maid in Rio de Janeiro, the maid answers in a bittersweet tone: “Eu considero que eu tenho liberdade. Disso também eu gosto [I believe I’m free. I like that too].” She then returns her gaze to the photo album in her hands: pictures of her childhood in the countryside. The film cuts to black and to silent credits. There is nothing else to say about the present. Doméstica closes with a gaze at the past while Domésticas looks at a possible future beyond kitchens and tiny backrooms—if not for this generation, then for the next.

Notes 1. Meirelles’s sophomore film would be Cidade de Deus (2002), codirected by Katia Lund. 2. “‘Domésticas’ consegue ser divertido.” O Estado de S. Paulo, April 19, 2001. https://cultura.estadao.com.br/noticias/cinema,dometicas-consegueser-divertido,20010419p1891

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3. Doméstica was released one month after the sanction of PEC das Domésticas, a constitutional amendment that extended many labor rights to domestic servants, such as limits on working hours and welfare benefits. Although the amendment was absent from the film’s inception, it informed its reception. See Rodrigo Salem, “Filme que retrata relação entre domésticas e patrões estreia um mês após a PEC,” Folha de S. Paulo, May 1, 2013, E1. 4. Gabriel Mascaro, “Gabriel Mascaro fala sobre seus filmes,” Esquerda Diário, November 17, 2014, http://www.esquerdadiario.com.br/ Gabriel-Mascaro-fala-sobre-seus-filmes 5. “‘Domésticas’ consegue ser divertido.” 6. Inácio Araújo, “‘Domésticas’ retrato da inocência do mal,” Folha de S.  Paulo, Ilustrada, May 24, 2001, E2. The following week Folha published a point-­ by-­ point rebuttal by the filmmakers themselves. See Fernando Meirelles and Nando Olival, “É preciso olhar ‘Domésticas’ sem preconceito,” Folha de S. Paulo, June 1, 2001. 7. Silvana Arantes, “Colombiano ganha Festival de Mar del Plata,” Folha de S. Paulo, Ilustrada, March 18, 2002, E3. 8. José Geraldo Couto, “O país das domésticas,” Blog do IMS, May 3, 2013, https://blogdoims.com.br/o-pais-das-domesticas/ 9. Consuelo Lins, “Veias abertas do cotidiano,” O Globo, Rio Show, May 3, 2013, 13. 10. Sérgio Alpendre, “‘Doméstica’ não agrada quem espera experiência estética,” Folha de S. Paulo, May 1, 2013, E7. 11. Cacá Diegues’s Orfeu is the second screen adaptation of Orfeu da Conceição, the 1956 musical play by Vinicius de Moraes and Antonio Carlos Jobim that transplants the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century slums of Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. It was previously filmed by Marcel Camus as Orfeu Negro (1959), which won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. 12. Laurent Desbois, A Odisseia do Cinema Brasileiro (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016), 432, e-pub. 13. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 14. 14. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 53. 15. Sonia Roncador, Domestic servants in literature and testimony in Brazil, 1889–1999 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. 16. Anjo Mau, chapter 1, directed by Régis Cardoso, written by Cassiano Gabus Mendes, aired February 2, 1976, on Globo Network. 17. Anjo Mau (2), chapter 173, directed by Denise Saraceni, written by Maria Adelaide Amaral, aired March 28, 1998, on Globo Network. 18. International Labour Office, Domestic workers across the world: global and regional statistics and the extent of legal protection (Geneva: ILO, 2013), 26.

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19. Another enduring trope is that of the fiercely loyal surrogate mother, which is absent from Domésticas. These maids are usually black, which inevitably echoes the house slaves in colonial times. Bá from Sinhá Moça—a film version in 1953 and two television versions, one in 1986 and the latest one in 2006—is a period drama part that makes this reference explicit. A modern-­day version of this trope is Inácia from Renascer (1993), played by the typecast actor Chica Xavier, Bá in the 1986 Sinhá Moça. 20. Mariana Souto, “O direto interno, o dispositivo de infiltração e a mise-­en-­ scène do amador: notas sobre Pacific e Doméstica,” Devires  – Cinema e Humanidades 9, no. 1 (Jan–Jun 2012): 70. 21. Mascaro, interview by Esquerda Diário. 22. Gabriel Mascaro, “Cientista dos ventos  — Entrevista com Gabriel Mascaro,” interview by Pedro Pessanha, Revista Beira, August 5, 2016, https://medium.com/revista-beira/cientista-dos-ventos-entrevista-comgabriel-mascaro-58c1b5c91ee7 23. Cristian Avello Cancino, “‘Doméstica’ vira filme experimental,” Folha de S. Paulo, March 1, 2000, 5–6. 24. Cancino, “‘Doméstica’ vira filme experimental.” 25. Mario Marques, “Atrás do glamour no mundo da moda,” O Globo, January 7, 1996, Baixada-11. See also “Chance de brilhar nas passarelas,” O Globo, September 9, 1999. 26. Salem, “Filme que retrata relação entre domésticas e patrões estreia um mês após a PEC.”. 27. ILO, Domestic workers across the world, 26. 28. Marco A. Gonçalves, “Doméstica: Uma Etnografia Indiscreta,” Sociologia & Antropologia 5, no. 2 (2015): 601. 29. A film movement that drew inspiration from the French Nouvelle Vague to interpret Brazil through formal and content experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s. 30. Ismail Xavier, Alegorias do Subdesenvolvimento: Cinema Novo, Tropicalismo, Cinema Marginal (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2013), Conclusão, Kindle.

References Alpendre, Sérgio. 2013. ‘Doméstica’ não agrada quem espera experiência estética. Folha de S. Paulo, May 1. Amaral, Maria Adelaide. 1998. Chapter 172. Anjo Mau. Directed by Denise Saraceni. Rio de Janeiro: Globo Network. Arantes, Silvana. 2002. Colombiano ganha Festival de Mar del Plata. Folha de S. Paulo, March 18. Araújo, Inácio. 2001. ‘Domésticas’ retrato da inocência do mal. Folha de S. Paulo, May 24.

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Bauman, Zygmunt. 1991. Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cancino, Cristian Avello. 2000. ‘Doméstica’ vira filme experimental. Folha de S. Paulo, March 1. Chance de brilhar nas passarelas. O Globo, September 9, 1999. Couto, José Geraldo. 2013. O país das domésticas. Blog do IMS, May 3. https:// blogdoims.com.br/o-pais-das-domesticas/ Desbois, Laurent. 2016. A Odisseia do Cinema Brasileiro. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. E-pub. ‘Domésticas’ consegue ser divertido. O Estado de S. Paulo, April 19, 2001. https:// cultura.estadao.com.br/noticias/cinema,dometicas-consegue-ser-divertido, 20010419p1891 Gabus Mendes, Cassiano. 1976. Chapter 1. Anjo Mau. Directed by Régis Cardoso. Rio de Janeiro: Globo Network. Gonçalves, Marco A. 2015. Doméstica: Uma Etnografia Indiscreta. Sociologia & Antropologia 5 (2): 599–607. International Labour Office. 2013. Domestic Workers Across the World: Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protection. Geneva: ILO. Lins, Consuelo. 2013. Veias abertas do cotidiano. O Globo, May 3. Marques, Mario. 1996. Atrás do glamour no mundo da moda. O Globo, January 7. Mascaro, Gabriel. 2014. Gabriel Mascaro fala sobre seus filmes. Esquerda Diário, November 17. http://www.esquerdadiario.com.br/Gabriel-Mascaro-falasobre-seus-filmes ———. 2016. Cientista dos ventos—Entrevista com Gabriel Mascaro. Interview by Pedro Pessanha. Revista Beira, August 5. https://medium.com/revistabeira/cientista-dos-ventos-entrevista-com-gabriel-mascaro-58c1b5c91ee7 Meirelles, Fernando, and Nando Olival. 2001. É preciso olhar ‘Domésticas’ sem preconceito. Folha de S. Paulo, June 1. Roncador, Sônia. 2013. Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil, 1889–1999. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Salem, Rodrigo. 2013. Filme que retrata relação entre domésticas e patrões estreia um mês após a PEC. Folha de S. Paulo, May 1. Souto, Mariana. 2012. O direto interno, o dispositivo de infiltração e a mise-en-­ scène do amador: notas sobre Pacific e Doméstica. Devires  – Cinema e Humanidades 9 (1): 68–85. Xavier, Ismail. 2013. Alegorias do Subdesenvolvimento: Cinema Novo, Tropicalismo, Cinema Marginal. São Paulo: Cosac Naify. Kindle.

CHAPTER 8

Partial Affection: The Place(s) of Female Domestic Workers in Recent Brazilian Cinema Carlos Cortez Minchillo

Politics of Affection in Brazil In 2016, as a wave of mass rallies spread across Brazil, a photograph taken during a street protest went viral on social media. Antigovernment protesters were allegedly crying out against corruption and were pressing, or so they believed, for the shaping of a “new country.” However, the picture of a couple, their two children, and a nanny shed a different light on the motivations and ideological ambiguities ingrained in those street demonstrations. Many interpreted the shot as an emblem of the social, gender, and racial disparities that plague Brazilian history to this day. The photo shows a white couple wearing the green and yellow of the national flag, the theme colors of antigovernment protesters. On the other hand, their maid, just a few steps behind them, pushes toddlers in a stroller. Disciplined by the uniform, her black female body is read in the public sphere as a domestic worker and as such evokes a myriad of prejudices attached to this occupation.1 The symbolic power of the image is blatant: from the C. Cortez Minchillo (*) Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_8

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­ erspective of Brazilian upper classes, the vision for a “new country” quesp tioned neither the oppression of class structures nor racial and gender hierarchies. Dissatisfaction with the status quo was unapologetically blind to the deep inequities ingrained in Brazilian society. The aftermath of the series of public demonstrations and the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff later that year made it patently clear that a significant segment of the country’s elites was annoyed by government-led social programs and inclusion policies that had favored the poorest Brazilians and seemed to threaten their own social privileges.2 Accordingly, as the photo suggests, the public performance of the couple’s citizenship presupposes not only their dependence on the low-paid work of a nanny but also suppresses her ability to freely participate (or not participate) in the civic gathering. She was there to service, not to speak out, and her bodily presence, paradoxically as it may seem, attested to a political absence or interdiction. This image not only exposes the type of ambiguities inherent in the lives of domestic servants everywhere but also hints at deep class and racial antagonisms in Brazilian society that form the background within which the relationship between employers and domestic workers operates. Contemporary Brazilian cinema has examined the complexities of the topic by addressing the interplay of conservative practices and new social, political, and economic configurations as a relational field. Que horas ela volta? (The Second Mother, Anna Muylaert, 2015) and Casa grande (The Ballad of Poor Jean, Fellipe Barbosa, 2014) are two recent examples that highlight the emotional challenges of the lives of domestic workers and explore individual experiences in the private sphere of their masters’ homes. Both productions portray the multifaceted relationship between employers and maids, and shed light on repressed conflicts that stem from strained personal relations and clashing class expectations. Consequently, these films simultaneously disengage from the explicitly politicized and frequently allegorical discourse on poverty that prevailed in Cinema Novo and from the spectacular “aesthetics of violence” of more recent films.3 Neither Muylaert nor Barbosa presents the public space as an expression of inequities and violence or as a locus of social conflict. Que horas ela volta? and Casa grande render a rather neutral portrayal of the underserved areas of the city—the outskirts of São Paulo and the favela in Rio de Janeiro, respectively. The filmic narratives in these two films avoid stereotyped associations between poverty and brutality, yet they risk depoliticizing their message as they follow a trend in twenty-first-century Latin American cinema of “turn[ing] our attention from structural issues (e.g.,

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socioeconomic inequalities; the inefficacy of governmental institutions; racial discrimination) and the vital role of collective struggles.”4 This chapter carries out a comparative analysis of Que horas ela volta? and Casa grande and discusses, among other issues, the implications of their aesthetic and narratological choices as well as the political meaning of their filmic discourse. Que horas ela volta? tells the story of Val, who left her child, Jéssica, with relatives in the northeast—the poorest region in Brazil—to work as a live-in nanny, housekeeper, and cook in São Paulo. A devoted and loyal worker, middle-aged Val cherishes the friendly rapport she has developed with her employers Bárbara and Carlos, and is particularly attached to their teenage son, Fabinho, whom she has looked after since he was a child. Val’s routine and her relationship with her employers are disrupted by the unexpected arrival of her daughter Jéssica, a bright and forceful teenager who comes to São Paulo to take her university entrance exams. Casa grande focuses on the Cavalcantis, an affluent family in Rio de Janeiro. Hugo, the father, and his wife, Sônia, struggle to keep up appearances while experiencing a financial downfall that fully impacts the lives of Rita, Noêmia, and Severino, the domestic workers who serve the family. In her twenties, high-spirited, and attractive, Rita contrasts with taciturn Noêmia, her black middle-aged colleague who, it turns out, lives with Severino, the family’s private driver who is abruptly fired. Jean, the kind and sensitive teenage son of the Cavalcantis, gradually awakens to his social privileges, and through his eyes the film renders an accurate description of the complicated class relations in contemporary Brazil. In the past, other Brazilian films have explored how female servants experience vulnerability and abuse due to power imbalance, legal disfranchisement, and economic constraints, but they foreclosed the possibility of resistance and transgression. Que horas ela volta? and Casa grande partially break away from this tradition by presenting stories of social and personal empowerment. I am especially interested in the dialogue that these two films establish between the private lives of domestic workers and the broader Brazilian political, economic, and social contexts in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Although I subscribe to the notion that films are first and foremost aesthetic objects and, as such, do not necessarily have to bear the burden of representability, I argue that in this study it would be reductive to ignore the historical, political, and social dimensions of fictional representations of domestic servants. Given the long history of maids in decorative and often disparaging roles in Brazilian audiovisual narratives, the prominence of the domestic

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workers’ perspective in these more recent films should not be taken for granted. In Que horas ela volta? Val, the domestic worker, is rarely not on camera, and even though the domestic servants in Casa grande revolve around the wealthy white family and are not, sensu stricto, the protagonists, they play a central role in the practical management and emotional dynamics of their employers’ family. Domestic workers are shown as essential parts of the machinery of patriarchy, and their lives both interfere with and are impacted by everything, the ups and downs, that their employers experience.5 Muylaert’s and Barbosa’s films capture how the naturalized conviviality between employers and employees in the household can suddenly unveil its muted tensions. In a more problematic manner, as discussed below, they also point out ways in which domestic workers can break free from these oppressive and volatile relationships. Que horas ela volta? and Casa grande make clear that from the standpoint of their employers the maid’s presence in the house is at once vital and undervalued, desired and annoying, pervasive and transparent. Female servants and their bosses share an intimate space and latently hostile territory in which the public and the private are confusingly intertwined. Both Muylaert and Barbosa translate into moving images the bewildering feelings and misleading messages that circulate in a spatial setting—the employers’ home/the maid’s workplace and home—that is highly polysemous: a space that is heterogeneous in sociocultural terms and multivalent in function. In a context where unbalanced power relations prevail, unclear protocols create gray areas in which each party negotiates a multilayered, unstable, and often hypocritical politics of (dis)affection. Yet, in their critique, Que horas ela volta? and Casa grande also indicate that oppressive social structures can be defied and subaltern individuals can reshape identities and recast subjectivities. Not surprisingly, housemaid Val leaves her job, as do her counterparts in Casa grande, Rita and Noêmia. Val and Noêmia each seeks a more meaningful life and better working conditions, whereas Severino and Rita are, for different reasons, abruptly fired, a subject explored further in this text. In the framework of Brazilian paternalistic society with a persistent history of social oppression and institutional authoritarianism,6 the subjective precariousness of housemaids was further aggravated by a legislation that, until 2013, did not recognize full labor rights for domestic workers, who represent a workforce of roughly seven million Brazilians.7 Given the lack of a clear set of legal parameters, the relationship between employers and employees depends on complex and casual arrangements based on

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i­nterpersonal values and practices such as loyalty, friendship, patronage, forgiveness, and exchanges of favors and gifts that, on the one hand, are alien to what is usually considered to be modern labor relations and, on the other, allow for alternative affective engagements and mechanisms for compensation. The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 significantly improved the legal status of domestic workers in the country and allowed them to unionize, but it was not until 2013, with Constitutional Amendment 115, that their basic rights were granted equal standing with those of other occupational categories.8 Even so, the establishment of new rights does not ensure their appropriation. As Dominique Vidal notes, the implementation of a legal framework did not change the intensity of confrontations and risks of oppression.9 Furthermore, the costs and the complex path of legal procedures, which rely heavily on literacy, jeopardize the ability of many domestic workers to access justice.10 Brazilians’ generalized lack of confidence with regard to the fairness, impartiality, and agility of their judicial system further undermines any confidence domestic workers have in the exercise of their legal rights, thus adding to their precarious labor conditions. They therefore tend to subscribe to the logic of clientelism as a more effective means of mediating relationships with employers: despite the changes in labor law, masters and maids still attempt to reconcile the rigidity of the law with a more domestic, personal, and affect-based set of unspoken rules that in many situations may benefit both parties.11 This power mechanism is clearly recognizable in Muylaert’s and Barbosa’s films: Val’s employer, Bárbara, is quick to offer to buy a mattress to accommodate the maid’s visiting daughter, Jéssica, while Rita is taught how to fashionably apply makeup by her zealous and motherly employer, Sônia Cavalcanti. Nevertheless, none of those kind gestures prevent Bárbara and Sônia from exercising power whenever the relationship with their maid becomes problematic or her presence is inconvenient, as discussed later in this chapter.

The Architecture of Social Power: Segregation and Permeability The strategy of promoting everyone’s interests and avoiding confrontation while keeping social hierarchies intact through the establishment of personal ties and a chain of favors, back scratches, and concessions is ingrained in the Brazilian society’s modus operandi at large and is

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f­ requently understood as a legacy of Brazil’s colonial past. Not coincidentally, the Portuguese title of Barbosa’s film translates as “The Master’s House” and refers to Brazil’s slavery system in colonial times. It also pays tribute to The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-grande e senzala, 1933), Gilberto Freyre’s well-known yet controversial essay on the racial, cultural, and economic formation of Brazilian colonial society. Despite Freyre’s depiction of rather congenial class interactions, his title was seminal in acknowledging the role of spatial cleavages in imposing and maintaining social divisions throughout Brazil in accordance with segregation practices and social imaginary stemming from slavery. Social and racial boundaries, deep rooted in the Brazilian urban and designed landscape, are best epitomized by the dramatic contrast between favelas and wealthy neighboring areas in any major Brazilian city. They can also explain some features of middle- and upper-class residences such as the quarto de empregada, a usually windowless, tiny room located right next to the kitchen and laundry room where live-in maids sleep, and the existence of segregated elevators in apartment buildings—one for “social” use, whose access was until recently forbidden for domestic servants, and one for “service” purposes.12 In public and private dimensions, the conceptualization and use of space in Brazil tells a story of social injustice and marginalization, unofficial segregation, and frequently inhuman conditions, conveying messages that reinforce race and class prejudices. As geographer Milton Santos puts it, in Brazil, the possibility of being a full citizen depends, to a large extent, on the territory where he or she lives.13 The opening credits of Casa grande emphasize the centrality of the family property in the symbolic syntax of the film. It is night, and the father, Hugo Cavalcanti, is initially quietly immersed in the backyard swimming pool of his mansion. He quietly leaves the big garden, enters the house, closes the door, shuts off the music, and turns off the lights. The combination of the title “Casa grande” displayed on the screen, the sense of solidity infused by the long static shot of the house, and the power of control over the household granted to the masculine figure suggests the connection between the family’s present lifestyle and the patriarchy that has ruled Brazilian society since colonial times. The analogy is confirmed in the subsequent sequence in which Jean, the teenage son, uses a bunch of keys to open a few doors before he can finally reach Rita’s bedroom. The sequence can be taken as an allusion to the power of colonial masters to regulate, according to their interests and appetites, the interactions between casa-grande and senzala (the slaves’ collective quarter). Together

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the two initial sequences clearly set the framework against which Jean’s coming-of-age story will develop: the privileges of the male lineage, whose prerogatives have historically included exploitation of the female body, especially those of slaves and servants. In a conversation with Jean and some of his school friends, Hugo conveys what sounds like an account of residual colonial habits of his social milieu when he explicitly praises the sexual pleasures of casual intercourse with black women. Nevertheless, Casa grande evokes this sexual topos, recurrent both in Brazilian social studies and fictional narratives, only to revise it. Each time Jean enters Rita’s bedroom on his secret nocturnal visits, he must bend to her will since she is the one who holds the reins of the conversation and establishes the limits of their intimacy. Conscious of the attraction the teenager feels for her, Rita obviously enjoys playing with Jean’s desires by fueling them with piquant accounts of her own sexual encounters. In those moments of vague sensuality, the predominantly unadorned aesthetics of Barbosa’s film help to reverse stereotypes and expectations. The steady camera and the intradiegetic cold blue light emitted by a television restrain the objectification of the female body and infuse a respectful, almost-innocent aura around Rita and Jean’s physical proximity. Young and attractive Rita thus neither escapes nor fully incarnates the Jezebel stereotype of the ultrasexualized mulatto woman: by dismissing Jean’s advances and refuting the conventional image of the seductress maid and of the master’s passive victim, she apparently does not endorse the patriarchal abusive morals or forfeit agency over her body and erotic life. As Suely Kofes points out, whenever household chores are carried out by a maid, distinct subjects perform the traditional feminine roles in the domestic realm of the employer’s family: the “reproductive,” sexualized woman (the wife, the mother) and the servant (the cleaner, the cook, the nanny) should be kept apart.14 Monitoring this type of role segmentation becomes a source of anxiety for employers, especially for housewives. Their suspicions and fantasies in this matter stem from a range of prejudices that, throughout Brazilian history, questioned the physical and moral purity of slaves and servants while cynically admitting that the family’s sons initiate their sexual life with women in domestic service.15 Consequently, as rendered by Que horas ela volta? and Casa grande, the relationship between the family and the maid depends on a continuous negotiation between physical and emotional distance and proximity, shared intimacy and implicit boundaries, belonging and otherness. Although maids are given access to the private life of the family, they are

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expected to be a transparent, automaton-like presence.16 Once naturalized, their vaporous existence in the household entails an emotional distance that contradicts the all-too-frequent rhetoric of affection between employers and domestic workers, and indeed helps desensitize employers to the servants’ humanity. That paves the way, for instance, for employers to dismiss a domestic worker at their exclusive discretion and with no remorse, as in the case of Severino, who was let go with no notice. In short, to keep the domestic workers’ presence in the household liminal, fundamental elements of their personal history and subjectivity, namely their sexuality, must be repressed in the employer-employee rapport. Rita’s gray uniform subdues her sexual appeal, while mistress Sônia exercises control over Rita’s lively personality by repeatedly correcting her pronunciation, censoring her potty mouth, and criticizing her fashion style. Hugo, in turn, ignores the most elemental facts of Rita’s personal life; despite the many years she has worked for his family, he is not even sure whether she is a mother. That aloofness becomes even more remarkable and ironic when the film later insinuates that Hugo and Rita were sexually involved. However, Barbosa (and Muylaert, for that matter), who is ethically committed to review conventionally accepted social behaviors and beliefs represented by employers in films, provides viewers with a broader and more complete understanding of domestic workers’ humanity, as well as the toxicity of Brazil’s current social order. In Casa grande the audience follows Jean through segregated spaces in the house and, by knowing more about Rita’s personality, can more easily identify with her. The film keeps most of the employees’ private lives in the shadows until the very end, when Jean pays a visit to Severino in the favela and, much to the boy’s surprise, finds the chauffeur living with Noêmia and meets their daughters. Jean also sees Rita there. The audience then gains a broader perspective and realizes that these individuals do enjoy a meaningful existence beyond the lives of their employers. Interestingly, in Casa grande the female servants are not the only women in the household to be silenced. Jean’s younger sister, Nathalie, is repeatedly ignored in familial interactions even when she obviously has something important to say, and her mother, Sônia, is kept in the dark about the family’s financial hardship. Even if they are both victims of the patriarch’s disdain, class, racial, and age divides prevent them from clearly realizing that structural misogyny affects all women in the household. Much to its credit, the film avoids sentimentality and precludes any explicit

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alliance between the female characters, providing an underlying commentary on the furtive ways masculine power in a class society imposes itself and disenfranchises its victims in a sort of divide-and-conquer strategy. Casa grande, however, not only captures how patriarchy operates it also exposes its fissures. As the erosion of the Cavalcanti family’s financial situation becomes evident, unemployed Hugo still poses as the chief of the clan but gradually loses power: now a debtor, he falls from a stepladder in his garden when a creditor calls him on the phone. His hubris and arrogance contrast with the down-to-earth and focused attitude of his fashionable and educated wife. Sônia teaches private French lessons—a dead language according to Hugo’s sardonic remark—and assumes a leading role in trying to make ends meet by readily engaging in a new, informal job, thereby transferring a significant fraction of symbolic power to the female character. Noêmia, the sullen black maid who also works for the Cavalcantis, defies the family’s stability from a different angle. Her evangelical principles make it difficult for her to tolerate Rita’s youthful and liberated behavior. Noêmia alerts Sônia about the demise of values within the family, which prompts Sônia to inspect Rita’s bedroom and find compromising photographs. Although Rita maintains that the provocative pictures of her in Sônia’s closet and bedroom were not taken by anybody in the family, the cinematic discourse hints otherwise: while Sônia and Rita talk in the kitchen, the camera also captures Hugo in the adjacent pantry, a canny way to bring his innocence under suspicion. Ultimately, Hugo does not suffer much from his presumed misconduct, while Rita, the weak link in the relationship, loses her job and is forced to leave the house, emphasizing the inconsistency of the mistress’s rhetoric in describing the servant as “uma filha [a daughter].” The dialogue between Rita and Sônia is particularly revealing about the power imbalance and mutual mistrust intrinsic to domestic work: Sônia asks whether Rita regrets her actions. An instant later Rita seems to realize the inequality inherent in her prerogatives ­compared to Sônia’s and reverses the question: “E a senhora? Está arrependida de ter mexido nas minhas coisas? [And you? Do you regret searching through my stuff?]” Both Sônia and Rita bitterly resent the respective violation of their intimacies, but in the heterogeneous and multivalent space of the employers’ household, only Sônia has the authority and power to defend her dignity. The politics of space and physicality are also key elements in Que horas ela volta?. The filmic discourse revolves around presence and absence,

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proximity and distance, access and barriers, and conviviality and segregation. In the first few minutes of the movie, Val playfully interacts with preschool-age Fabinho. While Val watches the boy swim, she talks on the phone with her daughter, Jéssica, who at the time lives in the northeastern part of the country. Fabinho then approaches, and Val hugs and kisses him. Val’s emotions are blocked from the viewer since the camera is positioned behind the actress, but it is all too clear that the affection Val heartily showers on the boy is an affection she is not able to provide to her biological daughter. In a classic case of unfair exchange that helps perpetuate social reproduction, Val’s job compels great personal sacrifices on her part while it allows her mistress, Bárbara, to achieve a successful professional career.17 Yet, Bárbara also loses something along the way: much to her disgust, she must share Fabinho’s filial affection with Val. The boy resents his mother’s absence and adores Val. Years later, as a teenager, his emotional attachment to the maid reaches the point of sharing her bed when he can’t sleep. At his convenience, and much like Jean in Casa grande, the boy crosses the boundaries that segregate different social classes. Val, on the other hand and unlike Rita, is convinced she must respect these same social barriers. Because she “knows her place,” she never uses the family’s swimming pool nor tastes Fabinho’s gourmet ice cream. Val’s seat of power in the house is the kitchen, a meeting point that symbolically bridges two distinct social spheres, the family’s and hers. From there the camera usually catches only a glimpse of the family’s intimacy and visually translates the complex mechanism that regulates Val’s access to the household. She only enters the private areas of the house when doing some chores; the backlighting used in some of those sequences reduces her body to a shadow and depicts Val as a “non-­ person.”18 It is also revealing that when Val anxiously tries to announce Jéssica’s imminent arrival to Bárbara and asks for temporary shelter for her daughter, she finds her mistress running on a treadmill and wearing headphones. What follows is a dialogue of the deaf: Bárbara cannot hear Val’s words and just wants to be sure dinner is ready. In this sense, the sequence in which Val passes a tray among party guests who completely ignore her presence is remarkable (Fig.  8.1). It stresses the film’s commitment to promoting the audience’s identification with Val: the tracking shot during the party scene, taken from the maid’s perspective, drags the viewers through the living room and invites us to partake in the emotional experience of being “transparent.”

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Fig. 8.1  Live-in maid Val and her employer Bárbara, in Que horas elas volta?

However, those moments of overt aloofness and disdain in relation to the domestic worker are rare in the film. Fabinho’s parents, Bárbara and Carlos, establish a warm and personal relationship with Val in recognition of her years of hard work and loyalty to the family. According to Bárbara, the maid “é praticamente da família [almost belongs to the family].” The question here, of course, is how wide the gap between “belonging” and “almost belonging” is, and who has the power to regulate familial territory and working rules. It is worth noting that Val and Jéssica, as well as Rita in Casa grande, speak with a northeastern accent, which draws attention to cultural and social markers that evidently do not fit in the employers’ milieu and impairs any true feeling of closeness on both sides. Interestingly enough, Jéssica’s qualities that perfectly conform to the cultural standards and expectations of Bárbara’s family—after all, she sounds more learned than Fabinho—are regarded with suspicion, presumably because of her social origins. Jéssica’s arrival in São Paulo functions as a turning point in the orderly and amicable life of the household. When first asked about Jéssica staying for a short period in the house, Bárbara immediately agrees and applies the usual rhetoric of affability, which includes contributing to comfortably accommodate Jéssica in Val’s tiny bedroom. But when Jéssica turns up, she simply does not fit in with the presumed role of a maid’s daughter because, despite being a poor migrant, she is not deferential. Jéssica is not only estranged from her mother—in diametrical opposition to Fabinho— but she also can’t accept Val’s submissive worldview and the marginal

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­ osition her mother, until then, gladly occupies in the structure of the p household. Resourceful and independent, Jéssica causes discomfort as she dismisses condescension. Like Fabinho, Jéssica is preparing to take her university entrance exams and is clearly disturbed by the idea of sharing the cramped space of Val’s quarto de empregada, where she cannot even find a corner to study. The family, in turn, cannot hide their disbelief when Jéssica declares she wants to study architecture, one of the most competitive university majors. In this sequence the images suggest an inversion of power relations since Jéssica is shot in low angle whereas the family, sitting around the dinner table, is captured from a high angle. What’s more, Jéssica explains her choice by declaring that she considers architecture to be “um instrument de mudança social [an instrument of social change].” Indeed, Jéssica immediately breaks through spatial and social boundaries within the family’s house. When in the kitchen she usually occupies an intermediary position between the countertop where Val works on one side and the dining room where the family eats on the other. However, very soon Carlos invites Jéssica to sit at the dinner table and eat with him. Moreover, to Bárbara’s and Val’s further astonishment, Jéssica accepts Carlos’s suggestion that she occupy the fancy guest bedroom directly opposite the master bedroom. Jéssica’s trajectory in the house—from the maid’s bedroom to the family’s private area—inverts that of Fabinho. In Jéssica’s case, however, crossing boundaries comes at a price: Bárbara’s increasingly open hostility coupled with Carlos’s pathetic sexual advances. Like Rita, Jéssica does not respect the logic of the patriarchal order, but unlike the maid in Casa grande her assets are her intellectual skills, not her body. According to Fabinho, Jéssica is a strange person because she is “segura demais de si [too sure of herself].” Indeed, Jéssica’s self-reliance defies the gender and class expectations of Bárbara, Fabinho, and Carlos, and ultimately shakes Val’s conformist assumptions regarding her social position. As we see next, through the uncompliant Jéssica, Muylaert offers a fictional rendering of recent shifts in the Brazilian socioeconomic landscape, a topic also explored, in different terms, in Barbosa’s film (Fig. 8.2).

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Fig. 8.2  Bábara listens to Jéssica’s ambitious academic plans in Que horas ela volta?

Cinematic Perspectives: Protagonism and Social Change In both Que horas ela volta? and Casa grande, the most vehement attacks on the current configuration of the social structure come from outside the household. However, while Que horas ela volta? chooses to focus on interpersonal relations within the employers’ house and overlooks what is happening in the public sphere, Casa grande broadens its perspective and incorporates the social dynamics outside of the wealthy family circle into its narrative. Barbosa adopts an overall light-handed treatment and skillfully detects the subtle mechanisms of social exclusion. His film critically shows how affluent Brazilians live in gated, socially homogeneous communities that rarely come into contact with and have insufficient knowledge of the realities, values, and thoughts of other social segments. Although this also holds true in Muylaert’s film, the foundations of Fabinho’s family remain unchallenged throughout the narrative and small changes in their routine prove inconsequential. For instance, when Fabinho fails his college exams, his parents offer him a six-month trip to Australia. But in Casa grande, financial difficulties interfere in the Cavalcanti’s routine and undermine the parents’ capacity to overprotect their children and confine their lives to the safe boundaries of the well off. The decision to fire Severino involuntarily diversifies Jean’s social experiences, enlarges the spatial scope of the diegetic world, and invites new perspectives into the filmic narrative. From this point on, the cinematic

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narrative is firmly anchored to the present time and examines patriarchy against the shifting terrain of Brazilian society. The bus Jean starts taking to school allows him to meet the more diverse and less affluent crowd that uses public transportation in Brazil. If, as suggested earlier, deep class differences in Brazilian society translate into the modes of occupying urban space, the use of mass transit to navigate the city signals a low social status, whereas the middle class largely associates the mobility and comfort provided by private cars with “the image of success.”19 In the film the parents’ reluctance to accept public transportation as a viable solution for their children functions as a symbol of the deep-seated resistance of the Brazilian upper classes to partake in public life and have egalitarian social interactions.20 Early in the movie the sequence in which Hugo, driving his comfortable car, picks a fight with jitney drivers over a parking space is a telling moment about the social divides embedded in the way people get around in Brazilian cities (Fig. 8.3). In an attempt to avoid conflict, one of the drivers amicably calls Hugo “meu irmão [my brother],” to which Hugo aggressively answers, “Eu não sou seu irmão [I’m not your brother].” The scene and its dialogue suggest that Hugo is unable to experience empathy for others outside his social environment, but his son behaves differently. In his teenage quest for romance, sex, and ultimately his own

Fig. 8.3  Jean on a bus in Casa grande

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identity, Jean has a more open mind and gladly flirts with Luiza during his bus rides. Like Jean, Luiza is a high school senior, but while he attends one of the most prestigious private institutions in Rio de Janeiro, she goes to a public school. Based on stereotyped associations between poverty, public transportation, and public school, and misled by the fact that Luiza gets off the bus near Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil, Jean mistakenly assumes that she lives there. Arguably, the film casts an optimistic glow here since despite socioeconomic and racial differences—Luiza is the offspring of a Japanese man and a brown woman—Jean overcomes his biased perceptions and invites the girl out. In this respect, the scene mirrors the playful conviviality among the youngsters in the swimming pool shown in one sequence of Que horas ela volta? addressed below. Later, when Jean brings Luiza to a weekend gathering at his house, the outsider teenager disrupts the upper-class ideological pact regarding class issues by defending affirmative-action policies and discrediting Hugo’s apologia for meritocracy. Although she does not represent oppressed Brazilians—even the Pedro II public school she attends is quite competitive and above the mediocre standards in Brazilian public education—Luiza does come from a different background and benefits from a quota system in public education. Hence, when Luiza bluntly reminds everyone that affirmative-action quotas pay a historical debt that Brazil owes to a huge part of its population, she speaks out for those like Rita and Noêmia who, due to their low social and cultural capital and more challenging living conditions, are less empowered to openly confront the status quo. This outspoken sequence at the Cavalcanti’s barbecue suspends the previous sober and well-­ mannered atmosphere of the movie and flags the insurgence of defiant voices in the contemporary Brazilian social landscape, which was only slightly transformed by legal changes and government-sponsored social programs that resulted in reduced poverty and segregation during the years the Workers’ Party (PT) was in office (2003–2016). Like young Jéssica in Que horas ela volta?, Luiza may be understood as the fictional representation of the so-called “new lower middle class” that emerged in Brazil between roughly 2003 and 2012.21 During this period strong commodity prices induced economic growth, making it possible for the Brazilian government to implement a moderate yet unprecedented policy of wealth redistribution. Minimum wages increased and jobs were created. A quite ambitious cash transfer program and other social policies benefited about fourteen million families.22 Despite the fierce debate about the merits and long-run consequences of the economic and social

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policies adopted by former president Lula da Silva and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, it is undeniable that the situation favored about forty million previously poor who were able to climb the socioeconomic ladder.23 Along with improved purchasing power, a system of economic and racial quotas enhanced access to higher education in public institutions. For many disfranchised Brazilian youngsters, going to college brought opportunities that were out of reach for previous generations. In this regard Luiza and Jéssica help explain, by contrast, the social standing of domestic workers like Val, Noêmia, and Rita, who did not have access to the opportunities available to the new generations of poor and marginalized Brazilians. By telling the stories of four college candidates—Fabinho, Jéssica, Jean, and Luiza—Que horas ela volta? and Casa grande recognize the fundamental role of higher education as both a mechanism of social reproduction and a potential agent for social mobility. Since Fabinho fails the entrance exam and Jean apparently gives up his college plans, both films endow the young female characters with greater perseverance and, on a hopeful note, admit that outspoken Jéssica and Luiza can help reverse the marginal situation they share with so many other Brazilian women. In Que horas ela volta? Jéssica’s presence tests the limits of cordiality and condescension as soothing remedies for the problematic and conflicted relationship between homeowners and housekeepers. The sequence in which Jéssica plays with Fabinho and one of his friends in the swimming pool may announce new modes of interclass interactions among young generations, but Bárbara’s subsequent reaction—outraged, she immediately calls a serviceman to clean the pool—dampens any optimism and attests to the upper classes’ violent backlash against the upward social mobility of disadvantaged groups. With her unapologetic and aspirational behavior, Jéssica ends up opening Val’s eyes to the constraints of her life as a domestic servant. Toward the end of the film, Jéssica’s strong performance on the entrance exams serves as a beacon of hope and empowerment to her mother. Then, in an emotionally charged sequence, Val enters the family’s half-empty pool and calls Jéssica to happily express how proud she feels. Val’s childlike amusement in kicking and splashing the water embodies a liberating rite of passage that both marks the crossing of social barriers and betokens Val’s willingness to live differently. Jéssica also provides Val with the opportunity to reverse a history of child abandonment and coming to better terms with her own motherhood: once Val finds out that Jéssica has left a son behind, she decides to leave her job, move to the outskirts of São Paulo with Jéssica, and help take care of her grandson.

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Caught by surprise and blind to Val’s sentimental reasons, Bárbara offers her a raise, but to no effect. Now that Fabinho has left for a gap year, the emotional ties that Val, his second mother, had with the family loosens. She seems ready to rewrite her story and devote herself to her own family. An equally optimistic message seems to emerge at the ending of Casa grande. Pressed by his father, Jean decides to pursue a promising career in economics or law instead of following his inclination to study communications. Yet, on the day of the exam, Jean rebels and gives up halfway through the test. He then seeks comfort at Severino’s house in the favela, where he also meets Rita at an outdoor party. The final shot shows Jean and Rita the following morning peacefully lying in bed in a humble kitchenette with a picturesque view of the favela. The boy calmly stands up, sits on the windowsill, and lights a cigarette. This closing, which resembles that in Que horas ela volta?, represents a rupture with the past and suggests new patterns of social ties. However, to what extent do the narrative final twists in Barbosa’s and Muylaert’s films challenge the social order and amplify the voice of the oppressed segments in Brazil?

Conclusion: Reception and Representation of the Subaltern Casa grande and Que horas ela volta? artfully examine problematic relationships between wealthy employers and domestic servants and, voluntarily or not, compose an account of Brazil’s shifting society. Each of these films conceptualizes social change in a specific way and assigns different roles to the domestic workers in the process of social reimagining. Barbosa’s film, a coming-of-age tale of an overprotected wealthy teenager, presents a dignified and sexually emancipated Rita who, at the end of the day, exercises no control over the changes that affect her life. On the one hand, one may concede that her portrait expands narrow notions about the humanity of the less privileged since she is not rendered as a powerless victim; on the contrary, her integrity remains unimpaired despite the hurdles she presumably faces as a poor and uneducated favela dweller and a domestic worker. On the other hand, the filmic narrative does not present any alternative path for Rita’s life and does not question her situation once she is fired from her job. By the film’s end, Rita still looks full of life, but her individuality is flattened and her voice unheard. Casa grande opts for channeling through Luiza the impetus to contest the

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social order and thereby convert an interracial lower-middle-class girl into a spokesperson for the oppressed. What can we conclude from Rita having sex with Jean? Does it attest to some degree of emancipation or was it a surrender to Jean’s power, the patriarch-to-be? Moreover, how do we understand Jean’s visit to Severino and his staying overnight with Rita in the nonviolent favela? Like Fabinho’s emotional attachment to Val, it may signal a sympathetic and accepting attitude toward those from other social ranks, but does Jean’s behavior go beyond an egocentric dilemma arising from his family’s economic failure? Indeed, it would be hard to interpret Jean’s behavior as a lasting alliance with the poor or a commitment to a new social order. Rather, it boils down to the completion of his male quest for sexual initiation and psychological individuation that requires him to defy his authoritarian father, a necessary yet probably intermediary step in his transition into an equally wealthy adulthood. If the sexual possession of Rita’s body can be understood as the trophy in the oedipal battle between son and father, then Rita’s fate eschews any utopian ideals and reiterates the subaltern role reserved for nonwhite, poor women in Brazil. Nevertheless, despite being the emotional and epistemological experience of an upper-class adolescent, Casa grande at the very least captures the disorienting facts and feelings aroused by the shifting winds of Brazil’s contemporary social and political scenario and evinces the persisting sway of its patriarchal and classist forces. Director Muylaert, in turn, omits almost all direct references to the historical context that could help situate a character like Jéssica, whose achievements instead tend to be presented as a matter of individual merit.24 Incidentally, Muylaert declared in an interview that Jéssica is almost a “superhero.”25 For many commentators, Muylaert’s use of an intimate point of view offers a subtle portrait of class disparities, preventing propaganda and didacticism.26 Arguably, Val and Jéssica may themselves be unaware of the historical factors that impact their private lives, but since they eventually overcome class obstacles and experience some degree of social emancipation, it is striking that the movie overlooks everything happening in the public sphere in Brazil that enabled both mother and daughter to steer their lives toward new directions. The effacement of the political dimension also impacts the construction of the main character. In racial matters, Brazilians classify people according to how they look. Thus, based on Brazilian racial categorization, Val is perceived as nonblack. However, in Brazil, the difference between black and white women employed as domestic servants is significant. In 2015,

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10.3 percent of employed white women were maids, compared to 18.0 percent of employed black women.27 One could maintain that by not focusing on a black character, Que horas ela volta? avoids a discussion of specific cases and offers a broader picture of class disparities. However, if the movie ignores race as a crucial element in the domestic labor market in Brazil, it involuntarily sanctions the watered-down interpretation of Brazilian society as a racial democracy. The decision to not take a clearer stance on sensitive issues like race and social confrontation may have been motivated by the desire to make the film appealing and accessible to Brazilian audiences.28 The same may apply to the choice of Regina Casé, a beloved television actress well known for comedy, to play the leading role. Directors, producers, and investors must come up with viable strategies in order to succeed since the Brazilian cinema industry, for many reasons and despite the growth in production of recent years, relies heavily on state sponsorship and still struggles to turn a profit.29 That may also explain the strategic use of humor throughout the movie since it makes it easier for middle- and upper-class spectators—those who can afford to buy movie tickets in Brazil—to relate to the protagonist. As anthropologist Donna Goldstein suggests, “The humor of particular classes plays an important role in boundary formation and the reinforcement of class position, hierarchies, and structures.”30 When Brazilian moviegoers laugh at Val’s northeastern accent and linguistic idiosyncrasies, they bolster class hegemonies that the film questions. Thus, critic Mike D’Angelo has a point when he says that Que horas ela volta? “undermines its sociological ambition”: while the filmic narrative celebrates the emancipation of two marginalized women, it contradictorily reinstates some biased assumptions about race and class, possibly because, being a market product, it could not risk ignoring white middle-class expectations. Nevertheless, as far as fictional representation of poor women is concerned, Jéssica and Val emerge as alternative figures in Brazilian cinema. Previous movies that focus on the lives of domestic servants and their families leave little room for professional shifts or social mobility. For instance, Fernando Meirelles’s Domésticas (Maids, 2001) shows how live­in housekeepers fail when they try to find a new way of earning a living. Despite the efforts of the female protagonists, in the final scenes of the film each one is still doing the daily chores in their mistress’s home. Muylaert’s film brings a different message: in a heartwarming finale, when history risks repeating itself, Val frees herself from ambiguous affective ties with her employers and prioritizes her own family. However, in the absence

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of historical contextualization, Val’s liberating gestures, similar to Jean’s, seem simplistic. Perhaps the most powerful critique in Casa grande and Que horas ela volta? resides in the naked truth that stories of individual emancipation cannot be socially consequential as long as the social structures that generate privileges and misfortune remain intact.

Notes 1. Suely Kofes, Mulher, Mulheres: Identidade, Diferença e Desigualdade na Relação entre Patroas e Empregadas Domésticas (Campinas: Unicamp, 2001), 139. Kofes rightly suggests that domestic work in Brazil suffers a double belittlement due to its association with both slavery and female domestic duties. 2. Lucy Earle, Transgressive Citizenship and the Struggle for Social Justice: The Right to the City in São Paulo (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 5. 3. Ricardo Pinto, “Sobre o Abandono do Discurso Alegórico no Cinema Brasileiro Atual,” in Literatura e Sociedade: Narrativa, Poesia, Teatro e Canção Popular, ed. André Bueno (Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 2006), 191; Ivana Bentes, “The Aesthetics of Violence in Brazilian Film,” in City of God in Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action, ed. Else R.  P. Vieira (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2005), 84–85. 4. Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 81. 5. Tiago de Luca, “Casa Grande & Senzala: Domestic Space and Class Conflict in Casa Grande and Que Horas Ela Volta?” in Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, eds. Márcio da Silva and Mariana Cunha (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 203–19. Luca carries out an insightful analysis of both Barbosa and Muylaert’s use of deep focus. 6. Marilena Chauí, Sobre a Violência (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2017), Kindle edition, location 679. 7. International Labor Organization (ILO), Domestic Workers across the World: Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protection, 2013, accessed January 20, 2018, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/ public/@dgrepor ts/@dcomm/@publ/documents/publication/ wcms_173363.pdf 8. Christiane Girard-Nunes and Pedro Henrique Isaac Silva, “Entre o Prescrito e o Real: O Papel da Subjetividade na Efetivação dos Direitos das

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Empregadas Domésticas no Brasil,” Sociedade e Estado 28, no. 3 (2013): 596, accessed March 29, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1590/ S0102-69922013000300007 9. Dominique Vidal, “A Afetividade no Emprego Doméstico: Um Debate Francês à Luz de uma Pesquisa Realizada no Brasil,” in Novas Configurações do Trabalho e Economia Solidária, eds. Isabel Georges and Marcia de Paula Leite (São Paulo: Annablume, 2009), 185. 10. Jurema Brites, “Serviço Doméstico: Elementos Políticos de um Campo Desprovido de Ilusões,” Campos: Revista de Antropologia Social 3 (2003): 74–75. 11. Vidal, “A Afetividade no Emprego Doméstico,” 189. 12. In the city of São Paulo the segregation of elevators based on race, gender, color, social status, age, or disability was not outlawed until 1996. 13. Milton Santos, O Espaço do Cidadão (São Paulo: Nobel, 1998), 81. 14. Kofes, Mulher, Mulheres, 35. 15. Sônia Roncador, Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil, 1889–1999 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 9–11 and 94–101. 16. Suely Kofes, “Entre Nós Mulheres, Elas as Patroas e Elas as Empregadas,” in Colcha de Retalhos: Estudos sobre a Famíllia no Brasil, eds. Antonio Augusto Arantes et al. (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982), 192. 17. As wittily formulated by Norma Alarcón, “in cultures in which ‘asymmetric race and class relations are a central organizing principle of society,’ one may also ‘become a woman’ in opposition to other women.” Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” in Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Foundations Books, 1990), 360. 18. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 210. 19. Eduardo A.  Vasconcellos, “The Making of the Middle-Class City: Transportation Policy in São Paulo,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 29 (1997): 303. 20. Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 258. 21. Marcelo C.  Neri, A Nova Classe Média: O Lado Brilhante da Base da Pirâmide (São Paulo: Saraiva, 2011), 43. 22. Alfredo Saad-Filho and Armando Boito, “The Failure of the PT and the Rise of the ‘New Right,’” Socialist Register 52 (2016): 217; Timothy J.  Power, “The Reduction of Poverty and Inequality in Brazil: Political Causes, Political Consequences,” New Order and Progress: Development

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and Democracy in Brazil, ed. Ben Ross Schneider (New York: Oxford UP, 2016), 213. 23. Charles H. Klein, Sean T. Mitchell, and Benjamin Junge, “Naming Brazil’s Previously Poor: ‘New Middle Class’ as an Economic, Political, and Experiential Category,” Economic Anthropology 5, no. 1 (2018): 84. 24. Matheus Pichonelli, “O Retrato Incompleto de ‘Que Horas Ela Volta?’” Carta Capital, Oct. 10, 2015. 25. Anna Muylaert, interview by Laura Nicholson, IndieWire, August 27, 2015, www.indiewire.com/2015/08/the-second-mother-director-annamuylaer t-on-why-it-took-20-years-to-make-her-award-winningdrama-202756/ 26. According to Arun Kumar, Muylaert, and her team “stage the nuances of cold class war without ever allowing a cacophony of argumentative voices to take over.” Arun Kumar, “Que horas ela volta? [2015]: A Nuanced & Acute Look at Class Differences,” High on Films, February 2, 2016, accessed July 16, 2018, www.highonfilms.com/second-mother-2015nuanced-acute-look-class-differences/ 27. Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada, Retrato das Desigualdades de Gênero e Raça, 2011, accessed July 3, 2018, http://www.ipea.gov.br/ retrato/ 28. With 493,568 viewers, Que horas ela volta? earned about 6.8 million reais (1.8 million U.S. dollars) domestically and was the tenth most lucrative Brazilian film released in 2015. Produced in that same year, Casa grande took in around 524,000 reais (138,000 U.S. dollars) and was ranked twenty-­third. Agência Nacional do Cinema (Ancine), “Listagem de Filmes Brasileiros e Estrangeiros Lançados 2009 a 2017,” accessed July 12, 2018, https://oca.ancine.gov.br/listagem-de-filmes-brasileiros-e-estrangeiroslan%C3%A7ados-2009-2017 29. Marcelo Ikeda, Cinema Brasileiro a partir da Retomada: Aspectos Econômicos e Políticos (São Paulo: Summus Editorial, 2015), 166. 30. Donna Goldstein, Laughter out of place: Race, Class and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 10.

References Alarcón, Norma. 1990. The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism. In Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa, 356–369. San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Ancine. Listagem de Filmes Brasileiros e Estrangeiros Lançados 2009 a 2017. https://oca.ancine.gov.br/listagem-de-filmes-brasileiros-e-estrangeiroslan%C3%A7ados-2009-2017

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Bentes, Ivana. 2005. The Aesthetics of Violence in Brazilian Film. In “City of God” in Several Voices: Brazilian Social Cinema as Action, ed. Else R.P. Vieira, 82–92. Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press. Brites, Jurema. 2003. Serviço Doméstico: Elementos Políticos de um Campo Desprovido de Ilusões. Campos: Revista de Antropologia Social 3: 65–82. Caldeira, Teresa. 2010. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carvalho, Bruno. 2013. Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (from the 1810s onward). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Chauí, Marilena. 2017. Sobre a Violência. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica. Ebook. D’Angelo, Mike. 2015. Que horas ela volta? Tackles Class War, Sometimes Reductively. A.  V. Club, August 27. www.avclub.com/review/ second-mother-tackles-class-war-sometimes-reductiv-224348 de Luca, Tiago. 2017. ‘Casa Grande & Senzala’: Domestic Space and Class Conflict in Casa Grande and Que Horas Ela Volta? In Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema, ed. Márcio da Silva and Mariana Cunha, 203–219. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Earle, Lucy. 2017. Transgressive Citizenship and the Struggle for Social Justice: The Right to the City in São Paulo. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Girard-Nunes, Christiane, and Pedro Henrique Isaac Silva. Dec. 2013. Entre o Prescrito e o Real: O Papel da Subjetividade na Efetivação dos Direitos das Empregadas Domésticas no Brasil. Sociedade e Estado 28 (3): 587–606. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-69922013000300007. Goldstein, Donna. 2003. Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ikeda, Marcelo. 2015. Cinema Brasileiro a partir da Retomada: Aspectos Econômicos e Políticos. São Paulo: Summus Editorial. Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada. 2011. Retrato das Desigualdades de Gênero e Raça. http://www.ipea.gov.br/retrato/ International Labor Organization (ILO). 2013. Domestic Workers across the World: Global and Regional Statistics and the Extent of Legal Protection. ILO. http:// www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/@publ/documents/publication/wcms_173363.pdf Kiernan, Paul. 2015. Brazil’s Economic Crisis Beats the Emerging Middle Class Back Down. Wall Street Journal (online), November 10. ProQuest. https:// search-proquest-com.dartmouth.idm.oclc.org/docview/1731933071?acc ountid=10422 Klein, Charles H., Sean T. Mitchell, and Benjamin Junge. 2018. Naming Brazil’s Previously Poor: ‘New Middle Class’ as an Economic, Political, and Experiential Category. Economic Anthropology 5 (1): 83–95.

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Kofes, Suely. 1982. Entre Nós Mulheres, Elas as Patroas e Elas as Empregadas. In Colcha de Retalhos: Estudos sobre a Famíllia no Brasil, ed. Antonio Augusto Arantes et al., 185–194. Brasiliense: São Paulo. ———. 2001. Mulher, Mulheres: Identidade, Diferença e Desigualdade na Relação entre Patroas e Empregadas Domésticas. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp. Kumar, Arun. 2016. Que horas ela volta? [2015]: A Nuanced & Acute Look at Class Differences. High on Films, February 2. www.highonfilms.com/ second-mother-2015-nuanced-acute-look-class-differences/ Leeuwen, Thomas A.P. 1998. The Springboard in the Pool: An Intimate History of the Swimming Pool. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Muylaert, Anna. 2015. ‘The Second Mother’ Director Anna Muylaert on Why It Took 20 Years to Make Her Award-Winning Drama. Interview by Laura Nicholson. IndieWire, August 27. www.indiewire.com/2015/08/ the-second-mother-director-anna-muylaert-on-why-it-took-20-years-to-makeher-award-winning-drama-202756/. Neri, Marcelo C. 2011. A Nova Classe Média: O Lado Brilhante da Base da Pirâmide. São Paulo: Saraiva. Pichonelli, Matheus. 2015. O Retrato Incompleto de ‘Que Horas Ela Volta?’ Carta Capital, October 10. Pinto, Ricardo. 2006. Sobre o Abandono do Discurso Alegórico no Cinema Brasileiro Atual. In Literatura e Sociedade: Narrativa, Poesia, Teatro e Canção Popular, ed. André Bueno, 191–203. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras. Podalsky, Laura. 2011. The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Power, Timothy J. 2016. The Reduction of Poverty and Inequality in Brazil: Political Causes, Political Consequences. In New Order and Progress: Development and Democracy in Brazil, ed. Ben Ross Schneider, 212–237. New York: Oxford University Press. Rollins, Judith. 1985. Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Roncador, Sônia. 2014. Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil, 1889–1999. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Saad-Filho. 2016. Alfredo, and Armando Boito. In The Failure of the PT and the Rise of the ‘New Right’. Socialist Register 52: 213–230. Santos, Milton. 1998. O Espaço do Cidadão. São Paulo: Nobel. Vasconcellos, Eduardo A. 1997. The Making of the Middle-Class City: Transportation Policy in São Paulo. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 29: 293–310. Vidal, Dominique. 2009. A Afetividade no Emprego Doméstico: Um Debate Francês à Luz de uma Pesquisa Realizada no Brasil. In Novas Configurações do Trabalho e Economia Solidária, ed. Isabel Georges and Marcia de Paula Leite, 173–192. São Paulo: Annablume.

CHAPTER 9

Domestic Labor and the Crisis of Care in La tierra y la sombra and La Sirga Marcelo Carosi

Introduction In contrast to countries such as Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Mexico, among others, Colombia lacks films that explore the figure of the domestic servant—the so-called housemaid. Although the majority of Colombian films have not explored domestic labor through the traditional figure of the maid—uniformed and compensated in the bourgeois home—they have approached domestic labor from another perspective that merits attention, that of the rural population. Nancy Fraser uses the term “crisis of care” to refer to the shortage of domestic labor that arises when neoliberalism exacerbates the gap between who can pay for care and who needs to give care in exchange for a wage. This gap is usually constructed in terms of citizenship, language, race, and class since “typically, it is racialized, often rural women from poor regions who take on the reproductive and caring labor.”1 The city becomes the space where this transfer of labor from one class to the other is exacerbated, and films that focus on uniformed domestic labor take place in a particular territory: urban space. For instance, La nana (Sebastián Silva, Chile, 2008), La teta asustada (Claudia M. Carosi (*) Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_9

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Llosa, Peru, 2009), and El niño pez (Lucía Puenzo, Argentina, 2009) show how the bourgeoisie in Lima, Santiago, and Buenos Aires deal with this crisis of care. However, the reality of rural homes throughout Latin America is radically different, obliging us to consider how gender today intersects with ethnicity, citizenship, and the environment in a reworking of power relations. The growing inability to manage the household in places such as Colombia, where political and economic unrest have displaced millions, has radically transformed the limits of labor, reinscribing not only its relevance but also the importance of the subject who performs it. My analysis therefore transcends the traditional figure of the maid as defined by her uniform, her salary, or the bourgeois home in which she works as I focus on two films, La tierra y la sombra [Land and Shade] (César Acevedo, Colombia, 2015) and La Sirga [The Towrope] (William Vega, Colombia, 2012) that take place in rural homes that are both unprotected and in various stages of disintegration.2 Although Colombian cinema has not reflected on either of the two forms of female domestic labor—remunerated or unremunerated3—it is clear that from the 2010s on it pays more attention to the effects of violence on the family as an institution in a conflict that involves more and more areas of the country. In this sense, the countryside becomes the preferred territory for many directors, something that at the same time shifts film away from the tendency to use the city as the principal backdrop. Thus, it is not a coincidence that Colombian cinema has put into dialogue characters, such as Alicia and Alfonso, who explain how the armed conflict has translated into a crisis of care, different from the one observed in the city. While in the majority of cases, urban life offers a better-armed support network, here in comparison we have a countryside destroyed by the conflict. In other words, the crisis in traditional economies allows for a closer reading of the dynamics of the domestic sphere. The countryside devastated by the war broadens the cinematic gaze toward a home that captures how those who have been affected by political and economic violence seek recuperation. La tierra y la sombra The crisis of care affects everyday life in rural populations that are vulnerable to fluctuations in the market and the whims of large landowners. Specifically, I consider La tierra y la sombra central to observing how

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visual culture accounts for the dynamics of the home disrupted not only by contamination that causes illness leading to death but also by a reversal of traditional gender roles that, for example, brings to the fore domestic labor performed by men. Acevedo’s film shows, in particular, the adverse effects of hyperintensive farming, which has taken place in the sugar industry and resulted in the forced appropriation of rural land, a process that intensified during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe between 2002 and 2010. It is this new cocktail of political and economic terror that has challenged rural households to varying degrees, often forcing entire families to migrate to the cities. It is worth nothing that Acevedo’s film is an exception in focusing on a family that does not migrate to the city; instead, it represents the new reality faced by those who stay behind despite these extreme conditions. La tierra y la sombra centers on the life of Alfonso who, after a seventeen-­year absence, returns home to care for Gerardo, his only son, who is dying from a respiratory illness related to the preharvest burning that big landowners carry out in preparation for the cutting of sugarcane. Little is said about the reason why he left in the first place and about where he was during all that time. The film does not provide straightforward answers to what has happened before Alfonso comes back since there is very little dialogue that provides details on the past or on the present. Unlike conventional films, this is a work constructed by gaps, silences, dark rooms, and feelings that go unsaid to emphasize what cannot be registered in everyday speech. It approaches the difficulties in making sense of neoliberal changes from a rural perspective that shows how extensively life has been altered by globalized factors that facilitated land appropriation, such as the financialization of the economy—the term Mauricio Lazzarato uses to refer to the increase in capital flows that “has achieved the redistribution of risk and protection, leaving the individual increasingly at the mercy of the market.”4 In La tierra y la sombra, this redistribution of risk and protection becomes a problem because it cannot be named properly. The crisis of care, as we will also see in La Sirga, goes hand in hand with the lack of linguistic resources that would help to reverse it. The problem resides in the inability to give an account of its reasons, expose its nature, and find solutions. A series of initial sequences sets the film’s tone, exposing this lack of linguistic resources. La tierra y la sombra begins in medias res, eliding any explanation to the viewers of how Alfonso has gotten to the point of returning home days before his son dies. The film offers few clues because

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it is about the present of a crisis, not about its origins or its future. A boy opens the door and asks an unfamiliar man if he is his grandfather. This man is holding a suitcase and wearing the same clothes that he will wear for the entirety of the film. A few seconds pass in suspension, marking a void that foreshadows the break between one generation and the other, specifically between grandfather and grandson since Gerardo will soon die. This beginning also indicates an interruption in social reproduction in this new reality that Alfonso’s family faces. Not only is domestic labor unable to maintain the workforce that sustains production but capital also cannibalizes social reproduction due to a state that does not intervene when facing the progression of this type of intensive farming. Consequently, the receding of the state facilitates the advance of harmful factors in the domestic realm that literally invade it, contaminating the space. Upon arriving home, Alfonso learns that Alicia, his wife, has prevented the landowners in the area from appropriating the small plot of land they still have. This demonstrates two things: first, that she has achieved something that men in their surrounding area could not, and second, that the majority of the nearby crops belong to these large estates. This may be why the house seems to be besieged by the sugarcane that grows in an uncontrollable manner, almost reaching the front door. In one of the scenes in which father and son find themselves alone, Alfonso observes that the home seems strange with all the sugarcane surrounding it, and Gerardo tells him that he was among those who, under the orders of the landowners, demolished the neighboring homes that had been forcibly sold in order to plant more sugarcane. Thus, in the place of homes such as the one belonging to his family, today there are only crops that make it impossible to see what surrounds the house. Only a rain tree breaks the monotony as the bastion of an irretrievable past, whose function I study later in greater depth. To a certain extent, the plantation is a threat not only because it is in the hands of unscrupulous companies but also because of the hyperintensive rotation of its crops. Sugarcane is produced in a staggered manner; it is sown in certain places and burned in others, and the rest is cut. This cycle continuously intervenes in daily life, especially by creating constantly contaminated air that has caused Gerardo’s illness. This fact makes the plantation a space that in certain moments appears apocalyptic: we even witness a scene in which the surroundings of the house become engulfed in flames, as if La tierra y la sombra were a science fiction film. In one of the scenes in which Alicia and Esperanza, Gerardo’s wife, return home

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once the day’s tasks are finished, it begins to rain ashes—to no one’s surprise but the viewer’s. Their impassivity shows how common this scene has become and the feeling of defeat that accompanies it. Esperanza even considers the burning necessary because it makes it easier to cut the sugarcane, that is, this rain facilitates her labor. Nevertheless, this naturalized danger forces them to take greater precautions to protect Gerardo, who cannot leave his bedroom due to the air quality. The plantation has become so dangerous that the interior of the home is kept dark—the windows are permanently closed so that Gerardo is less exposed to the toxic smoke. In this way Gerardo’s illness is spread, along with his presence, touching all the activities of the house. We hear his wheezing in the background throughout the film, an auditory contamination and sign of this diffuse illness. Besides this ghostly sound, La tierra y la sombra is a film full of silences, interrupted by murmurs around the convalescent body that is unable to do anything other than establish the atmosphere of a hospital, of which Alfonso seems to be in charge. Domestic labor in the hands of this man who returns to care for his son concretizes the retreat of the state as the social mediator responsible for the welfare of its citizens, or at least the kind of citizen that Acevedo’s film reflects. In this sense, we can observe the effects of the policies of President Uribe during the 2000s that brought about the privatization of public healthcare by passing the administration of the healthcare system into the hands of financial multinationals, something that not only permitted those companies to appropriate a large amount of public resources but also “[force] people to file for writs when providers or insurance companies deny access to treatments, medications, surgeries, and referrals for the diagnosis, treatments, and control of common diseases.”5 In Acevedo’s film, we do not even have the instance of judicial intervention since the hospital itself refuses to care for Gerardo when Alfonso brings him in to be examined. In a way, we could say that Gerardo is condemned to receive care in the home and not in a hospital, which could have prevented his slow death that is now inevitable with each passing day in the home. This is the reason why, in the eyes of Alfonso, that which surrounds the home becomes unrecognizable. In many of the scenes in which he looks at the sugarcane, the landscape appears removed from sight as the director chooses to depict it out of focus, giving the impression of sugarcane that is distorted, at least from his perspective. Up to a point, the blurry background informs us that the landscape has been transformed into a shadow, a disconcerting space. Acevedo points to the inability of the worker to

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order the land as a reflection of the impossibility here not only of labor but also of making sense of the territory, that is, narrating it or situating it within a history. From the masculine perspective, it becomes difficult to establish a stable bond with the landscape as a territory over which the worker can weave a personal narrative and articulate it with a community of subjects. Facing this panorama, Alfonso takes refuge in the house that, for a moment, seems to have a narrative frame as disconcerting as that of the plantation; that is, it is also difficult to situate it within a history since it is a domestic space filled with unspoken words and half sentences. This challenge to narrative and historical contextualization becomes particularly pointed when Alfonso cares for his son. If we carefully consider the scene in which Alfonso finds himself with Alicia for the first time after his absence, he has a subaltern role, clearly taking orders from Alicia that deliberately make it clear that he is unwelcome. His function in the home is only to dedicate himself to domestic chores. As we hear from Alicia, Alfonso has returned home only to “cook, clean, and wash clothes.” Acevedo takes a particular interest in showing this male character in a position that the patriarchy has given to women, not only that of providing free labor but, above all, of recreating the relationships of power that divide the public and the private, the productive and the reproductive (Fig. 9.1). Acevedo obsesses over certain moments of the family’s daily life as observed from the perspective of this man, who at no point shows signs of returning to work on the plantation. In this way, the film shows public space mainly from the perspective of Alicia and Esperanza, who cut the sugarcane in order to earn the sole sustenance for the home. Even if Alicia has taken on a certain masculine position within the home, this shift in roles does not replicate itself outside of the house. The two women work from morning to night and earn the same wage as Gerardo, but it is divided between the two of them. In this way, we see a special interest in the tensions that the female laborer awakens in the realm of farming, especially when on the plantation both experience the compassion and even pity of the men who end up helping them when they cannot keep up with the pace the work demands of them. In the eyes of their employers, they end up being a burden. They become doubly unproductive subjects who are unable to find a place inside or outside the home. It is important to note that the crisis of care, as Acevedo approaches it, brings with it an erasure of the woman as reproductive subject. Alfonso has replaced Alicia

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Fig. 9.1  Alonso meets Alicia in Land and Shade

and Esperanza, who are away from home when care for Gerardo is most needed. On the other hand, Alfonso works—watering plants, cleaning, and feeding the rest of the family. The scenes in which the family sits at the table or Alfonso keeps his son and grandson company in the shade of a tree mark the importance of this reproductive space. His presence and actions there—unthinkable in previous social configurations—facilitate the construction of lost ties, which cannot take place in public space since the most savage market has radically configured the countryside. Although domestic work is attached to the position of a diminished man, as we observe in relation to a deliberately submissive position, it also offers moments that weave a transformation within the family sphere. With this new position, Alfonso is able to approach Gerardo and take on the activities that are no longer solely the duties of women. In other words, this becomes the springboard to taking command of the house, a form of control defined in terms of reproductive abilities. The home offers the possibility of constructing a space that, first, will make sense of the present filtered by the illness of his dying son, and second, will permit a repositioning of Alfonso within a lost hierarchy. It can be said that it is necessary to

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remove Alicia and Esperanza from the home so that Alfonso can regain a tarnished protagonism. Although the plantation does not provide any meaning to this man’s life, domestic labor does by offering a space of redemption. One of the recurrent spaces of the house is the patio where a rain tree grows. This tree, which provides great shade and has a thick trunk and large roots, is a plant typical of the Valle, the Colombian province where La tierra y la sombra was shot, and very valued in the countryside. There, under its branches, Alfonso makes a bird feeder to instill in his grandson a respect for nature that he did not have when, for example, he threw stones at the blackbirds or great kiskadees that lived in the tree. Gerardo also goes there the first time that he is observed leaving the house. The following scene (Fig.  9.2) exhibits well the repositioning of a lost order through which the grandfather becomes the main protagonist. The tree functions as a space of emotional contact that not only recuperates a tie with lost nature but also establishes a homosocial space that emphasizes aspects of solidarity among the men of the household. Alfonso becomes the creator of the moment in which communication is reconstructed between the members of the household, at least the masculine ones; he facilitates here the terrain of identification with other men. In other words, he re-establishes the complicity among

Fig. 9.2  Men under the shade of a rain tree in Land and Shade

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­randson-father-­ g grandfather precisely by contradicting Alicia’s instructions that would force Gerardo to always stay indoors. We observe, seated in the shade of the tree, three generations of men positioned chronologically with Gerardo in the middle under a white blanket. Here the crisis of social reproduction is relieved by the call for the respect for nature, directed at the grandson who will understand it as he positions his grandfather as the subject that unites what illness and pollution had compromised. Over the course of the film, Alfonso reinstates his position in the home in relation to others in this way. While doing chores, he finds the only photograph the film offers us, a photo of a past time without any larger context than that of a horse. Acevedo is not only interested in capturing this spirited horse, he also shows over this image the blurry reflection of Alfonso himself, as a ghost, as the man who, like the horse, has disappeared. This photograph leads to a dream through which we see how the home makes possible, to a certain extent, the ability to narrate what cannot be narrated. In one of the most enigmatic scenes, which can be understood as part of a dream, Alfonso rises from his bed when he hears a banging noise and enters an empty room. There he finds his horse (or the ghost of his horse), which appears calm but is nonetheless a magnificent sight. Alfonso opens the door to free it, like someone liberating a specter. No words are spoken, but there is an exchange of meaningful gazes. This moment not only foreshadows the death of the son, who the horse to a certain degree represents, when it gallops away from the house, but also brings Alfonso onto a common plane with the animal. In this sense, the horse comes to function as a reflection since in this scene it offers a place of identification for the man. What is not said through words is communicated through this exchange of gazes; there a space without verbal communication is opened up, one that accounts for the lack of a language that is able to explain death, a language that would elucidate the causes of illness, that could reconstruct the history behind death that exalts the patriarchal imaginary of pain due to the death of a son. Nevertheless, the animal does create a space of inscription for those abandoned in the neoliberal order. It opens “an instance of recognition that passes through the body and not through biography.”6 In this sense, the animal is a frame that allows the assertion of the common condition while giving form to his son’s pain. The lack of communication becomes a common element in the film, but at the same time, we see that it is compensated for in more than one form. In addition to explaining the impossibility of giving a name to death

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due to the environmental crisis in this region of Colombia, muteness opens the possibility of focusing on one of the most emotional scenes in which we are given the chance to observe both Alfonso and Alicia engaged in a joint activity. Both wash the corpse of their just-deceased son, opening up a common space between them. In other words, we observe how domestic labor exceeds reproduction and intersects, in this way, with grief and mourning, perhaps the principal labor in the home that Gerardo is now no longer a part of. The state’s abandonment of marginal populations has various repercussions in the domestic realm due to fewer resources for public health and less control over landlords who are able to appropriate land easily. The burden of finding the means of survival is consequently left in the hands of the dispossessed and unprotected. From the analysis of Acevedo’s film, this crisis of care also translates to a difficulty of contextualizing this new experience when environmental catastrophes, as Rob Nixon argues, make physical landscapes unrecognizable to those who used to or still live there. Nevertheless, for male peasants like Alfonso, there is still the possibility, outside of verbal communication, of making sense of his new social position and even redeeming it by performing domestic labor, something that will prove unattainable for displaced women as we see in La Sirga. La Sirga While La tierra y la sombra calls attention to the shortcomings of language in understanding the male experience of the neoliberal order’s economic and ecological onslaught, La Sirga accounts for the dynamics of the home through the lens of the work of Alicia, a displaced girl who fled her house due to an upsurge in the armed conflict. Neoliberal policies have caused not only the displacement of millions of people, particularly young women as we see in this film, but also a breakdown in rural economies. The armed conflict combined with the liberalization of the economy stripped entire communities of ancestral livelihoods such as fishing, forcing their members to find new means of survival.7 Hence, as this film shows, it is not a coincidence that the change in production underlines the importance of domestic work in moments in which the countryside has become dangerous or is no longer the source of identity or economic resources. This section seeks to answer the following question: in what way does a displaced person such as Alicia contextualize the crisis of care in the Colombian countryside? I emphasize the word countryside because, as already

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observed, the social dynamics around domestic employment there remain different from those in the city. For that reason, I consider it necessary to investigate unremunerated labor because here compensation takes other forms. In contrast to Acevedo’s film, in La Sirga, the protagonist is not a man caring for someone close to him but a young woman who, after an attack in which her immediate family dies, takes refuge in the house of a relative she barely knows. After her town is burned down by an insurgent group, Alicia flees to her uncle’s house, called La Sirga and located on the shores of what is known as the lagoon of La Cocha, a placid body of water almost 3000 meters above sea level in the Colombian southwest periphery.8 There she is informally employed in exchange for lodging, and has the chance to begin recovering from the emotional consequences of losing her family. Alicia’s point of view offers the possibility of exploring the private life of a displaced young woman, thus moving the film away from traditional narratives of the armed conflict that are generally centered around a masculine perspective.9 As a consequence of this distancing from masculine rhetoric, the film calls on us to think about the role of women in both traditional economies and in power relations in the domestic sphere. Vega makes Alicia’s point of view our point of view, and in this way obliges us to adopt her position, one that is shaped by both pain and ignorance of the dynamics of violence. The film begins with a long scene, almost four minutes in duration, in which Alicia, having fled the town where she lived, walks alone in a barren wasteland until she faints from fatigue. An oarsman named Gabriel finds her and brings her to her uncle’s home. It is in La Sirga that Alicia begins to recuperate, the home at some points resembling a hospital. Facing the cold demeanor of her uncle, who at first does not even acknowledge her as his niece, Alicia offers her labor in order to stay. This chain of scenes establishes the tone and consequent atmosphere while following the gaze of a disoriented and perplexed Alicia. The trauma suffered due to the death of her family revives Alicia’s somnambulism that had previously seemed cured. In multiple scenes, we see her sleepwalking from her bedroom toward the lagoon, carrying a candle in clear reference to an apparently unresolved grief. We can affirm that the somnambulism symbolizes the grief that cannot take shape while she is awake. As Stephen Thomson states, “All sleepwalkers, as the unconscious authors of their actions, effectively deny themselves the possibility of narrating their story in the first person.”10 Vega incorporates this problem but does not intend to solve it with another character that would make the

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story narratable. He only gives us some signs that provide clues about Alicia, always as part of a nonverbal universe and associated in particular with the lack of public debate that stands in the way of a frame of intelligibility around violence seen through the particular lens of gender. In one of the scenes in which it becomes difficult to discern reality from a dream, we see Alicia walking with the candle toward the kitchen where some fish deposited on the table slap the surface with their fins. The noise on the table suddenly becomes confused with the hammer blows that are heard outside of the house at the same moment in which Alicia is shown waking abruptly. This is one of the most symbolic scenes of the film that marks, above all, Alicia’s perspective that flows between different spaces and times, between the lagoon and the house, between the past and the present, giving rise to a problematized gaze over the conflict and the position of the woman inside in relation to it. It goes without saying that the humanitarian crisis outside the walls of the house forces a repositioning of the gaze to the inside of the home and consequently gives a special place to Alicia, whose work involves a series of activities that not only includes cooking and cleaning but also a transformation of the house. Because the inhabitants of the place can no longer fish out of fear of being attacked, Oscar, Alicia’s uncle, has decided to convert his home into a hostel to give shelter to tourists. This transformation occurs in clear harmony with the phenomenon of conceptualizing the home as a space remote from production—that is, it narrates a paradigmatic shift of relating the public with the private; it is something that also shows a weakening of barriers that previously protected domestic space. In this sense, Vega emphasizes the importance of women in the economy during periods of political and economic crisis, and consequently challenges studies that affirm that armed conflicts such as in the Colombian case generate a “renewal of a patriarchal familial ideology,” as Cynthia Cockburn poses when she argues that civil war in late capitalism has “deepen[ed] the differentiation between men and women, masculinity and femininity, preparing men to fight and women to support them.”11 La Sirga problematizes this asseveration; even though the women in this film do serve men in traditional ways, they have also taken up some masculine roles. Let us emphasize that generally a shift in gender hierarchies due to the new valorization of women’s work is usually placed outside of the domestic sphere such as when women advance toward territories that were traditionally masculine, such as public space. Having said this, Vega is not

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interested in spaces outside of the domestic, which leads to an interesting decision that allows us to see how these hierarchies reinstate the control of the female body inside the house. In contrast to La tierra y la sombra, in which Alfonso fulfills a clear function in the home after years of absence and thus recuperates his patriarchal place by tending to his dying son, for Alicia, domestic labor is configured in a less-clear way, or at least it becomes more encompassing. Transcending the fact that both directors explore the crisis of care in relation to affective intrafamilial ties, in La Sirga, labor takes on an unusual protagonism in the material activities to repair the home. The state of the house, its walls, ceilings, railings, all the elements that mark limits, are found to be full of holes, rotten, and broken. Thus, it is not by chance that the director pays special attention to Alicia’s work around this perimeter. If we think about how the crisis of care is above all one that involves an erosion of the limits between the public and private spheres, facilitating an invasion of the market and conflict in the home, with her labor Alicia tries to reconstruct them, turning toward Nancy Fraser’s affirmation that the crisis of social reproduction “is … located … at the border that simultaneously supports and connects production and reproduction. Neither intra-economic not intra-domestic, it is a contradiction between these two constitutive elements of capitalist society.”12 The permeability of the home narrates this contradiction that Fraser refers to in that it raises the need to protect the domestic environment from the political and environmental interventions that have placed Alicia in her current position. If we focus on the images in the film, for the most part, they lack a precise notion of spaces; Vega is reluctant to capture detail. Inside the house, for example, the camera plays with the light and shadows in which the limits that establish what is inside and what is outside of the house appear diffuse. The most striking exteriors are those that are shot from the interior, particularly while Alicia works. From there the landscape appears like a blurry background without depth, as we see in Fig. 9.3. We can maintain that the focus is Alicia and her project, which is not reduced to the repair of the house but constructs the space that will facilitate the repair of the emotional wounds inflicted by losing her family. In Vega’s eyes, recovering the domestic space involves rebuilding the limits of the home in order to protect it from what exists outside. In this way, we see that to a large degree the role of the woman is to reinstate the protection lost by the lack of attention stemming from the neglect of men. Let us recall that from the very origin of Western patriarchy, the woman is she who makes the home a “place of order and memory,” who “ ­ accumulates

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Fig. 9.3  Alicia fixing the terrace railing in La Sirga

and conserves that which has been acquired,” and in this way gives the home “its spatial organization.”13 Patriarchy forces the woman to preserve and reproduce both the techniques of care and the relations of power and domination in which the same woman finds herself subsumed. If neoliberalism has been eroding the system of control that the patriarchal space inscribed within the familial jurisdiction through the masculine figure, it has done so while forcing a redefinition of the notions that identify the family as an institution since the family has become more exposed to external forces related to an omnipresent social control that has the body of the woman as the principal reference to discipline. Alicia’s position in the home is explained as that of a domestic worker who is family yet a stranger, someone who is never seen as a full member of the family. Although he no longer fishes, Oscar is focused on the construction of a trout farm that would permit him to produce what he can no longer find in the lake due to ongoing violence. Freddy, his son, has abandoned the home to enlist in a paramilitary group that we can assume is the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), an extreme-right counterinsurgent and terrorist organization. Both men not only find themselves alienated from the typical work activities of those who inhabit this region but

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also from the maintenance of the house. It is through Alicia that the film explores the anxiety of a father who is continually preoccupied with what Freddy hides in his new life. For example, Alicia is prohibited from entering Freddy’s room even before he arrives at La Sirga. When Oscar realizes that Alicia has entered her cousin’s room to tidy it, he orders her “not to be nosy” and not return to the space, illustrating his anxieties with respect to the new life of his son, a life that, as we find out, has a direct connection to the causes of Alicia’s present situation. On one hand, her cousin sees her as another member of the family rather than as a woman who works in the house in exchange for sustenance; on the other, he considers her a possible “companion” to Oscar. Freddy wants his father to migrate to the city where he thinks it will be safer, and in his opinion, Alicia could accompany him. Also significant is the fact that Freddy’s surprise arrival reveals certain clues regarding the nature of his absence. For example, he appears with a burnt arm, raising questions about his possible participation in the fire in Siberia, the town where Alicia’s family perished. The character of Freddy takes on more depth to the point that he emerges as the one responsible for Alicia’s existing situation. Let us keep in mind that neoliberalism has incentivized violence against the female body in diverse ways. In Vega, domestic violence appears in a subtle way but remains relevant to my analysis that explains how domestic labor in places like La Sirga reconstructs a common masculine territory. Alicia’s work not only renovates the house, it also exposes her body to the male gaze. It is being the object of the male gaze that forms part of a phenomenon that is perceived inside in La Sirga: although the landscape refuses to be appropriated by the male gaze, we see how Alicia, in a certain sense, takes its place. Not only do we see the uncle and nephew observe a nude Alicia in various moments of the film, we also hear the uncle’s ex-­ coworkers loudly celebrate the arrival of his niece in the house, something that clearly frightens her. Alicia’s work places her in a position of high visibility before the male gaze and in this way serves as a counterpoint to the landscape, which has lost significance not only because it forms part of the violent territory of the Colombian periphery but also because the male worker can no longer intervene on it with his labor. Agricultural exploitation as a masculine phenomenon offers a wage for men but also a sense of belonging and community. In this sense, William Vega offers a critical perspective on how neoliberal politics have not only dismantled traditional economies but have also disrupted family relations. Consequently, it can be said that in the context of La Sirga the male laborer reinstates his

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­ osition through his gaze inside of the domestic sphere while the public p one is shaped by logics of violent intervention that transcend all possibility of resistance. Although Alicia is a migrant subject who, like Alfonso, is in mourning, she does not recognize the possibility of making sense of the deaths that displaced her to her uncle’s home in the first place. As stated in the beginning, almost nothing is known of what occurred in Siberia. In this way, silence, which is also reflected in the impossibility of Alicia’s being able to speak about what happened and a lack of interlocutors who are interested in her pain, does nothing but prolong her vulnerability. Alicia is emotionally blocked for the length of the film, at least in these terms. If domestic work here is also the labor of mourning, it forms part of an ephemeral project that fails to maintain any affective archive that would provide the tools necessary to cope with mourning. This space of neglect captures how the present is poorly perceived and registered. The house as hostel becomes another figure that narrates the conception of the home as a place of passage that does not offer an adequate response to the crisis. The home works against the possibility of cementing or recuperating a history shared by those that inhabit it because it does not consolidate an affective archive of knowledge that reproduces the techniques of care, resulting in, among other things, the grief that Alicia seems unable to resolve. Thus, La Sirga threatens reproductive nature in relation to this memory that currently finds itself intervened on by a fragile home, one in transit and in which women such as Alicia remain the principal victims. I have examined these two films side by side through the lens of the domestic labor performed by two different characters affected by political and economic violence in neoliberal Colombia. While this violence apparently takes place in the landscape and external, nondomestic space, both William Vega and César Acevedo reveal that in fact it restructures labor and gender relations within the domestic space. On one level, these films expose that the crisis of care in rural areas is marked by forced displacement, mourning, and environmental and economic terror. On another level, we see that gender dynamics are still at work in defining who carries, in the end, the burden of the crisis. In Alicia’s case, care seems to fall short: she is not cared for and her work does not help her care for herself emotionally. This presents a radically different example from that of Alfonso, who is able to work through his new position in his home once he comes back to take care of his dying son. He indeed re-establishes familial bonds, challenging a violent neoliberal intervention that disrupts social norms,

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economic possibilities, and the physical landscape, all of which are tied up in how people provide care. These films present two sides of the crisis of care in Latin America exacerbated by neoliberal policies that problematize gender roles, deform the environment, and annul traditional narratives and forms of communication.

Notes 1. Nancy Fraser, “Contradiction of Capital and Care,” New Left Review 100 (2016): 99–117. 2. César E.  Abadía-Barrero, “The Transformation of the Value of Life: Dispossession as Torture,” Medical Anthropology 34, no. 5 (2015): 389–406. 3. There are exceptions such as Luis Ospina’s neorealist short film Asunción (1975), which portrays the mistreatment of a female domestic worker from the Bogotá middle class and her subsequent revenge. To a certain extent, Asunción is a film that explores the construction of class consciousness in women who decide to work instead of forming a family. Within the unremunerated frame, we have ¿Y su mama qué hace? (1981), a short film shot by the feminist collective Cine-Mujer. The film takes as its focus the social importance of domestic work, glimpsed through an endless number of draining activities carried out by a middle-class housewife throughout a day of work. 4. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Neoliberalismo in Action: Inequality, Insecurity, and the Reconstruction of the Social,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 111. 5. Abadía-Barrero, “The Transformation of the Value of Life,” 63. 6. Gabriel Giorgi, Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2014), 157. 7. Abbey Steele, Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). 8. Southern Colombia has been particularly affected by the armed conflict since the policies that protect the well-being of the communities living there have not been effectively implemented. In addition, the fact that much of its territory either has an inhospitable climate or lacks infrastructure makes it easy for insurgent groups to control its space. 9. This is the case with films such as Cóndores no entierran todos los días (Francisco Norden, Colombia, 1983) and El páramo (Jaime Osorio Márquez, Colombia, 2011). That said, some recent films on the civil war have explored female characters in more detail, as we observe with Alias

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María (José Luis Rugeles, Colombia, 2015) and Oscuro animal (Felipe Guerrero, Colombia, 2016). 10. Stephen Thomson, “Ancillary narratives: Maids, sleepwalking, and agency in nineteenth-century literature and culture,” Textual Practice 29, no. 1 (2015): 95. 11. Cynthia Cockburn, “The Continuum of Violence: a Gender Perspective on War and Peace,” in Sites of Violence, eds. Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 32. 12. Fraser, “Contradiction of Capital and Care,” 109. 13. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. II (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 170.

References Abadía-Barrero, César E. 2015. The Transformation of the Value of Life: Dispossession as Torture. Medical Anthropology 34 (5): 389–406. Cockburn, Cynthia. 2004. The Continuum of Violence: A Gender Perspective on War and Peace. In Sites of Violence, ed. Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles, 24–44. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990. History of Sexuality, Vol. II. New York: Vintage Books. Fraser, Nancy. 2016. Contradiction of Capital and Care. New Left Review 100: 99–117. Giorgi, Gabriel. 2014. Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2009. Neoliberalismo in Action: Inequality, Insecurity, and the Reconstruction of the Social. Theory, Culture & Society 26 (6): 109–133. Nixon, Rob. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. La Sirga. 2012. Directed by William Vega. Colombia: Contravía Films. La tierra y la sombra. 2015. Directed by César Acevedo. Colombia: Burning Blue. Steele, Abbey. 2017. Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Thomson, Stephen. 2015. Ancillary Narratives: Maids, Sleepwalking, and Agency in Nineteenth-Century Literature and culture. Textual Practice 29 (1): 91–110.

CHAPTER 10

Domestic Matters: Hollywood and the Politics of Representing la doméstica in Babel and Cake Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro

The maid, more specifically the domestic worker of Mexican origin or descent, has historically been one of the signature roles Hollywood has created for Spanish-speaking and Latina actors in both film and television entertainment. This popular filmic portrayal of the Latina maid is symptomatic of, on the one hand, the reality of global economics with its incessant demand for cheap domestic labor in the United States and, on the other, the stereotypes that still abound in the US popular imaginary about who Latinos—in particular, Mexican-Americans, its largest subgroup— and Latin American immigrants are.1 More than any other ethnic group, Latino and Latina characters tend to be limited to roles representing low-­ status occupations such as service and domestic workers, unskilled laborers, and, in the worst cases of negative profiling, all kinds of criminals and outlaws.2

S. Ruiz-Alfaro (*) Department of Spanish and Linguistics, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_10

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The highly stereotyped Latino/a characters that Hollywood has provided to mainstream audiences shed light on how this heterogeneous group has been homogeneously construed within the nation’s imaginary.3 This chapter explores the construction of one of these figures, the female domestic worker of Mexican descent, a character construed as socially acceptable for US audiences despite the persistent, heated current public debates on immigration that target Latinos, especially those of Mexican origin. Film scholar Isabel Molina Guzmán explains that Hollywood has incorporated Latina characters as domestic workers in a “romanticized and politically nonthreatening” way, either through “inherently morally good” maids or secondary characters “commonly used as the source of ironic humor.”4 My point of departure here is to consider that Hollywood has already introduced this subject successfully within the repertoire of characters that participate in the representation of domestic life in today’s United States. I am interested in exploring how her presence, beyond stereotypes and common traits that make this character “safe for cultural and economic consumption,”5 signals a deeper questioning of who this Latina Other is within the nation’s social fabric and identity in the twenty-­ first century. This chapter analyzes the cinematic representation of the Mexican female domestic worker in two Hollywood films: Babel (2006), directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett; and Cake (2014), directed by David Barnz, with Jennifer Aniston as its main star. In both films, the housekeeper-nanny, Amelia and Silvana, respectively, is played by the same Mexican actress, Adriana Barraza, whose international recognition came after working under González Iñárritu’s direction in the 1999 Oscar-nominated film Amores Perros.6 These two movies employ the character of the housemaid, a woman of Mexican origin, as an immigrant who has already rooted herself in the United States and works for what constitutes Hollywood’s sacrosanct ideal of the American family: upper-middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon, and heterosexual. Another common element in both stories is that they revolve around each upper-middle-class family’s internal crisis, symbolically presented by the illness, both physical and emotional, of each mother, Susan Jones (Cate Blanchett) in Babel and Claire Bennett (Jennifer Aniston) in Cake. The reason behind the ongoing trauma is the family’s unexpected loss of a young child. The child’s death has also brought about a profound crisis in each marriage, the absence and infidelity of Richard (Brad Pitt) in Babel and the departure and separation of Jason (Chris Messina) in Cake.

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However, the two films show how in these dramatic and difficult moments there is a solid, nurturing presence of the immigrant Mexican female who works as a nanny/housemaid, a figure that provides much-needed physical and emotional support for these families at a time of complete distress. The fact that the films locate their stories (or its main story, in the case of Babel) in contemporary times and in the suburbs of Southern California (San Diego in Babel, Los Angeles in Cake) relates to the filmmakers’ effort to represent the quintessential global socioeconomic setting of twenty-­ first-­century America. Moreover, the distinct recognition of Amelia and Silvana as Mexican immigrants and the near presence and inclusion of the US–Mexico border in the diegesis of the story function as a reminder of the reality of life in Southern California today and, by extension, the everlasting presence and participation of the immigrant Latino/a Other in the US political and socioeconomic fabric. Since the 1990s domestic work in the United States has employed high numbers of female immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, making domestic work one of the most gendered and ethnic occupations in the country today.7 The establishing shot in each film clearly defines who this Other is by immediately locating the domestic worker within their workplace and the chores they perform. In Babel spectators first see Amelia in the kitchen of the Jones house, answering the phone to receive instructions from her employer, Richard, to whom she acts submissively by repeatedly answering “Yes, sir.” This is an acknowledgment of the employer’s position of power and the maid’s acceptance of the dynamics of their relationship. In contrast to this clear demarcation of hierarchy, Amelia’s tenderness toward the children shows another side of the domestic work she performs for the Jones family. The camera’s intruding eye invites the audience to follow Amelia through the interior of the house—kitchen, living room, bedrooms—witnessing how she joyfully interacts with the two children. She speaks to them in Spanish, a fact that immediately identifies Amelia’s ethnic background. In this first sequence, language differentiates the two spheres with which Amelia deals in her work at the house, speaking English to the señor and Spanish to his children. The latter shows how Amelia has created a very intimate relationship with the children, a connection that is also emphasized by her warm gestures and the fun games they play together. Her maternal demeanor is cinematographically presented by the close-up shots of Amelia’s hands caressing the children before they fall asleep, and the reverse shots of the children’s faces and Amelia’s to emphasize the closeness and intimacy of their relationship (Fig. 10.1).

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Fig. 10.1  Amelia’s tenderness toward Mike in Babel

In the case of Cake, Silvana is also first introduced inside the house of the family for whom she works, cooking and preparing an unrequested quesadilla for Claire, the actual mother and señora of the home. At this point, only Claire lives in the house, but Silvana shows her caring attitude in protecting and nurturing Claire before departing for her own house and family. It is telling that in this first scene, as the dialogue reveals, Silvana is working off hours, taking emotional care of her employer in an obviously sincere display of concern for Claire. As in Amelia’s case, Silvana’s ethnic background is immediately established by her thick accent, broken English, and the preparation of Mexican food that the viewers can easily identify. As in the case of Babel, the film also needs to establish and define Silvana’s role as an employee within the intimate locus of a home that is not hers. Spectators see how, despite her initial rejection, she takes the money Claire insists on giving her for the extra hours she did not request, an action that reflects the need to somehow limit Silvana’s display of affect toward her señora, a spontaneous gesture on the maid’s part that was never expected to be compensated. In sum, both films take narrative and visual time to introduce the two sides and the complex nature of domestic work. The domestic worker is an outsider paid for performing the physical chores and care work within the household; more importantly, she is an insider, both a witness of and participant in the family dynamics that inherently entail exchanges of affect, feelings, and emotions.

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Adriana Barraza plays the same role, indeed, the same character in both films: a maternal, caring, hardworking, affectionate, nurturing, middle-­ aged immigrant Mexican woman. She is a figure defined from the very beginning by the place in which she is first presented to spectators: the kitchen, the central place of a traditional home, the foremost naturalized space for traditional motherhood. Moreover, with their actions, Silvana and Amelia both occupy or, rather, substitute for the place of the upper-­ class, white mother, absent at the very moment both stories unravel their respective conflicts and drama. Susan is away from home, both literally and figuratively speaking: she is in Morocco at the beginning of the story and is emotionally and physically wounded throughout the entire film. Claire’s trauma is the focus of the story, her mourning process precisely pointing out her current situation as a mother who has lost her only child. As these first scenes show, Amelia and Silvana have access to the private confines of American family life that functions, as I argue throughout this chapter, as a metaphor of the nation’s ethos and cultural identity in contemporary times. Indeed, the American family is the institution that resides at the core of the United States’ imaginary and cultural identity since its inception as a nation-state. Since the nineteenth century the realm of the domestic has borne crucial meaning in the creation of a white upper and middle-class American culture, the pillar for defining what was then an expanding nation in the process of constructing its own identity—confronting Others such as Native Americans, Mexicans, and Europeans.8 Domesticity has thus been crucial in imagining the nation as home, and women have played a major role in defining it. Also, if family life and domesticity—with gender and sex at the epicenter of its construction— were central in the formation of national identity, the presence and definition of the foreign, as opposed to the domestic, were needed to “erect the boundaries that enclose the nation as home.”9 The most tangible, physical representation of the foreign, the border, became a crucial site of hegemonic ideological dynamics, in particular, those related to race and ethnicity.10 White nativist ideology, with its exclusionary terms that defined an “us” from an Other throughout the country’s history, has provided the public imagination with a sense of nationhood that established “whiteness,” conceived as a racial category, the English language, and the Anglo-Saxon cultural identity as the core elements of a white native myth, one that is prevalent to this day in the United States.11 Particularly since the 1990s, white nativism has focused on Mexican immigrants as “the quintessential

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illegal aliens,” and “invading force,” incapable of integrating and therefore a threat to the American way of life.12 In both films, the border is construed as directly related to Amelia’s and Silvana’s Otherness: Their place of birth is identified as Tijuana, and crossing the border allows spectators to have access to Amelia and Silvana’s subjectivity since their personal identity is associated with the families and friends that remain there. Also, crossing the border defines who they are, immigrant workers, and in this sense the action of border crossing demarcates their condition as subjects in legal terms, a point that both films emphasize even if in opposite terms: Amelia is an undocumented worker with no citizenship rights under US law, a fact that will have disastrous results for her in the end, while Silvana proudly possesses a green card that confirms her legal status and rightful residence in the country. Through the border and border crossings, both films make explicit the paradoxical nature of the domestic worker: an outsider whose origin and ethnicity potentially represent a threat to the sense of nationhood but also an insider whose presence in US family life is welcomed and valued since she evokes an ideal of a normative and patriarchal motherhood that appears to be presently absent and, as both films suggest, temporarily lost. Moreover, what happens at the border is presented as a decisive moment, a breaking point that defines the destiny of each character and the development of the films’ narrative, despite the fact that they are not protagonists. If Babel recreates the border as a perilous place that defines the confines of the domestic as safe and the foreign as absolute danger, Cake presents it in the opposite way, with a safe treatment of the border full of stereotypical, humorous, and innocuous images. These opposing interpretations of the border are a reflection of the contrasting contextual political climate about immigration present at the time each film was produced. Babel was filmed at the height of one of the most visible white nativist movements of the twenty-first century, the Minuteman Project on the Arizona–Mexico border in 2005,13 and the ensuing massive immigration demonstrations a year later against the protectionist legislation passed at the time.14 Cake, however, was the product of a much more favorable public view of immigration and immigrants, particularly relating to children and undocumented parents of those minors living in the country, and legislation that took place under President Obama’s second term in office.15 The readings that both films play out in regard to the border and the Latino Other show the power of cinema and its participation in the construction of a collective and cultural identity projected for its audience.

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The next two sections analyze the character of the female Mexican domestic worker beyond the existent stereotypes that make her an easily consumable character for American audiences. In contrast, in these two films la doméstica becomes a complex character whose paradoxical position as an insider/outsider plays out in each story as a subject with knowledge and power to see and act within the parameters of domestic life. Her complexity also comes from her association with the US–Mexico border, a fact that is corroborated by the inclusion in both films of the border-­ crossing experience and the meanings that it conveys regarding current immigration debates that try to elucidate who this Other is within competing narratives of inclusion/exclusion within the national body. I argue that the characters Amelia and Silvana ultimately serve Hollywood’s political agenda well in their portrayal of an imagined ideal of the family and nation that, in the end, supports whiteness and nativism as its pillars.

Dangerous Borders, Disposable Domestics in Babel González Iñárritu’s film offers a complex view of a global world that, despite its technological advances, is profoundly disconnected. The central thread of the film is the story of the white and upper-middle class American Jones family that resides in the San Diego area. The family has employed Amelia, a middle-aged Mexican domestic worker, to work as a housekeeper as well as the nanny of Mike and Debbie, the couple’s young children. As Amelia confesses to the border inspector later in the film, she has been working in the United States for sixteen years while the rest of her family resides in Tijuana. The diegesis of the entire film and the family’s fate revolve around the story of Susan and Richard’s marital crisis and their vacation in Morocco, taken in hopes of restoring their marriage. The other threads of the film become interwoven: the tragedy of the two Moroccan brothers who accidentally and unintentionally wound Susan with a rifle; the rifle’s connection to a Japanese family whose teenage daughter mourns the death of her mother; and Amelia’s personal story, one that follows her from San Diego to her son’s wedding on the outskirts of Tijuana. Amelia’s final ordeal of crossing the border back to San Diego with Mike and Debbie becomes a perilous (mis)adventure that puts the three of them at risk of losing their lives. Despite being a secondary character in the plot, Amelia’s role as an insider/outsider working for the Jones family and her direct association with the foreign that represents Mexico gives the domestic worker central importance in the film. She becomes a mediator of the

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two worlds Babel clearly presents as worlds of difference: the domestic— the affluent and “developed” lifestyle represented by San Diego and its epitome, Tokyo, and the foreign—the poor and “underdeveloped” rural settings associated with Mexico, Morocco, and its peoples. The development of Amelia’s prominence throughout the film relates directly to the very same purpose that González Iñárritu states about the central theme of his film: “It is about the point of view of others … it literally includes points of view as experienced from the other side.”16 Indeed, more than any other character in the film, the housekeeper’s personal story is the narrative strategy through which the filmmaker constructs and construes the foreign for American/Western audiences. For example, when the story is set in Mexico the camera’s point of view alternates between a third-person that follows Amelia and the children in this adventure with the children’s point of view, one that parallels that of the audience. The extensive cinematic time devoted to the wedding festivities confirms the director’s intention to give the audience access to the Other’s world. As the film shows, Amelia feels at home and happy with her own family and in her culture; the idea that at present she belongs to the two worlds that the border divides is made visible. She proudly states in front of her daughters that she has supported her own family in Mexico economically while taking physical and emotional care of the Jones family in the United States. Furthermore, later that same night when she and the children are abandoned in the middle of the desert, the viewers understand the hardship of undocumented people crossing the border, those Others who are excluded from the domestic, the nation. Numerous close-­ ups of Amelia’s suffering expression and of the children crying in desperation, as well as long takes of their hike in the desert, make plain González Iñárritu’s effort to show this human tragedy that is part of everyday life at the US–Mexico border. Furthermore, the film’s ending, with Amelia detained, interrogated, and finally deported, ultimately points out her embodiment of that Other vilified by white nationalist rhetoric in the United States. Through the story of the Jones family as the central axis of its diegesis, Babel presents the fact that the Other does indeed exist: Mexico, Morocco, and its peoples are construed and presented in the film as wild, unknown, different worlds. The film presents a view of the current global order, one that clearly separates and differentiates the westernized, technical, and capitalist lifestyle of the United States and Japan, on the one hand, while, on the other, there are the underdeveloped, anti-technical, and rural

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worlds of Mexico and Morocco. Curiously enough, the introductory intimate images of an enclosed, safe home that represents the domestic for the Jones family contrast sharply with a defining, common image that is presented as characteristic of the foreign: the desert. The slow and magnificent long takes of the Moroccan hilly deserted landscape and its counterpart, and the flat chaparral terrain of the US–Mexico Sonoran Desert, serve as visual cues of narrative transition in the stories that run parallel in the film. One focuses on the parents, Susan and Richard, and their ordeal to save Susan’s life; the other centers on their children, Mike and Debbie, in jeopardy of losing their lives while lost in the borderlands. The story clearly presents the idea that away from home and completely immersed in foreign lands, the Jones family is placed in absolute danger. These worlds that represent the Other are initially tolerated and even welcomed to a certain degree as exotic, as briefly suggested in the couple’s touring Morocco and as substantially developed in the cinematic treatment of Tijuana’s life and the festivities that revolve around the wedding of Amelia’s son. Richard and Susan are transported in a luxury bus that serves as protection from the foreign and seems to be a barrier between the tourists (profiled as an all-white, English-speaking, upper-middle-class group) inside the bus and the outside, the deserted Moroccan landscape.17 Their children’s travel by car parallel their parents’ touring, but in Mexico’s territory. From the car they witness Amelia’s world through a series of intercut shots that, accompanied by fast-paced Mexican extradiegetic music, present snapshots of Tijuana’s crowded streets and peoples. Upon their arrival in the rural town where the wedding takes place, the children and, by extension, the audience experience a different world of music, games, food, language, and peoples that are new to the children (and the audience) but not to Amelia, who feels at home. This incursion into the foreign shows its sheer difference from the domestic. The “energetic exuberance” of what is shown as Tijuana’s world is one that “offsets the sterile, regimented nature of daily life in the United States”18 but also, and more importantly, gives the audience a glimpse of Amelia’s subjectivity as a mother and as a woman with family, cultural traditions, and female desires of her own. This narrative treatment of Amelia’s personhood ultimately construes her as a female subject beyond her role and employment as a domestic worker. At one point the camera follows Amelia, from the outside courtyard where the party is unraveling and where the viewers see her dancing with a man, an old acquaintance of hers, to her bedroom, where a romantic, sexual encounter ensues.

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However, reality sets in and the foreign turns out to be extremely dangerous. Out of the bus and abandoned by the rest of the tourists, Susan and Richard are left in a small rural town in Morocco with Susan’s life in jeopardy. Amelia and the children’s return to their home in San Diego becomes a total nightmare. While being inspected by border patrol officials, a series of unfortunate events results in Amelia’s nephew abandoning her and the children in the desert in the middle of the night and without any protection. These parallel moments of total peril and desperation in Morocco and in the borderlands symbolically place the Jones family in an extremely fragile condition: while Susan and Richard are physically and emotionally at risk in Morocco, their offspring, Mike and Debbie, are also on the verge of disappearing as the result of, literally and figuratively speaking, their parents’ absence (Fig. 10.2). The ordeal of Amelia wandering in her desperate search for help, first with the siblings and then by herself, takes substantial narrative time in Babel. Film scholar Laura Podalski explains that this long sequence of the US–Mexico borderlands and the camera work “makes Amelia’s intense suffering visible to the viewer,”19 adding that the entire film “insists upon the disproportionate nature of Amelia’s suffering.”20 She embodies the personal, familiar, and collective trauma that Babel presents to the viewers, presented not only through the personal loss as the surrogate mother of

Fig. 10.2  Amelia and the children lost in the desert (Babel)

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the children but also as the collective ordeal of those Others who cross the border, risking their lives. Furthermore, this is corroborated at the end of her odyssey when Amelia is detained and shown in a van that is full of undocumented crossers: men, women, and children. While Amelia is being detained by the border patrol officer, Mike and Debbie are alone and lost in the desert. The film’s total absence of images of the children leaves the audience clueless about their fate, including their potential death. Along with the fragile condition of the mother in Morocco, this possibility becomes the most suspenseful and climactic point of the film. Interestingly enough, the film’s denouement makes plain that in its view of the current world order there is always a clear winner, with the eventual safety of the Jones family and their return home at the expense of the Other. In Babel the domestic is restored by the rehabilitation of masculinity in Richard, who saves Susan’s life, in this way initiating the full recovery of his role as husband and father. His persistence and grit in fighting the authorities to send a helicopter to rescue his wife and his final phone call home for reassurance that the children are home and safe, even crying in full display of emotion while listening to Mike on the phone, confirm his capacity and willingness to restore the integrity of the family. In a parallel action and figurative reading of masculinity and white nationalist rhetoric, back in the United States, it is the border patrol officers and the authoritative figure of a male immigration officer who finally recover and save the children. The imminent return home of all the members of the family reiterates the importance of patriarchy, both in the family and in the nation, to safeguard the sacrosanct American family. Moreover, the restoration of the domestic and family unity is directly related to the enforcement of a white nationalist rhetoric. This is clearly played out in the film by the interaction between Amelia and the immigrant inspector, who interrogates her after being detained by the border patrol. At this point, the audience and Amelia are unaware of Debbie and Mike’s fate. During most of this sequence the camera focuses on Amelia’s face, with close-ups that portray her suffering, her crying, and her anxiety about what has happened to the two of them, with over-the-shoulder shots (from the position of the border officer) that focus on her facial expressions during the interrogation. The audience does not see the immigration officer’s face until the shot that ends the sequence, instead focusing on Amelia’s distressed emotional state and reactions to the interrogation. However, the audience listens to his authoritative voice,

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one that functions as a semi “voice of God”: one that knows everything, is punitive, and implacable to Amelia and her situation: Officer:

It’s a miracle we found those kids, ma’am. I don’t know how you could have left them alone like that out in the desert. Amelia: How are they, sir? O: That’s none of your business. You know how many kids die every year trying to cross this border? A, starts crying: I raised these kids since they were born. I take care of them day and night. I feed them breakfast, lunch and dinner. I play with them. Mike and Debbie are like my own children. O: But they are not your children, ma’am. Plus, you’ve been working in this country illegally. … The father was very angry but decided not to press charges. A: Thank you. O: Nevertheless, the government of the United States has decided that you are seriously breaking the law and is determined to immediately and definitively deport you.

For the audience, the interaction between the law and the subject ultimately shows Amelia as a subaltern individual in an unequal power relationship. Moreover, she has become a totally disposable subject, both for the family and the nation for which she has worked for many years. Her subsequent pleas to the officer that she has established her home in the United States and the fact that she has been working without ever breaking the law are ignored. It is not important that she has put her own life at risk in order to find the children. The audience is shocked by the information that Amelia will be deported and that there will be no legal repercussions for the Jones family, who were obviously negligent in attending to her irregular legal and employment status. Moreover, as she is reminded by the law-enforcement officer, she is lucky that the Joneses are not pressing charges for unlawfully taking the children, US citizens, across the border. That is, both the immigration officer and the father agree on this final resolution: by moving Amelia out of the home and out of the nation, the crisis is resolved and the integrity of the family and, by extension, the nation is restored. Even though Babel creates empathy for Amelia as a subject and “sustains a layered critique of American hegemony,”21 it patently states the

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conditions and real powers of a present economic and political order that uses and disposes of the subaltern at will. The film’s ending, with the expected reintegration of the family unit and the return of the Joneses safe and sound back home, even if at the cost of Amelia’s deportation, “simultaneously encourages and subverts an array of neoimperial prejudices and yearnings in its audience.”22 It unveils Hollywood’s politics of representation at its best, with the Latino Other becoming the prime example of a subject who is disposable and disposed of by more powerful forces that, powered by a white nativist agenda, decide her final destiny.

Female Intimacy and Familiar Crossings in Cake If in Babel the security of home, family, and nation needs the presence of the Other to re-establish its identity by defining its borders through a reaffirmation of patriarchy and its powers, in Cake the Other is part of the rehabilitation process that takes place within the private world of the home and through female intimacy and alliance. If Babel cast Cate Blanchet as the epitome of white motherhood and Brad Pitt as the unsung hero who embodies white masculine fatherhood within the sacred institution of the American family, the casting of Jennifer Aniston in the role of the suffering and mourning mother is also telling in regard to Hollywood’s insistence on its identity politics. Without a doubt, Aniston is one of the most recognizable Hollywood stars and has been the audience’s favorite “girl next door” for the past two decades. In this breakout dramatic role, Aniston plays the role of Claire Bennett, a white, upper-middle-class, professional lawyer and mother who has lost her only child in a car accident. The accident also left her with scars covering her body and with incredible chronic pain that adds to her intense emotional trauma. This tragedy is at the heart of the film’s diegesis, as well as the relationship Claire establishes with Silvana, her domestic worker, who aids her in the process of mourning. As in Babel, the fact that the family unit is in total crisis and that a Mexican domestic female worker provides a nurturing presence makes Cake an allegory of contemporary motherhood and family life, and explores the role played by the Latino Other as an integral part of the domestic fabric in today’s United States. As the story unfolds, the audience finds out that Claire’s husband, Jason, has left the family household due to Claire’s anger and self-­alienation after her son’s death. Upon his departure, she gave him a large picture of mother and son in happier times. The absence of this portrait, located in

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the heart of the home—the living room—has left a physical mark on the wall, symbolically representing Claire’s emotional inability to cope with her loss even a year later. Furthermore, Claire’s body is also shown, through numerous close-up shots during the film, deeply marked by long scars that, like the wall, mirror the loss and absence of the beloved son. The house is haunted by memories of an idyllic family life, with Jason’s clothing still hanging in the closets and the child’s room still unused. At the beginning of the film, Claire is at the apex of her frustration, negativity, and self-destructive impulses: she is expelled from her counseling group for her sarcasm, scolded by her physical therapist for not making any progress, and facing her own ghosts—hallucinations due to her overconsumption of drugs and alcohol—that lure her to suicide. The domestic worker is a vigilant and nurturing presence who works to keep Claire alive, keeping things running until her señora returns home, figuratively speaking, from her journey of personal mourning. Silvana, the Bennett family’s Mexican nanny and housemaid, is a middle-­aged woman who becomes Claire’s most loyal and close companion in this time of distress. In addition to doing chores around the house— the audience sees her cooking, doing laundry, and ironing—Silvana’s work goes beyond the physical: she safeguards the house and the home while Claire mourns. One of the early scenes in the film shows Silvana working off hours, at night, watching the house from her car, waiting for Arturo, the gardener who Claire invites sporadically to have sex with her to leave the house, all without Claire’s knowledge. Silvana steps outside the house and angrily confronts the young man for his behavior. She speaks to him in Spanish, clearly embodying an authority based on her older age and common ethnicity, as well as her role as the main worker in the house. Silvana forcefully takes from Arturo the toys that Claire is giving away as part of her mourning process. With this action, she defends the traditional values of the sanctity of home and family that she believes in, protecting Claire against “intruders.” Moreover, this sequence ends with Silvana slowly picking up one of the toys from the road, cleaning it with utmost care and attention, indicating that she is also mourning the child’s death along with her señora. Silvana has become deeply involved in the intimate and private world of her employer, so much so that Silvana’s personal life is inextricably connected to her professional role as housemaid. This is clearly established early in the film when Silvana is introduced, a scene in which she insists that Claire eat the quesadilla she has prepared. “You must to eat. Doctor

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says,” she states in her broken English. She listens carefully to the voicemails Claire plays on speaker while in the kitchen, an explicit d ­ emonstration that she is aware of all the details of Claire’s personal life. The next morning Silvana finds Claire sleeping in the backyard after a rough night. She carefully wakes her up, touching Claire’s shoulder tenderly and murmuring in a maternal way, “You poor thing, come” as she helps Claire inside the house. A following scene from that same morning shows Silvana entering the bathroom completely unannounced while Claire is brushing her teeth. Silvana offers a new remedy to heal the large scar on Claire’s face. The familiarity of Silvana’s movements around the house and her direct interactions with her señora signal the intimacy already established between the employee/employer, a co-dependence between the two that will play out throughout the story. Silvana feels at home in a house that is not her own, contrary to what the audience sees at her own place. Her small apartment, situated near downtown Los Angeles—shown in the background of this sequence— contrasts sharply to the residential area where the Bennetts live, a detached house with a pool in the backyard, serving as a marker of the socioeconomic differences between the two women. In this other domestic space, Silvana encounters resistance from her own daughter, who is unable to understand her mother’s emotional involvement with Claire. After mocking Claire’s requests for painkillers, Silvana’s daughter says: “She doesn’t pay you enough to put up with her shit, Ma. If I were you, I would just quit.” The emotional bond Silvana feels is indeed kept as a private and secret part of her relationship with the Bennetts. The response the housekeeper gives to her daughter, “Pero tú no eres yo [But you’re not me, all right?],” is telling of her empathy for Claire, and becomes clear once she enters her bedroom. In her closet Silvana keeps boxes of the toys her señora is giving away, echoing the early scene in which Silvana retrieves the toys given to the gardener, emphasizing the private and secret way she is mourning the loss of the child. As in Babel, this initial presentation of Silvana reaffirms the Mexican female domestic worker’s abnegation, loyalty, self-sacrifice, compassion, and nurturing qualities. If in Babel there was great intentionality in showing the suffering of Amelia lost in the desert, Cake insists on Claire’s sorrow and physical injuries, facilitating the audience’s identification with the protagonist’s ordeal and sympathy toward Silvana. Since Claire is unable to move without unbearable pain, Silvana adds to her chores by driving Claire around the city. In this way, she witnesses Claire’s behavior, acting as a Sancho Panza

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with her down-to-earth wisdom regarding her señora’s erratic decisions and at the same time deepening her understanding and compassion toward her. The numerous car scenes duplicate what it is seen inside the house as if it were another domestic space, characteristic of everyday life in Los Angeles. The enclosed space of the car emphasizes the intimacy developing between the two women. Indeed, the road trip to Tijuana on which the women embark, Silvana’s place of origin, functions as a breaking point in the story and their relationship. This journey is a metaphorical way of crossing borders between the two and the establishment of their alliance, one that in theory seems completely unlikely, based not only on the hierarchical labor relationship but also on their disparate socioeconomic status and ethnic backgrounds. If up to this moment the film devoted most of its narrative attention to Claire and how Silvana cares for her, the trip shows Claire’s opening up to Silvana as subject. As they drive through Orange County, a traditionally white and conservative county of Southern California, Claire’s remarks make clear her disdain for the racial bias she associates with this area: Claire: Silvana: C: S: C:

Are we in Orange County yet? I don’t know. Do you only see white people? I don’t know, maybe… Then, we’re in fucking Orange County. Oh, I hated trials in Orange County. … You had to assume that everyone was a fucking right-wing Nazi sympathizer. Oh, hey, I’m the card-carrying ACLU defense attorney. Please don’t hold that against my client and sentence him to death for shoplifting.

Even through dark humor, Claire’s acknowledgment of her work as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union identifies her as a defender of civil rights. This serves as a hint to the audience that in her profession she has defended those Others targeted by white nativism. This facet of Claire’s personality, although briefly introduced here, foreshadows her defense of Silvana later in their trip. Once in Tijuana and after buying her painkillers, Claire “rescues” Silvana from the harassment by two of her old friends they run into while having lunch. During the meal the women greet Silvana, but the encounter turns into a diatribe full of cynicism and scorn from these “friends” who belittle Silvana for her immigrant situation and socioeconomic status. The women represent Tijuana’s elite and criticize Silvana’s husband and daughter for what they believe represents fail-

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ure: the husband is unemployed and the daughter is unmarried, both unfavorable conditions in a patriarchal society like that of Mexico. When Silvana looks utterly distressed by the sarcastic attacks of these two women, Claire intervenes in the conversation to defend her, understanding the difficult situation Silvana is in and turning out to be her most unexpected ally. Claire ridicules the two women for their behavior and pretends that Silvana has in fact invited her to lunch in this fancy restaurant. She also insinuates that they are friends who came to Tijuana on a shopping spree. As they leave the restaurant, the two women leave the restaurant arm in arm, the same gesture that will be repeated while strolling the crowded and touristy streets of Tijuana, as if they were close friends or even relatives. This gesture of affection and Claire’s protection of Silvana serve to reinforce the personal bonding that blurs the hierarchical employee/employer working relationship. Moreover, from this point forward the film cinematographically reaffirms this affection by repeatedly placing the two together on-screen. The trip thus consolidates a female alliance that, as the film suggests, overcomes class status and race, and parallels how the film constructs Silvana as the Other. In contrast to Babel, Silvana has a green card and abides by the law and the border officer when they cross the US–Mexico border. In this scene, Silvana is nervous about being stopped by agents while Claire seems to dismiss any serious consequence from her actions. Ultimately, it is Claire who is arrested by the officials when they discover the medications she tried to smuggle inside a Saint Jude’s figurine, adding irony to this benign representation of the border crossing. More importantly, it shows how different the meaning of the border is for each woman: the obedient legal immigrant who understands the legal status the border has granted to her, versus the careless behavior of a citizen whose ethnicity and socioeconomic status give her a free pass even when failing to comply with the law. The journey to Tijuana materializes the closeness of the relationship and paves the way for the crucial role that Silvana plays in Claire’s final healing. After the trip, the story develops Claire’s emotional and physical recovery until a dramatic scene—the man involved in the car accident comes to the house to ask for Claire’s forgiveness—temporarily halts her recovery. Indeed, the climactic moment of the diegesis occurs when the two women go to a drive-in cinema outside the city. In a moment of desperation, Claire leaves Silvana in the car and attempts suicide one last time, but she ultimately backs down and accepts the fact that she had no control over her child’s death. She repeats out loud to herself, “I was a good

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mother, I was a good mother” just as Silvana arrives on the scene. After helping Claire, Silvana goes on a rant that resembles a mother who cannot grasp the reprehensible actions of a daughter: “Se acuesta Ud. con cualquier estúpido que se le pasa por enfrente; se emborracha, señora, se droga … no sé porqué estoy preocupada por usted, no sé porqué le pongo veladoras a la virgen para que la cuide [You sleep with any low-life who walks in front of you; you get drunk, you use drugs. I don’t know why I worry about you; I don’t know why I light candles to the Virgin Mary and ask her to protect you].” Silvana’s complaints show equal frustration and love toward Claire, who at that instant becomes fully aware of Silvana’s care and compassion for her. After this emotive and emotional moment they decide to spend the night at a hotel. Once inside, Claire asks Silvana to share her bed. The scene is the culmination of the close, intimate, and caring bond between the two women that the film carefully constructs. The ensuing camera shot, a medium ceiling shot in which both women are together within the same frame, side by side, at the same level, and with Claire initiating the action of holding Silvana’s hand, symbolizes not only Silvana’s healing presence but also the consolidation of the alliance between these two women. This not only completely blurs the employer/ employee hierarchical relationship but also points to how the film construes the erasure of their class and ethnic differences in this ultimate expression of female solidarity (Fig. 10.3). Their return home ends the period of mourning and is narratively constructed when the mother and son’s portrait returns to the family living

Fig. 10.3  Female empathy and affection in Cake

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room now that Claire is ready to accept it back in the house. Like the film, the portrait of son and mother affirms the irreplaceable role of the mother at the heart of the family. The last image of Silvana is that of the two women at the cemetery, again appearing within the same frame in a long-­ take shot that shows them arm in arm in front of a plaque, reaffirming their sense of cohesion. The gesture and the image insist on their common experience of motherhood, their shared sorrow for the loss of a child they both loved, and the mutual healing process on which the film clearly centers.

The Politics of Representation: Visible Borders, Invisible Workers in Hollywood Cinema Babel and Cake construct a portrayal of the Mexican female domestic worker that emphasizes their role as a traditional mother, and whose primary function is the protection of conservative conceptions of femininity and the reinforcement of normative family values. Amelia and Silvana embody qualities such as sacrifice, compassion, and abnegation, all elements ingrained in the popular cultural imagination about what constitutes ideal motherhood. These are the same qualities they show in the care work they carry out for the families that employ them, families that are enduring an internal crisis. Silvana and Amelia are construed, as Molina Guzmán asserts about this character in Hollywood’s cinema, as “domestic nurturers of whiteness and white domesticity.”23 However, their prominence within the family is presented as a temporary condition since in the end both films foreshadow the return of Susan and Claire to their traditional role as mothers, following the culturally prescribed conventions for women under patriarchy. The fact that the two mothers are played by two icons of American whiteness, Blanchett and Aniston, only reiterates Hollywood’s politics that make visible its racialized conception of the nation’s identity.24 Finally, the character of la doméstica the films project is an image that mirrors the new economic global order that demands and disposes of the subaltern at will. Babel and Cake take different routes, only to arrive at the same end. If in Babel the domestic worker is construed first as the Other, one in direct association with the foreign and the border in order to later be totally excluded from both the familial and national spheres, in Cake the housemaid, who still clearly represents the foreign, is at face value accepted, included, and welcomed in the familial and national space. However, not everything is what it seems; indeed, the extra material

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included in the DVD version of Cake shows Hollywood politics at its most extreme. The two sections, titled “The many layers of Cake: Learning to live again,” and “The icing of the Cake: Meet the cast,” focus entirely, obsessively, on Jennifer Aniston, her dramatic role, and her performance of Claire. By contrast, Adriana Barraza is completely missing, both as a key participant of the cast and as a prominent character/role crucial to the development of the story and of Claire as the main character. Indeed, Barraza’s filming persona and her role as Silvana are totally absent in all the opinions collected—from director, editor, production assistants, producers, other actors, and even Aniston herself—even though their explanations and commentaries are accompanied by numerous images of the film in which Silvana appears together with Claire. The visible invisibility of the Mexican female domestic worker and the Mexican actress seem to parallel a national discourse that favors whiteness and nativism in the construction and projection of an ideal of the American family and domestic life, a discourse that ultimately disposes of the Latina Other once she has served Hollywood’s hegemonic and ideological agenda.

Notes 1. As of July 1, 2016, the Hispanic population in the United States was 57.5 million people, 17.8 percent of the nation’s total population. Of those, 63.2 percent were of Mexican origin, according to the US Census. These numbers do not account for the undocumented immigrants of Mexico; that group would add approximately another 5.6 million people, according to the Pew Research Center. https://www.census.gov/nresroom/ facts-for-features/2017/hispanic-heritage.html and www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2017 2. Mireya Navarro, “Trying to Get Beyond the Role of the Maid: Hispanic Actors are seen as Underrepresented, with the Exception of One Part,” The New  York Times, May 16, 2002, https://nytimes.com/learning/ teachers/featured_articles/20020517friday.html 3. The Hispanic or Latino definition in the US Census includes people “of Cuban Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central America, or other Spanish culture of origin regardless of race.” 4. Isabel Molina Guzmán, Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 151. 5. Guzmán, Dangerous Curves, 152. 6. Barraza’s role as Amelia garnered her nominations for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, a Golden Globe Award, a Broadcast Film

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Critics Association Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, an Online Film Critics Award, and a Chicago Film Critics Circle Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture. She won in this category at the San Francisco Film Critics Circle Awards. 7. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 8. By 1990, fewer than 1 percent of employed American women were engaged in domestic work. Also, the number of African American women working as domestics in private homes fell from 35 percent to 4 percent by the end of the 1980s due to the historical legacy of slavery in the United States. This resulted in the increase of foreign-born Latinas filling this void, and who by the turn of the century composed 68 percent of females in domestic work in the United States. 8. Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” in Separate Spheres! eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 183–207, 185. 9. Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 183. 10. Maria del Mar Farina, White Nativism, Ethnic Identity and US Immigration Policy Reforms. American Citizenship and Children in Mixed Status, Hispanic Families (New York: Routledge, 2018), 4. 11. Farina, White Nativism, 38. 12. Leo R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 2–3. 13. Jim Gilchrist founded the Minuteman Project in October 2004. The immediate appeal of the movement was based on the call for “patriotic” volunteers to conduct surveillance, locate and report “illegal” immigrants, and receive ample coverage by the media. The popularity of this group was based on the use of national iconic symbols, “reenacting a contemporary version of an Old West narrative of cowboys romanticized in a wide range of cultural productions.” Chavez, The Latino Threat, 139. 14. These were the largest demonstrations for immigrant rights recorded in US history, taking place in 140 cities and 39 states across the nation. The popular outcry was in response to HR4437, an immigration bill that proposed, among other restrictive measures to immigration, to make undocumented immigrants felons: Chavez, The Latino Threat, 1. 15. In November 2014, President Obama sought to regularize the migratory status of unaccompanied migrant minors by expanding the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals (DACA) as well as seeking to protect undocumented parents of permanent resident children through the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). 16. Alejandro González Iñárritu, “The New Global Cinema: Hollywood Must Portray Point of View of Others,” interview by Nathan Gardels, New

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Perspectives Quarterly 24, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 7, https://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/toc/15405842/24/2 17. Elizabeth Anker, “In the Shadowlands of Sovereignty: The Politics of Enclosure in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel,” University of Toronto Quarterly 82, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 967. JSTOR. 18. Anker, “In the Shadowlands,” 960. 19. Laura Podalski, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 139. 20. Podalski, The Politics of Affect, 138. 21. Anker, “In the Shadowlands,” 951. 22. Anker, “In the Shadowlands,” 951. 23. Molina Guzmán, Dangerous Curves, 174. 24. Anker, “In the Shadowlands,” 962.

References Anker, Elizabeth. 2013. In the Shadowlands of Sovereignty: The Politics of Enclosure in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel. University of Toronto Quarterly 82 (4): 950–973. JSTOR. Chavez, Leo R. 2008. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Farina, María del Mar. 2018. White Nativism, Ethnic Identity and US Immigration Policy Reforms. American Citizenship and Children in Mixed Status, Hispanic Families. New York: Routledge. González Iñárritu, Alejandro. 2007. The New Global Cinema: Hollywood Must Portray Point of View of Others. Interview by Nathan Gardels. New Perspectives Quarterly 24 (2): 6–9. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15405842/24/2. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2007. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaplan, Amy. 2002. Manifest Domesticity. In Separate Spheres! ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, 183–207. Durham: Duke University Press. Molina Guzmán, Isabel. 2010. Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media. New York: New York University Press. Navarro, Mireya. 2002. Trying to Get Beyond the Role of the Maid: Hispanic Actors are seen as Underrepresented, with the Exception of One Part. The New  York Times. https://nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_ articles/20020517friday.html Podalski, Laura. 2011. The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 11

Filmography Kerry Moynihan

Apnea. Directed by Manuela Martelli. United States and Chile: Cinestación, 2015. Short film. Aquarius. Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. Brazil: CinemaScópio Produções, 2016. Feature film. Batalla en el cielo. Directed by Carlos Reygadas. Mexico: Coproduction Office, 2005. Feature film. Beatriz at Dinner. Directed by Miguel Arteta. United States: BRON Studios and Killer Films, 2017. Feature film. Cama adentro. Directed by Jorge Gaggero. Argentina: Libido Cine, 2004. Feature film. La camarista. Directed by Lila Avilés. Mexico: Bambú Audiovisual, 2018. Feature film. La casa de Beatriz. Directed by Suzanne Andrews Correa. Mexico: HBO Latino, 2017. Short film. Chance. Directed by Abner Benaim. Panama: Apertura Films, 2009. Feature film. Corazón de león. Directed by Marcos Carnevale. Argentina: Sinema and Aleph Media, 2013. Feature film.

K. Moynihan (*) Worcester State University, Worcester, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_11

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Coronación. Directed by Silvio Caiozzi. Chile: Andrea Films, 2000. Feature film. Criada. Directed by Matías Herrera Córdoba. Argentina: El Calefón Cine and Habitación 1520 Producciones, 2009. Documentary. De colores. Directed by Luz Marina Zamora. United States/Venezuela: Luz Marina Zamora, 2017. Short film. El delantal de Lili. Directed by Mariano Galperin. Argentina: FilmSharks International and Galperin Producciones, 2004. Feature film. Doméstica. Directed by Gabriel Mascaro. Brazil: Desvia, 2012. Documentary. Domésticas. Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Nando Olival. Brazil: O2 Filmes, 2001. Feature film. Los dueños. Directed by Ezequiel Radusky and Agustín Toscano. Argentina: Rizoma Films, 2013. Feature film. Empleadas y patrones. Directed by Abner Benhaim. Panama: Apertura Films, 2010. Documentary. Francia. Directed by Israel Adrián Caetano. Argentina: La Expresión del Deseo, 2009. Feature film. Geminis. Directed by Albertina Carri. Argentina: Matanza Cine, 2005. Feature film. Las herederas. Directed by Marcelo Martinessi. Paraguay: La Babosa Cine, 2018. Feature film. La hija. Directed by Luis Sampieri. Argentina: MR Films, 2016. Feature film. Hilda. Directed by Andres Clariond. Mexico: Cinematográfica CR and Pimienta Films, 2014. Feature film. Historia del miedo. Directed by Benjamín Naishtat. Argentina: Rei Cine, 2014. Feature film. Madre. Directed by Aaron Burns. Chile: Purgatorio, 2016. Feature film. Mi amiga del parque. Directed by Ana Katz. Argentina: Campo Cine, 2015. Feature film. Muchachas. Directed by Juliana Fanjul. Mexico: ECAL, 2015. Documentary. La nana. Directed by Sebastián Silva. Chile: Forastero, 2009. Feature film. Nana. Directed by Diego Luna. Mexico: Canana Films, 2015. Short film. Nana. Directed by Tatiana Fernández Geara. Dominican Republic: Fondo de promoción cinematográfico, DGCINE, 2015. Documentary. Nosilatiaj. La belleza. Directed by Daniela Seggiaro. Argentina: Vista Sur Films S.r.l, 2012. Feature film.

11 FILMOGRAPHY 

233

La novia de desierto. Directed by Cecilia Atán and Valeria Pivato. Chile: Ceibita Films, 2017. Feature film. Soma o Redor. Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. Brazil: Hubert Bals Fund and CinemaScópio, 2012. Feature film. Paco. Directed by Diego Rafecas. Argentina: Zazen Producciones, 2009. Feature film. La paz. Directed by Santiago Loza. Argentina: Frutacine, 2013. Feature film. Play. Directed by Alicia Scherson. Chile: Parox, 2005. Feature film. Primo Basílio. Directed by Daniel Filho. Brazil: Lereby Productions, 2007. Feature film. Que Horas Ela Volta? Directed by Anna Muylaert. Brazil: Gullane, 2015. Feature film. ¿Qué le dijiste a dios? Directed by Teresa Suarez. Mexico: Videocine, 2014. Feature film. Réimon. Directed by Rodrigo Moreno. Argentina: Compañía Amateur, 2014. Feature film. Roma. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Mexico: Participant Media and Esperanto Filmoj, 2018. Feature film. Santiago. Directed by João Moreira Salles. Brazil: Videofilmes Produçoes Artisticas Ltda., 2007. Documentary. Una semana solos. Directed by Celina Murga. Argentina: Tresmilmundos Cine, 2007. Feature film. Trabalhar Cansa. Directed by Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas. Brazil: Africa Filmes, 2011. Feature film. Zona sur. Directed by Juan Carlos Valdivia. Bolivia: Cinenómada, 2009. Feature film.

Index1

A Abuse, 46n17, 76, 77, 81, 169 Acevedo, César, 192, 193, 195, 196, 199–201, 206 Acha, Omar, 76, 92n3 Agriculture, 24, 205 Ahora te voy a llamar hermano, 124 Allende, Salvador, 124 Alonso, Lisandro, 25, 197 Alpendre, Sergio, 146 Amaral, Maria Adelaide, 149 Amores Perros, 210 Anjo Mau, 148 Appiah, Anthony, 137 Araújo, Inácio, 146 Argentina, 5, 9–12, 14, 24, 53, 54, 76, 137, 191, 192 Asymmetry, 9, 23–26, 32, 39, 41, 187n17 Atán, Cecilia, 12, 13 Auden, W. H., 23–25, 41, 43

Avenida Brasília Formosa, 150 Ayala Blanco, Jorge, 100, 101, 116n9 B Babel, 4, 209–228 Barbosa, Fellipe, 168, 170–174, 178, 179, 183, 186n5 Barnz, David, 210 Barragán, Luis, 66 Barraza, Adriana, 210, 213, 228, 228n6 Barraza Toledo, Vania, 126 Barreto, Bruno, 149 Bauman, Zygmunt, 147 Bender, Lucho, 24 Benjamin, Walter, 122 Bertilotti, Matías, 25 Bize, Matías, 123 Black-and-white film, 154–156

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Osborne, S. Ruiz-Alfaro (eds.), Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9

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INDEX

Body body language, 85, 90 female, 69, 167, 173, 203, 205 Bolivia, 5, 15, 24 Bonaerense, El, 25 Border, the, 203, 213–216, 219–221, 225, 227 border crossing, 47n28, 214, 215, 225 Bravo, Sergio, 124 Brazil, 5, 7, 10, 11, 15, 87, 145–148, 157, 164n29, 167–172, 174, 180, 181, 183–185, 186n1 Brazilian Constitution (1988), 171 Brody, Richard, 2 Buenos Aires, 36, 62, 76, 192 Buttes, Steve, 134, 138n1 C Caetano, Israel Adrián, 24, 25, 42 Cake, 4, 209–228 Cala a Boca Etelvina, 11, 148 Cama adentro, 5, 7, 25, 53–70 Camerawork, 55, 115 See also Cinematography Canevaro, Santiago, 76, 77, 92n5 Capitalism, 110, 111, 126, 202 Carlos, Manoel, 149 Carnevale, Marcos, 12, 13, 19n43, 49n39 Cartoneros, 24, 25 Caruso, Marcos, 10, 147 Casa Grande, 7, 168–170, 172–180, 182–184, 186, 188n28 Casa-grande e senzala, 172 Casé, Regina, 185 Castro, Mary Garcia, 4, 92n9 Catholicism, 34 Cavallo, Ascanio, 123 Chaney, Elsa M., 4, 92n2, 92n9 Chaskel, Pedro, 124 Cheias de Charme, 162

Chile, 5, 11, 12, 14, 53, 54, 56, 72n19, 121–124, 126, 134, 139n17, 140n24, 191 Chow, Rey, 67 Christianity, 54 Ciénaga, La, 24–30, 41, 44n10, 45n11, 45n13 Cine Novisimo, 121 Cinema Novo, 162, 168 Cinematography, 1, 9, 23–43, 131, 155 See also Camerawork Citizenship, 168, 191, 192 City, the, see Urban space Clariond, Andrés, 53, 68 Class, 3, 24, 53, 76, 102, 121, 146, 168, 207n3 See also Inequality, class Clothing costumes, 101, 107, 114 uniforms, 10, 55 Cockburn, Cynthia, 202 Colla, 27, 29 Colombia, 5, 191, 192, 200, 206, 207n8 Colonialism, 3, 53 Comedia ranchera, 103 Comedy, 11, 102, 143, 146, 147, 152, 153, 162, 185 musical, 10, 11, 100–102, 148 Concertación government, 56 Consumerism, 57, 58, 129, 133 Consumption, 6, 57, 79, 83, 89, 210 Costa Rica, 5 Couto, José Geraldo, 146 Critics cultural, 8, 101 film, 2, 100, 123 Cuarón, Alfonso, 1–3, 12, 15, 16 Culture mainstream, 99, 109 popular, 2, 9, 10, 12, 104, 145, 147, 149, 162, 227

 INDEX 

D Dance, 38, 39, 47n26, 103, 107, 110–113, 115, 153, 161 D’Angelo, Mike, 185 De la Madrid, Alejandro, 100, 104 Deleuze, Gilles, 62, 140n35 Desbois, Laurent, 146 A Diarista, 162 Diegues, Cacá, 146, 163n11 Doméstica, 4, 8–12, 93n11, 143–162, 185 Domésticas-O Filme, 9, 10, 143–162 Domesticity, 40–43, 213, 227 Duas Caras, 149 E Economy global, 15, 209, 227 rural, 200 Employees, 6, 7, 13, 27, 35, 38, 39, 48n37, 54, 56, 66, 67, 78, 89, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109–114, 117n24, 118n32, 118n33, 118n38, 119n51, 130, 134, 146, 147, 152, 156, 160, 170, 174, 212 Employers, 3, 5–7, 25, 26, 32, 34, 38–42, 46n17, 47n29, 53–56, 59–61, 63–66, 69, 70, 71n13, 75–81, 83–92, 100, 102, 105, 110–112, 114, 116n6, 124, 127, 130, 131, 133–135, 145, 146, 148, 149, 156, 158, 160, 162, 168–171, 173–175, 177, 179, 183, 185, 196, 211, 212, 222, 223 and relationship with employees, 27, 108, 115, 170, 174, 225, 226 Esposito, Roberto, 40

237

Ethnicity, 4, 9, 15, 28, 29, 33, 34, 45n11, 46n18, 192, 213, 214, 222, 225 European, 62, 67, 104, 213 Exclusion, 59, 78, 147, 179, 215 social, 78, 179 F Family dynamics, 2, 33, 212 members, 7, 29, 61, 66, 84, 85 Farming, 193, 194, 196 See also Agriculture Felicidades, 24 FEMCINE8, 123 Femininity, 3, 4, 6, 13, 46n20, 54–58, 60–62, 68, 70, 202, 227 See also Womanhood Feminism, 5 Fernández, Cristina, 24 Fernández, Pedrito, 103 Fernández Irusta, Diana, 24, 43n4 Filmmakers, 1, 9, 42, 123, 124, 145, 149–152, 156, 162, 163n6, 211, 216 Flâneur, 122, 137 Francois, Marie Eileen, 114 Fraser, Nancy, 191, 203 Freedom, 6, 14, 56, 87, 122, 124, 125, 130, 133, 135 Freyre, Gilberto, 172 Friendship between domestic workers, 171 between maid and mistress, 59 Fuguet, Alberto, 122, 123 G Gabriel, Juan, 11, 99–116 Gabus Mendes, Cassiano, 148, 149

238 

INDEX

Gaggero, Jorge, 25, 53 Garavelli, Clara, 25, 44n8, 72n21 Gaze, 7, 9, 26, 42, 55, 59, 77, 79, 85, 91, 92, 105, 122, 127, 131, 134, 137–138, 152, 161, 162, 192, 199, 201, 202, 205, 206 Gender dynamics, 206 roles, 10, 11, 84, 102, 109, 193, 207 See also Labor, gendered; Norms, genders Gestures, 13, 38, 44n10, 56, 78–83, 86–88, 90–92, 94n26, 99, 105, 113, 114, 128, 171, 186, 211, 212, 225, 227 Gifts, 47n29, 54–57, 61, 62, 64, 65, 69, 88, 89, 91, 95n29, 171 Gissi, Nicolas, 134 Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, 103 González Iñárritu, Alejandro, 210, 215, 216 Grande, Rodrigo, 25 Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Encarnación, 77 Guzmán, Enrique, 103 Guzmán, Patricio, 124 H Hair, 28, 34, 35, 47n26, 55, 58, 62, 63, 68, 69, 104, 105, 110–112, 114, 115, 131, 152, 159 hairstyles, 62 Heteronormativity, 99, 109 Heterosexuality, 109 Hilda, 5, 7, 53–70 Historias mínimas, 25 Homem de Mello, Cecília, 144 Horn, Katrin, 99, 109 Households, 4, 6, 7, 10–13, 30, 33, 45n11, 54, 77, 99, 102, 105, 109, 114, 115, 133, 146, 170, 172–177, 179, 192, 193, 198, 212, 221

I Immigration, 4, 210, 214, 215, 219, 220, 229n14 immigrants, 10, 11, 19n39, 24, 122, 134, 209–211, 213, 214, 219, 224, 225, 229n13, 229n14 Independence, 7, 54–57, 64, 68, 84, 87, 115, 126 Indigenous peoples, 2, 124 Inequality class, 54, 70, 92, 122, 125, 137 power, 54 social, 9, 49n40, 53, 66, 92, 103, 138n8 Interiority, 41, 60, 67, 105, 115 Intimacy, 8, 25, 57, 76, 77, 111, 135, 147, 158, 173, 175, 176, 211, 221–227 Isolation, 57, 65, 70, 76, 77, 147, 159 K Kalman, Tibor, 137 King, John, 124 Kirchner, Néstor, 24, 25 Kofes, Suely, 173, 186n1 Krögel, Alison, 80, 94n26 Kuznesof, Elizabeth, 76 L Labor contracts, 7, 54, 57, 78, 93n9 gendered, 8 See also Norms, labor Landscapes, 14, 33, 36, 104, 121, 122, 124, 172, 178, 181, 195, 196, 200, 203, 205–207, 217 Langer, Marie, 75 Language, 1, 32–36, 42, 46n22, 77–79, 85, 90, 92, 124, 134, 145, 162, 175, 191, 199, 200, 211, 213, 217

 INDEX 

Lara, Hugo, 100, 101 Latifundia, 53, 70n2 Latin America, 2–5, 8, 12, 16n2, 19n44, 53, 76, 92n9, 114, 126, 192, 207, 211 Lavanderos, Fernando, 123 Lazzarato, Mauricio, 193 Leisure, 37–39 Lelio, Sebastián, 123 Libertad, La, 25 Lima, 80, 192 Lins, Consuelo, 146 Littín, Miguel, 124 Llosa, Claudia, 78, 80, 81, 83, 94n26, 95n29, 191–192 Love, 8, 14, 43n1, 47n23, 54, 56, 57, 72n19, 84–87, 102, 103, 109, 110, 112, 118n33, 124, 148, 149, 161, 226 self-love, 110 Lucerito, 103 Lugar ao Sol, Um, 150 M Madrid, Alejandro L., 101, 109, 111 Makeup, 58, 111, 115, 132, 159, 171 Mapuche, 6, 121, 122, 124, 125, 129, 132, 134, 137, 138n7 Marginal, El, 25 Marginality, 15, 125 María, Angélica, 103 Marshall, Nini, 10, 19n39 Martel, Lucrecia, 27, 41, 46n18 Marx, 38, 39, 48n31, 65, 139n20 Mascaro, Gabriel, 144–151, 156, 157, 159–162 Masculinity, 4, 6, 15, 202, 219 Materialism, 108 Maternalism, 7, 53–70 Maza, Gonzalo, 123 Meirelles, Fernando, 9, 143–145, 147–151, 154, 156, 162

239

Melo, Renata, 144 Melodrama, urban, 103 Men, as domestic workers, 15 See also Masculinity Mexico, 2–5, 10, 11, 15, 16, 16n2, 53, 54, 79, 99, 100, 102–104, 106, 110, 118n38, 191, 215–217, 225 Meyer, Moe, 109 Migration, 17n17, 66, 125 Miguel, Luis, 64, 103 Minuteman Project, 214, 229n13 Mirrors, 7, 40, 54, 55, 57–59, 62–64, 67–69, 105, 131–133, 153, 181, 222, 227 Mise-en-scène, 66, 101, 105, 107, 108 A Moça que Veio de Longe, 148 Molina Guzmán, Isabel, 210, 227 Monologues, 143, 144, 154–156, 162 Monsiváis, Carlos, 101 Moreno, Rodrigo, 36, 37, 40, 47n27, 49n38 Morocco, 213, 215–219 Moulian, Tomás, 127, 133 Movement, 7, 14, 15, 33, 34, 36, 44n10, 46n22, 54, 55, 60, 63, 64, 69, 77, 78, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91, 111, 129, 164n29, 214, 223, 229n13 Mulheres Apaixonadas, 149 Mulvey, Laura, 79, 131 Mundo grúa, 25 Murray, N. Michelle, 6 Music pop, 103 songs, 103, 119n44 soundtracks, 39, 56, 101, 102, 109, 131, 153 Muylaert, Anna, 78, 87, 162, 168, 170, 171, 174, 178, 179, 183–185, 186n5, 188n26

240 

INDEX

N Nana, La, 5–7, 53–70, 78, 84–87, 121, 125, 130, 131, 133, 134, 191 Neoliberalism, 124, 132, 191, 204, 205 Niño pez, El, 18n32, 24–26, 30–32, 41, 46n22, 46n23, 47n24, 192 Nixon, Rob, 200 Norms gender, 11 labor, 11, 102, 112 Nosilatiaj. La belleza, 24–26, 33–36, 41, 42, 232 Nosotros los pobres, 103 Novia del desierto, La, 12, 13 Novisimo, 123–130, 138n7 Nuevo Cine Chileno, 124 O Obligations, 54, 77, 87, 110 Okupas, 25 Olival, Nando, 9, 143–145, 147–151, 154, 156, 162, 163n6, 232 O Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferro, 150 Orfeu, 146, 163n11 Oso rojo, Un, 25 Other, the, 2, 3, 24, 78, 217, 225 P Pacific Balsa, 150 Page, Joanne, 132, 136, 140n25 Palomita blanca, 124 Palou, Pedro Ángel, 3 Passivity, 30 Pateman, Carole, 130 Paternalism, 3, 9, 100, 170 Patriarchy, 6, 8, 13, 109, 114, 170, 172, 175, 180, 196, 203, 204, 219, 221, 227 Patronage, 171

Pedroso, Marcelo, 150 Peluffo, Ana, 26, 28, 45n11, 45n15, 46n18 Pérez, Inés, 76, 77, 92n5, 92n7, 92n8 Personhood, 9, 26, 37, 40, 42, 55, 59, 60, 217 Persons and Things, 40, 48n33 Peru, 5, 11, 191, 192 Pierce, Joseph M., 2, 17n7 Pinochet, Augusto, 124, 126, 135 Pivato, Valeria, 12, 13, 233 Plantations, 194–196, 198 Play, 6, 121–140, 233 Podalsky, Laura, 8, 18n30, 44n10 Politics, 4, 7, 8, 18n30, 18n32, 25, 44n10, 99, 103, 109, 130, 167–171, 175, 205, 209–228 Polito, Natalia, 13, 19n39, 19n42, 19n43 Poverty, 24, 25, 33, 36, 49n40, 100, 125–127, 135, 140n24, 168, 181, 187n22 Power, 3, 5–9, 11, 14, 15, 30, 32, 40, 53–55, 57, 61, 68, 69, 75–92, 102, 103, 108–110, 112, 115, 116, 119n49, 146, 147, 151, 152, 167, 169–179, 182, 184, 192, 196, 201, 204, 211, 214, 215, 220, 221 dynamics, 3, 5, 108, 109 See also Inequality, power Pratt, Mary Louise, 6 Pregnancy, 32, 76 Private sphere, 6, 8, 130, 131, 168, 203 Public sphere, 77, 131, 167, 179, 184 Puenzo, Lucía, 30, 41, 45n12, 46n22, 46n23, 47n24, 192 Q Quarto de empregada, 172, 178 Quechua, 46n22, 80, 82

 INDEX 

Que Horas Ela Volta?, 5–7, 78, 89, 162, 168–170, 173, 175, 179, 181–183, 185, 186, 186n5, 188n24, 188n26, 188n28, 233 Qué le dijiste a Dios?, 11, 99–116, 233 Quinceañera, 33, 35 Quinoa, 80–84, 91, 95n29 R Race, 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 15, 53–55, 68, 70, 76, 83, 99, 109, 114, 115, 119n49, 147, 154, 172, 185, 187n12, 187n17, 191, 213, 228n3 racism, 84 Radio, 10, 147, 157, 160, 161 Ramos, Eurípides, 10, 148 Rancière, Jacques, 122, 127, 137, 138n2 Rape, 80, 81 Reimon, 24–26, 36–41, 47n28, 48n38, 233 Resistance, 5, 6, 29, 54, 68–70, 77, 79–82, 91, 94n26, 112, 128, 169, 180, 206, 223 Revenge, 69, 76, 83, 112, 114, 207n3 Ribeiro, Ivani, 148 Richards, Patricia, 137, 140n31 Rio de Janeiro, 145, 150, 162, 163n11, 168, 169, 181, 186n3 Rodríguez, Ismael, 103 Rollins, Judith, 45n15, 54, 66, 71n6, 187n18 Roma, 1–6, 8, 12, 15, 16, 17n7, 17n9, 233 Romance, 118n31, 180 romantic relationships, 111 Romance da Empregada, 149 Ros, Ana, 62, 64, 72n22 Rosarigasinos, 25 Rossi, Reginaldo, 9, 44n9, 47n28, 160

241

Roussef, Dilma, 168, 182 Ruiz, Raúl, 124 S Sacramento, Paulo, 150 Saldaña-Tejeda, Abril, 79, 94n19, 94n22 San Diego, 211, 215, 216, 218 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, 102, 104, 117n21, 117n22, 118n31 Santiago, 15, 42, 56, 58, 75, 76, 84, 92n5, 93n9, 100, 113, 114, 122–128, 130–134, 136, 138 São Paulo, 87, 143–145, 148, 150, 154, 155, 163n12, 168, 169, 177, 182, 186n2, 187n9, 187n12, 187n16, 187n19 Sarlo, Beatriz, 18n21, 24, 25, 43n2 Savoini, Sandra, 64, 72n28 Scherson, Alicia, 6, 121–138, 233 Scott, James C., 29 Se arrienda, 122 Seggiaro, Daniela, 33, 42 Serrano, Antonio, 102 Serres, Michel, 79, 84, 94n23 Sex, 17n15, 30, 102, 109, 110, 149, 155, 180, 184, 213, 222 sexuality, 3, 13, 15, 55, 60, 68, 101, 109, 174 Sexo, pudor y lágrimas, 92n3, 102, 110 Shaw, Deborah, 3, 8, 9, 17n9, 18n32 Silva, Aguinaldo, 149, 182, 186n5 Silva, Sebastián, 43n3, 53, 56, 71n9, 71n12, 71n14, 72n17, 72n19, 78, 95n32, 121, 125, 130, 133–135, 191, 232 Sindicato de la Industria Cinematográfica Argentina (SICA), 146 Sirga, La, 10, 17n14, 191–207 Skin color, 110, 114, 153 skin bleaching cream, 110

242 

INDEX

Slavery, 3, 7, 93n9, 147, 156, 172, 186n1, 229n7 Sontag, Susan, 109 Sorín, Carlos, 25 Souto, Mariana, 150, 164n20 Space, domestic, 6, 76, 78, 79, 89, 110, 113, 115, 186n5, 196, 202, 203, 206, 223, 224 Squires, Judith, 130, 139n21 Stagnaro, Bruno, 25 Stereotypes, 2, 11, 12, 30, 41, 46n21, 54, 73n35, 127, 146, 168, 173, 209, 210, 215 Suárez, Teresa, 19n39, 99–101, 103–105, 107, 109, 112, 113, 116n10, 117n21, 117n24, 117n26, 119n51, 233 Submission, 30, 79–81, 91 T Tacher, Mark, 100, 104 Telenovelas, 11, 104, 114, 118n31, 118n35, 148, 149 Televisa Youth Films, 103 Television, 10, 11, 25, 42, 59, 82, 103, 104, 107, 147–149, 162, 164n19, 173, 185, 209 Teta asustada, La, 5, 6, 46n22, 78, 80–84, 191 Theft, 81, 83 Tierra y la sombra, La, 10, 15, 17n14, 191–207 Tijuana, 214, 215, 217, 224, 225 Tokyo, 216 Trair e Coçar, É Só Começar, 10, 147, 148 Trapero, Pablo, 25 Tribunal of Domestic Work (TDW), 76, 92n5

Triquell, Ximena, 64, 72n28 Tropes, 2, 9–11, 104, 143–162 of maids, 143–162 Tumberos, 25 U Urban space, 6, 7, 36, 46n23, 60, 84, 88, 121, 122, 125–129, 131–135, 137, 168, 180, 191–193, 201, 205, 223 Uribe, Álvaro, 193, 195 Uruguay, 5 V Vázquez, Alberto, 6, 103 Vega, William, 192, 201–203, 205, 206 Velódromo, 122 Violence domestic, 205 economic, 192, 206 political, 192 Viudas, 12, 13, 19n39, 19n42, 19n43, 49n39 Voyeurism, 59 W White nativism, 213, 224, 229n10 Wichi, 26, 33–36, 42 Womanhood, 7, 53–70 Women as caretakers, 8 as nurturers, 8 See also Femininity; Feminism; Womanhood Wright, Sarah, 127, 138n11, 139–140n24