Household Workers’ Struggle for Equal Rights Society for Economic Anthropology María Lis Baiocchi October 30, 2019 Domestic labor in urban Latin American life takes center stage in the ﾒlm, Roma. “Have you seen Roma?” This is perhaps the single most prevalent question I get as a response every time I talk about the subject of my research. Roma is not the ﾒrst ﾒlm to address the realities of paid household work in Latin America in complex nuanced and poignant ways, but it is the ﾒrst ﾒlm to reach a global audience and the ﾒrst to garner widespread critical acclaim. Roma comes out at a time when household workers’ struggle for equal rights is gaining increasing visibility. Cuarón ends the ﾒlm credits with an invitation to viewers to support household workers’ rights organizations… Household work as an institution of urban Latin American life often goes unnoticed or ignored. Roma, however, sparks conversations and attracts media attention, because it puts the subject of household workers into the center of public debate. Set in Mexico City in the early 1970s, the ﾒlm tells the story of Cleo and her life as a household worker for an upper-middle class family in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood. The ﾒlm is based on the life of director Alfonso Cuarón and his nanny, Libo, who Cuarón considers a member of his family to this day, having played an important role in his upbringing, and to whom the ﾒlm is dedicated. The autobiographical lens reveals the director’s ethnographic sensibility. We viewers are invited to observe Cleo’s daily life. Her routines are on display, including diﾕcult personal life events—unexpected pregnancy, romantic love gone awry, a stillbirth, a New Year celebration, and a trip to the seaside where two of the children in her care nearly die. And amidst these all, we get a sharp view of the gender, class, ethnic, and racial dynamics at play between Cleo and the family she works for, most brutally and honestly shown in the relationship between Cleo and her employer, Señora Soﾒa. Their relationship oscillates between the intimate and the distant,