Roma is a film based on director Alfonso Cuarón’s childhood, but told through the eyes of his household maid, or nana. In the film, the young Mixteca housemaid Cleodegaria Gutiérrez or Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) works for an upper-middle class white family in the affluent neighbourhood of Roma, located near the historic centre of Mexico City, which brims with its own historical connection to Francophile architecture. Cleo watches over and takes care of the family with care, patience, and ease, even when the patriarch, Señor Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), a medical doctor, abandons his wife Sofía (Marina de Tavira) and their four children. After discovering that she is pregnant, Cleo moves through the motions of the everyday that are governed by the wants and needs of her employer’s family while quietly considering what she will do with her new life position.

Roma has garnered considerable international attention, winning numerous awards for cinematography and directing, and has also benefited substantially from Netflix’s intensive marketing campaign. Filmed in black and white and featuring slow, meditative tracking shots, Roma stands as a unique addition to Mexican cinema that is semi-autobiographical and documentary-like, but intertwined with fiction. Scholars and critics have honed in on Cuarón’s film with vigor, discussing his visual recreation of the city, the political and social context (particularly the focus on the 1971 Halconazo student strike and massacre), the representation of working class mestizo and indigenous characters, and the roles Cleo performs inside and outside the household. While the perspectives vary yet intersect in several ways, all can agree that this film is seeped with nostalgia, a quality which I argue is enhanced by music.

The film’s soundscape is an example of an exceptional sonic archive, saturated with music and sounds of the early 1970s and functioning as a historically-driven aural and cultural text. The film’s music, which does not include a film composer or underscoring, was carefully selected by music supervisor Lynn Fainchtein and is intricately integrated into the narrative, operating solely diegetically to enhance the realites of Roma. Fainchtein took on the challenging task of researching and compiling the music and sounds of the early 1970s, working closely with Cuarón on detailing his own sonic memories and collecting samples from various archives, including Televisa, Filmoteca UNAM, and Mexico City radio stations. She gathered three terabytes worth of data and chose thirty-eight musical selections for the film, nineteen of which are featured on the film’s soundtrack, produced by Sony Masterworks. Together, Fainchtein and Cuarón sought to create (or recreate) the different musical environments inside and outside of the house (see Cantor-Navas Reference Cantor-Navas2018 and Villegas Reference Villegas2018 for more information). Pregones (street cries) from vendors, traffic noises, protest songs, and military bands make up the 1970s Roma soundscape. Nostalgia is the major impetus for the film, but the function of the music also follows patterns emblematic of Mexican cinema: the musical selections reinforce specific details about the film’s characters. In this case, music and sound highlight the divisions of social class.

As a domestic worker, Cleo’s musical choices are confined in the household to whatever is broadcasted from a battery operated, hand-held radio that she carries with her while she attends to household tasks. The music that she listens to while completing these chores consists of romantic baladas about love and heartbreak by popular artists from the period. This collection of music and its synthesis to housework operate as música para planchar (music to listen to while ironing), a popular colloquialism in Latin America that signifies the music one (typically the woman of the household and/or a female domestic worker) listens to while doing housework. Radio stations in Mexico City, such as XEW and XELA, broadcasted música romántica (romantic music) throughout the day, intended for a wide listening audience and in a sense bridging the gaps of the social divide.

At the film’s beginning, Cleo completes her daily activities in the Roma house. She mops the tiled driveway and patio and does various chores inside. While in the house, we hear her singing a few lines of the first verse of “Te he prometido” (“I Have Promised You”) by Leo Dan. She walks from room to room with the radio, picking up laundry and making a bed while quietly singing along to the song: “Te he prometido que te he de olvidar / Cuanto has querido, yo te supe dar” (“I have promised you that I will forget you / How much you have wanted, I knew how to give to you”). Her work is interrupted when another worker in the house, Adela (Nancy García), calls out for her. The women converse in Mixteca before Cleo turns off the radio and heads downstairs to meet her. Intriguingly, the song’s lyrics are not translated into the English subtitles in this scene, only the Mixteca dialogue, indicating perhaps that the message of the song is not as important as the romantic and earnest sound of the music and its association with Cleo.

One of the more engaging scenes of Cleo working to music takes place on the roof of the Roma house. While she washes clothes, her small radio plays “No Tengo Dinero” (“I Don’t Have Any Money”) by Juan Gabriel, a singer and songwriter affectionately known as Juanga or El Divo de Juárez. Gabriel’s music has served as a sentimental and cultural bridge for audiences across the social classes and across borders. The lyrics describe a love story between two people, the singer being poor and not able to offer their partner anything except love. Cleo sings a section of the second verse, where the singer explains they have no money, therefore they fear the object of their affection will not care for them: “Yo quisiera tener todo y ponerlo a tus pies / Pero yo nací pobre / Y es por eso que no me puedes querer” (“I wanted to have everything and place it at your feet / But I was born poor / and for that reason you cannot love me”). Unlike in the previous scene, we can read the English translation of the lyrics, which reinforce her social position and perhaps leave her wanting something more. While Cleo continues her work, the camera pans across the Roma rooftops, where we see other women doing the laundry as well, almost in solidarity. Gabriel’s song and its function here create intimate ties with the working class and their tastes and sentiments.

While the música para planchar is associated with Cleo, there are other musics that are synthesised with her employers and other members of their social circle and social class. Señor Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), a cold and emotionally distant character, is the first of the family to receive musical treatment. Upon arriving home from work, he is seen moving his massive car in the confined parking patio, maneuvering the vehicle carefully to position it straight between the narrow walls. Through these calculated movements, French composer Hector Berlioz’s second movement “Un bal” (“A Ball”) from his Symphonie Fantastique emits from the car’s radio, emphasising not only the precision required in parking, accentuated by the repetitive rhythms of the waltz, but also the linking of western European art music with the upper middle-class doctor.

Other musics are used when the family heads out of town to visit friends at a hacienda for the New Year. The families at the hacienda have travelled from the U.S., Norway, and Canada, creating a cosmopolitan gathering. While the families sit in the living room drinking, conversing and playing games, Yvonne Elliman sings “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from the 1970 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar. The song plays from a record player to entertain the party, which is a material and technological contrast to Cleo’s small hand-held radio. The English version of the song emanates as the point of audition from the record player, but visually, the Mexican cover of the album appears in the shot, not the U.S. version, indicating the importance and the success this show had in Mexico at the time. The inclusion of this song here comments on the international appeal of the musical and insinuates that a specific social class would not only be listening to this production, but would also own the album.

Further class difference is indicated in a later scene. On New Year’s Eve, the woods around the hacienda catch fire. Several of the hacienda workers and the guest families scramble to help. While the workers vigorously dump pails of water onto the flames, a man dressed up as the mythologised creature Krampus appears. He removes his headdress and, amidst the chaos, he begins to sing “Å eg veit meg et land” (also called “Barndomsminne fra Nordland” or “A Childhood Memory from Norway”). It is a nostalgic song about the countryside, but does not receive any translations (in English or Spanish) in the film. Instead, the audience is given a diegetic performance that is solemn and pensive, the rich male tenor voice cutting through the sounds of fire and destruction. The song’s theme fits well into the older genres of Mexican cinema from the 1930s and 1940s such as the comedia ranchera (ranch comedy), which featured music about the countryside, particularly on the haciendas. Protagonist charros (Mexican cowboys), the symbols of Mexican masculinity, would sing these songs, preserving a sense of utopia and escape, but here the Krampus character becomes the conduit of nostalgic interpretation while the countryside burns. He sings drunkenly and conveys a sense of privilege as those around him work in earnest to put out the fire.

The scenes I have discussed here are just a few snapshots of the music that materialise in the film. Roma does a phenomenal job of constructing a historically accurate and socially shaped soundscape of the period, the location, and the nostalgic reconstruction of Cuarón’s memory. The sounds and music work almost effortlessly to enhance Cleo’s experiences, her relationships with and around Roma, and the differentiations of social class. As Mexican cinema focuses more on nostalgia and interpretations of the past, Roma provides a model for future films both visually and aurally, functioning as a cultural text that bridges the present with interpretations of the past.