Latin America’s poor, black, and indigenous women perhaps best understand what it means to be marginalized. Although one in four wage-earning women in the region are household workers—around 18 million—almost all work informally, silently, and under unpleasant conditions. “She changed houses many times and felt at home in none,” Eduardo Galeano wrote in a 2012 poem for International Domestic Workers Day. “At last, she found a place where she was treated as a person. / Within a few days, she left. / She was starting to like it.”

In recent years, Latin American filmmakers have turned attention to the long overlooked narrative of the domestic worker. Both Hilda, a 2014 dramedy about a young, mestiza nanny who is held captive by her white employer, and Muchachas, Juliana Fanjul’s 2017 documentary on maids in Mexico City, have zeroed in on the divide between household worker and employer. Lila Avilés’s La Camarista, released earlier this year, highlights the daily life of hospitality employees in her documentary-style depiction of a hotel chambermaid. In most of these films, directors have explored questions of class and race, albeit from a perspective “limited by their material interests and social class,” as María Mercedes Vázquez Vázquez, author of The Question of Class in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, has told Remezcla. This growing trend in cinema grapples with tangled, complex social dynamics from a familiar, domestic space.

Even a well-intentioned film can perpetuate tropes of maids and nannies as meek, petty, and unremarkable. “They’re not Mary Poppins. They tend to come from a poor educational background,” Sebastian Silva, the director of La Nana (2009), a Chilean movie inspired by his experience with live-in maids, said nine years ago. “They take care of you, feed you, dress you, but they don’t teach you.” That attitude bleeds into the film, which often portrays the family maid, Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), as a stubborn and irascible caregiver, who locks every nanny hired to help her out of the house, and at one point even throws the family’s cat over the fence to sabotage one of them.

In that respect, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, the latest film to center on domestic workers in Latin America, is both refreshing and masterful. The film draws on Cuarón’s childhood memories and also those of his nanny, Liboria Rodriguez, an indigenous Mixtec woman from the village of Tepelmeme in Oaxaca, and presents a stunning and at times brutal portrait of everyday life in the Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City during the early 1970s. Cleo, played by Yalitza Aparicio in a breakout performance, is a live-in maid from the southern state of Oaxaca who works for a family of six and a sometimes-present grandmother. She sweeps floors, scoops dog poo, and hand washes laundry, taking the occasional break to play dead with the youngest child, Pepe, or to join the family as they watch late-night television.

Cleo gets up early in the mornings to wake the kids—three boys and a girl—for school, and also stays up late at night to tuck them into bed and turn off the lights. She’s there, standing off-center, watching as Sofía (Marina de Tavira), Cleo’s employer, squeezes her husband in an awkward embrace before he climbs into his car to drive to the airport for a work trip in Quebec. She’s there, again, when Sofía, distraught after a phone call with her mother, catches Paco, one of her teenage sons, eavesdropping on her conversation and smacks him in retaliation. He falls to the floor, crying, and she does, too, to console him. “Why are you still there?” she glares at Cleo. “Don’t you have anything to do?”