The Mexican Revolution, which broke out in 1910, delayed the expansion of the two colonias for a few years. After this exceptionally violent civil war, which lasted ten years and left a tally of at least a million dead, the new revolutionary governments began a process of genuine agrarian reform, which aimed to put an end to the feudal regime of the hacienda by means of a massive distribution of land among the peasantry. In the forties, this attempt at social justice was largely abandoned by the new administrations, which instead favored an emerging industrialization. Many rural folks had no choice but to migrate to Mexico City in search of jobs—men in the factories, women in domestic service. By that time, what was left of the aristocracy had moved from La Roma to higher-up areas farther from the city, opening the way for the beneficiaries of the new order: politicians, businessmen, professionals, bureaucrats. La Roma was reborn, La Condesa expanded. New parks, houses and apartment blocks in eclectic styles, and neo-Gothic churches appeared. From the fifties on, both colonias began to house middle-class families—like Cuarón’s, and like my own.

At the moment that he recreates (the end of 1970 and, most significantly, 1971), construction of these kinds of building projects had ended, and the architectural magnificence had ceased, but La Roma had become something better: a laboratory of cohabitation, with its stores and markets, its great schools, its playgrounds. To walk those streets is once again to see Juanita from the newsstand, the woman from the convenience store or the pharmacy, that other lady from the tiny restaurant or the Cine Gloria. The sounds of our world were exactly those reproduced by Cuarón: the TV programs; the radio commercials; the popular songs of the day; the chimes from the garbage truck; the sellers of balloons, sweets, and calaveritas (sugar skulls); the melancholy organ-grinder; the whistle of the camote (sweet potato) cart; and the voices of the ancient characters who passed through those streets, like the knife sharpener.

Indoors, the family in Roma is an us made up not only of Sofía and Antonio; their small children, Toño, Paco, Pepe, and Sofi; as well as Teresa (the grandmother, Sofía’s mother) but also of people who have come from very far away and very long ago, rural women who since colonial times have accompanied the lives of the others, those who are criollo (of Spanish extraction) or mixed-race, with a faithfulness that is moving but that also jars in its obvious inequity. This arrangement was replicated in my own family, as in so many others. The “muchachas”—the “girls”—as we called them, lived in a separate room, in the attic of the house. There were—there still are—many other ways of referring to them, all of them reminiscent of the feudal regime from life on the haciendas: the servants, the staff, the maids. They divided up the work: they cooked; they “did the bedrooms”; they mopped the floors; they went to el mandado (to do the shopping at the market); they washed, hung out, and ironed the clothes. They kept an eye on our daily schedule. They were the tellers of stories, the guardians of faith, the confidantes, the singers. They may not have been pure indigenous girls, like Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the sweet, stoic Mixtec woman of Cuarón’s movie. But they often mumbled words in Nahuatl. I can almost see them beside me now, with their aprons and their braids, serving us our afternoon snack and hot chocolate. Like Cuarón’s women.