You still see her there in Roma: Cleo, the silent and suffering indigenous housekeeper in director Alfonso Cuaron's "Roma."
I watch her from the window of my room in the afternoons. She tips a wave of water from her heavy bucket onto the tiled courtyard floor, then runs it down with a broom, scraping the soot and the mud and, yes, sometimes the piles of excrement the neighbors' dogs leave behind. Cuaron didn't spare any dirty details from his Oscar-nominated masterpiece.
That's the sort of thing you never stop noticing when you're an American staying for long periods of time in Mexico City. The class system is real, race-based, open and lasting; only now the roles are played by the children and grandchildren of the characters in the 1970s, black-and-white world of "Roma."
Pity it? Sure. Exploit it? Yes, I do, like everyone else, local or foreign, who is on the lucky side of the socioeconomic system here. I get my apartment cleaned and my clothes laundered for a couple of bucks a day. I tip, even though tipping is rarely required, just to assuage my guilt.
The Roma neighborhood gets by this way, but it's only part of the story. These days, you could fairly describe it as the hippest neighborhood in the entire metropolis of 21 million people. It houses the city's trendiest bars and restaurants; its poshest parks, art galleries and theaters. Everyone wears skinny jeans and fluffy scarves. It's as fashionable as Paris and one-third the price.
And technically, there are two of them. Roma Norte: young, gentrifying, tourist-friendly. And Roma Sur: quiet, residential and spread out enough that you can step back to enjoy the amazing mix of neoclassical, art deco and ultra-modern low-rise architecture that defines this part of town.
You go to Roma Norte to shop and party until 4 in the morning at places such as the renowned cocktail bar Licoreria Limantour, or the casual Pizza Felix, or the exclusive nightclub Departamento. In Roma Sur, you get a taste of how Mexicans of means really live, shopping from the stacks of oranges and avocados at the amazing Mercado Medellin or grabbing a beer and a movie at the homey Cine Tonala. Residents of the two colonias compete playfully for superiority, but the areas blend easily into each other, and both are welcoming to visitors.
And because they are centrally located, they offer a handy launching point for any journey to CDMX, as the sprawling capital has been branded lately. A cab to the Zocalo, the city's vibrant and historic downtown, with its baroque cathedrals, museums and relics of the earliest civilizations in North America, takes 20 minutes and costs less than $5. Though Mexico City's unpredictable traffic can get in the way of that convenience at any time.
On their western edge, the two Romas border the massive, urban green space Chapultepec Park, which hosts the famous National Anthropology Museum, probably the city's most popular tourist spot. Just to the east of Roma is Arena Mexico, home to the lucha libre wrestlers, and surely the city's most fun tourist spot. You can walk to all of it.
Or you can never leave Roma, as I rarely do now that I live in that part of Mexico City about half the year.
