On inheritance, and what a family hands down before anyone can choose.
Eighteen dollars to sew, six hundred to wear.
In Real Women Have Curves, a Los Angeles dress factory seamstress was paid eighteen dollars to sew a dress; a department store will sell it for about six hundred.
Ana García is eighteen; she has a full scholarship to Columbia and a summer job pressing those dresses for her sister.
The first thing passed on is a role.
Care That Arrives as Restriction
Care can arrive as a measurement.
Ana's mother, Carmen, wants her at the factory, thinner and married, and tells her she is hard on her because she loves her. The film lets both be true. When the women at the factory strip to their underwear in the heat and compare their bodies, Carmen walks out. At the end, Ana leaves for New York, and Carmen stays in her room.
Spanglish puts a second daughter at a second elite door. Cristina Moreno narrates the film as her Princeton application essay, and its subject is her mother. Flor arrives in Los Angeles from Mexico without English, and Cristina translates for her. When Flor pulls her out of a private school, afraid of losing her, Cristina screams in the street. The essay ends with Cristina saying Princeton will not define her. She is already her mother's daughter.
The Silence Learned
What goes unsaid still gets handed down.
In Y Tu Mamá También, Luisa, the older woman who joins two teenage boys on a road trip, is dying, and she tells them nothing. A narrator quiets the soundtrack to say what the boys don't: the village where Tenoch's nanny was born and left at thirteen to find work. A month later, in a café, Tenoch tells Julio that Luisa is dead and that she knew the whole time. He finds an excuse to leave. The narrator says they never saw each other again.
In Amores Perros, El Chivo left his daughter, Maru, to join a guerrilla and let her believe he was dead. Years later, he breaks into her house, leaves her his money, and records a message explaining himself. The machine stops recording before he can say he loves her.
What Remains
One ticket, and a decision about who it’s for.
In In the Heights, Abuela Claudia, who left Cuba as a child and raised Usnavi, tells the story of her life in a song and dies in the heat of a blackout. She has left him a winning lottery ticket. He passes it on to cover his cousin Sonny's DACA fees. Usnavi, who was about to leave for the Dominican Republic, stays.
Roma opens on soapy water washing across a tiled floor and follows Cleo, a Mixtec domestic worker in early-1970s Mexico City, through the work that keeps a family's house standing. When she and Adela, the other maid, speak Mixtec to each other, one of the children scolds them for it.
Seventeen years after the narrator of Y Tu Mamá También mentioned a nanny's village in passing, Cuarón made the nanny the film. It is dedicated to Libo, the woman who raised him.
Further Reading: On Where Belonging Is Kept
These pieces follow the same idea in different forms — that belonging is carried in sound, in silence, and at the table.
→ Albums That Feel Like a Foreign Country: Music as emotional geography, the same terms In the Heights uses for a neighborhood.
→ What Queer Cinema Understands About Fear and Intimacy: Vulnerability and masculinity from another angle, the territory of Y Tu Mamá También and Amores Perros.
→ The Table as Connection: Shared Meals & Emotional Intelligence: Food as memory and belonging, the domestic ground Roma observes.