Visualizing Urban Care Work in Mexican Film

Renker, Tess; Renker, Tess

This panel explores how Mexican film has attempted to render visible reproductive care work and the subjects who perform it in Mexico’s urban spaces since the 1940s, employing multiple cinematographic registers and political perspectives to do so. Social Reproduction Theory argues that, at the same time that reproductive labor is essential for sustaining life, modern regimes of oppression tend to make it socially invisible and politically neutral. In La casa como laboratorio (2022), for instance, Argentinian theorists Verónica Gago and Luci Cavallero argue that the careworks that sustain life are both indispensable and historically invisible. Furthermore, theorist Tithi Bhattacharya explains that this invisibility is produced by the intersection of forms of violence and oppression related to gender, race, and class. The different presentations in this panel explore how, in registers that move from the documentary film to the feminist short and the intimate memoir, Mexican cinema has attempted to dissect the social and political complexities of reproductive care work in Mexico’s modern urban spaces. Films debated in this panel address different instances of reproductive labor and its social invisibility, from the obscure place of hired household labor performed by migrant women to feminist accounts of housework exploitation, as well as the urban obscurity of women who perform care work in Mexico City’s streets and public spaces.

Daniela Lechuga, PhD candidate in El Colegio de México, will offer an account of how Mexican cinema from the 1940s to the 1970s represented the place of hired domestic employees in the household, many of them female migrants from Mexico’s rural areas. Lechuga argues that Mexican cinema helped articulate class, gender, and racial stereotypes that established and reproduced social hierarchies central to urban Mexican modernity and its organization of reproductive labor. Picking up the historical trace, Professor María Eugenia López-García explores two feminist artworks from the 1970s: the short film Vicios de la Cocina and the photographic easy Cuadernos de Tareas. López-García argues that these two artworks expose how boredom and tedium associated with women’s housework operate as intentional forms of gendered oppression and submission. Professor Tess Renker will then address the film Roma, situated in the 1970s. Renker is interested in dwelling on the protagonist Cleo, a migrant domestic employee. Renker argues that the film shows that Cleo’s migrant mobility and her social impasse co-produce each other, a “mobile immobility” that reveals structural inequities of class, race, and gender in modern Mexico. Finally, Professor Alfonso Fierro will explore the documentary film Tratado de Invisibilidad by Luciana Kaplan, a documentary film that addresses the marginal place of women workers who clean Mexico City’s streets and public places. Fierro argues that this film expands the question of gendered care work beyond the household and aims to produce a re-distribution of the sensible to make these women visible and audible in the urban public sphere they care for every day.

The panel overall provides an ample account of how Mexican film has represented and problematized reproductive care work in urban spaces, focusing on different historical periods, approaches to reproductive labor, and cinematographic registers and styles. Each participant will speak for 12 minutes for a total of 48 minutes of presentation time, leaving roughly 20 minutes at the end for a discussion and Q&A with the public (this is taking into account time needed to introduce presenters, transition between presentations, etc.).

589 Visualizing Urban Care Work in Mexican Film: Calls for Papers