This indigenous woman from rural Mexico appeared on film for the first time in Roma — and is earning global recognition. On the black-and-white screen, Yalitza Aparicio’s character, Cleo, calls urgently for Sofi and Paco to swim back closer to shore. A resounding panic builds in her voice. Realizing that the children she cared for are struggling in the powerful current, she plunges into the churning waves. Cleo drags the two back to the safety of shore, where they collapse on the sand, sputtering for breath. When Aparicio, now 25, shot this scene for the 2018 film Roma, confronting the pounding waves sparked a real and visceral fear. She, like Cleo, cannot swim. Aparicio had agreed to do the scene, but there’s no ocean in her hometown of Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, in Mexico. “So suddenly I found myself in front of that ocean and those huge waves, and I was very, very afraid,” Aparicio told Vox. This similarity is just one of the myriad ways in which Aparicio authentically embodied her character in a film that blurs the line between reality and performance. In Roma, Aparicio stars as a live-in housekeeper to a middle-class Mexican family — with four children, a mother and largely absentee father — in the 1970s. The plot was shaped by the real-life experiences of writer and director Alfonso Cuarón. | 