During the twentieth century, Mexican cinema's engagement with the nexus of racial and class inequality consisted largely of dramatizing Indigenous and campesino socioeconomic marginality in films such as Janitzio (Dir. Carlos Navarro, 1935), Emilio Fernández's indigenista films (María Candelaria, 1944; La perla, 1947; Río Escondido, 1948; and Maclovia, 1948), La rebelión de los colgados (Dir. Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1954), Raíces (Dir. Benito Alazraki, 1955), Macario and Animas Trujano (Dir. Roberto Gavaldón, 1960 and 1961, respectively), Tarahumara (cada vez más lejos) (Dir. Luis Alcoriza, 1965), just to name a few. More recently, Mexican filmmakers have begun examining the endurance of raced class inequality by focusing critically on White middle-and upper-class Mexican society as a site that produces and/or perpetuates discriminatory discourses and practices.

In order to levy such critiques, contemporary filmmakers have recovered the scenario of domestic labor—a setting traditionally used in Mexican films and telenovelas to stage aspirational stories of joining affluent White Mexican society through romantic bonds. Distancing themselves from this tradition and its “made-up maids” (Ríos 2015, 223–33), contemporary films such as ¿Qué le dijiste a Dios? (Dir. Teresa Suárez, 2014), Hilda (Dir. Andrés Clariond, 2014), and Roma (Dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2018) instead capture the space of domestic labor as a contact zone between raced socioeconomic classes for the purpose of marking and critiquing White middle- and upper-class privilege in Mexican society. In problematizing the White Mexican middle and upper classes as a locus of entitlement, willful obliviousness, and/or complicit ambivalence (both toward those who are outside of the group's limits as well as for those who are within them), these films subvert the notion that Mexican society is characterized by a democratic mestizaje—the basis of the country's postrevolutionary “fictive ethnicity”—and call attention to the endurance of entrenched hierarchical social dynamics that continue to be inflected by racial asymmetry.

The process of racialization in Mexico, as in the rest of Latin America, has economic, discursive, and physical dimensions. As Aníbal Quijano has explained, in the colonial period the distribution of labor occurred along racialized lines—a fact that laid the foundation for the enduring material, political, social, and cultural inequality among racial groups that he terms “the coloniality of power” (2000).