Watching Roma now: What's new, and what's not, in Mexico City neighborhood seen in Oscar winner

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