Rick Bayless Oaxaca Staff Trip: Making Mezcal at the Palenque
We spent the afternoon at a palenque in Ejutla to see the mezcal-making process. Located in the pueblo of San Agustín Amantego, this palenque is ...
|
Yalitza Aparicio once was a newly qualified pre-school teacher living in a dusty mountain town in Mexico.
Now, the 25-year-old is the star of Alfonso Cuaron's Roma and an Oscar nominee - a fairy tale marred by racist barbs the indigenous actress has encountered along the way.
Aparicio - who is part Mixtec and part Triqui - grew up in Tlaxiaco in the southern state of Oaxaca, home to about 40,000 people.
She had never even seen a movie on the big screen until she was 15 and went on a school trip to Puebla, a city some 350 kilometers away.
Tlaxiaco closed its only movie heater years ago, explains Miguel Angel Martinez, who runs the small city's tiny cultural centre. Even then, it had only shown films that had screened everywhere else years before.
The theatre's demise was hastened by the advent of pirated DVDs, a flourishing black market that at least brought more up-to-date movies to Tlaxiaco.
Now, in an open-air market next to the church and clock tower, a stall advertises Romaon sale for 20 pesos, or one dollar.
In the film, Aparicio plays an indigenous nanny living with a family in Mexico City - a tale drawn from Cuaron's own childhood in the 1970s.
In real life, Aparicio grew up in a tiny house among flowers, chickens and cows, before becoming Cuaron's unlikely on-screen muse.
RACIST INSULTS
Since bursting onto the big screen, her performance has been lauded from Europe to the United States, and her face has appeared on the covers of prestigious magazines.
She is the first indigenous woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar.
But with her newfound fame has come a wave of racist comments on social media, and even some from fellow actors.
WATCH | The movie trailer for Roma