Domestic plight.

• Author: Morales, Ed
• Position: Maid in America - Movie Review

While lurking in the background for some time now, the Latina maid may be emerging as a new favorite stock character in Hollywood. Last year's drama Spanglish featured a Mexican maid as its central plot device, but only as a corollary to a crisis in an upper-middle-class marriage. While it did portray some of the travails of the typical domestic worker, the movie treated the main character, Flor, ultimately as an exotic object of desire. In this year's race-and-class drama, Crash, the maid character was browbeaten by a neurotic housewife played by Sandra Bullock, only to dutifully comfort her after the erstwhile Miss Congeniality fell down a flight of stairs.

If these two films are any indication, Hollywood is just waving at the fact that more and more women from Latin America are working in U.S. households as domestics. In California alone, which has the most domestic workers, 70 percent are Latinas.

Anayansi Prado's new documentary, Maid in America, to be aired November 29 on PBS, goes a long way as a corrective. It follows the lives of three women: Telma from El Salvador, Evangelina from Mexico, and Eva from Guatemala, and the one-hour journey takes you directly into the hopes, fears, persistence, and loneliness of the domestic. The grainy look of this videotaped doc gives the workers a visceral immediacy as they perform their routines. Slowly, it allows us to understand their emotions.

The stories of Telma and Eva offer an interesting parallel about displaced feelings of motherhood. In two of the film's most moving sequences, women are shown fretting over children who don't seem to realize that the women are their mommies. In one, an upper-middle-class mother describes how her only son, Mickey, refers to his nanny, Telma, as "mommy."

In the other, Eva returns home to Guatemala to be reunited with her children, only to find that her youngest daughter doesn't know that Eva is actually her mother.

Telma, who says all of her employers have been African American, has developed a fascinating bilingual relationship with Mickey. She exhorts him in Spanish to work on his homework, and he responds dutifully in English...