My favourites are Buna on Orizaba just off the fountain-centred Plaza Rio de Janeiro, great for people-watching Borola on Jalapa with its airy interior and wide range of delicious coffees and the tiny roadside shacks, different every time I go, where you can buy a beverage to go or linger in the sunshine, drinking it all in. The area’s rehabilitation was slow, and in some ways it continues, but the run-down ambience led to cheap rents and a way of life that was affordable for a new generation of artists, and their influence has helped shape its current air of bohemianism. The disaster’s legacy remains: the churned-up, uneven pavements on some side roads the occasional still-ruined building, usually housing stray cats. An 8.1-magnitude earthquake devastated the city, killing 5,000, and Roma was one of the barrios that was hardest-hit. The biggest blow to Roma’s fortunes came suddenly and without warning, 15 years or so after the year in which the film is set, on the morning of 19 September 1985. Leonora’s house is five minutes’ walk from Cuarón’s the movie was shot on the street where he grew up, Tepeji, in the house opposite his family’s own. But the spacious houses were there, as Roma’s lingering shots depict: open-plan living rooms, internal courtyards, Bauhaus-style windows, open-air iron staircases leading to the rooftop laundries. That continued through Cuarón’s childhood perhaps the director’s decision to shoot his movie in black and white reflects it. The area’s heyday was in the first half of the 20th century, when it became the desirable neighbourhood for wealthy Europeans by the time Leonora and her fellow émigré artists arrived, refugees from the second world war, it was beginning to fade. Some of them have been redeveloped, of which the best-known is Casa Lamm, now an upmarket arts centre-cum-restaurant-cum-bookshop. Roma has a grand hinterland, as its ornate, fin de siècle mansions, with their shuttered French windows and intricate balconies, suggest. Its development hasn’t been a linear story. I am still a regular visitor to Roma and the area hasn’t changed in essence, although it’s a bit more gentrified each time I go. Photograph: Carlos Somonte/AP (top) and Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images Scene from Roma, set in early-1970s Mexico City, and a contemporary shot of the same neighbourhood.
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