Yalitza Aparicio is 25 years old and breaking stereotypes at breakneck speed. First, because his interpretation in Rome, by Alfonso Cuarón, is opening consciences about the lives of many immigrants. Then because she, who is Mexican of mestizo origin, has just been on the cover of Vogue Mexico magazine, a fact that helps to position her as a symbol of a sociocultural debate destined to break clichés, an act that has had fervent support and also harsh detractors.
Well received as an actress, whom critics praise for her performance, and questioned on social networks, where controversy is the daily bread, Aparicio has a story before Alfonso Cuarón decided that she would be the one who would play Cleo , the character on which his latest film is articulated.
Yalitza Aparicio had not had any professional contact with the cinema and it was not even in her plans to have it. She was a preschool teacher until fate crossed her path and she decided to accompany her sister Edith to a casting that Cuarón's team organized in the Mexican community of Tlaxiaco, in the state of Oaxaca. There they also convinced her to take the test, a fact to which she agreed with the minimum information about what the selection was for and many suspicions, which even led her to believe that she was experiencing a case of trafficking in women. The call only mentioned that everything was about a film that was going to be made in Mexico and that they were looking for women of any profile.
Yalitza Aparicio traveled to all the tests accompanied by her mother, of whom she boasts, as she does of her origins: “My skin is very Mexican, very Oaxacan and very human. Part of the colors of my land and the diversity of its colors ”, he said in the interview that the fashion magazine will publish in its January issue.
She also declares herself “tremendously attached to my roots and my family”, which is why she frequently sees her loved ones in the images she shares on her Instagram account, where she already has 175,000 followers. In it, his family photographs share space with the most recent ones, in which he can see her in different places during the presentation of the film in which he stars or with stars from the world of celluloid or television.
Un cambio radical de vida que llegó cuando Cuarón revisó el casting. Al ver a Aparicio supo que había encontrado a quien quería que fuera Cleo, el personaje basado en la historia de Liboria Rodríguez, la niñera del propio director del filme. Él prefería para interpretar el papel a alguien que no fuera profesional y acertó. Porque Yalitza Aparicio ha dejado atónitos a propios y extraños con su interpretación y algunas estrellas rutilantes de Hollywood, como Hugh Jackman o Emma Stone, han querido conocerla.
The name of the film, Roma, is the same as that of the upper-middle-class neighborhood in which Cuarón lived when he was little and where a real nanny took care of him and lived what the director reflects today in his film. "Yalitza Aparicio dignifies the role of domestic workers in the convulsive Mexico of the 70s," said Cuarón during the promotion. She has been surprised and excited at the premiere of her as an actress and is already collecting awards. Among others, the best performance of the year for Time magazine. The ability to adapt that she has shown has surprised her own mother: "She told me: 'I can't believe you're there in front of so many cameras when I couldn't even take a picture of you because you were scared and you were crying."
"I am very grateful to be traveling the world with such a beautiful story," said Aparicio to Vogue magazine. "A normal woman is getting to be the inspiration of other people." A fact that he is not very far from the reason why she wanted to be a teacher: “I wanted to help in that stage of the children in which you can help them to dream higher and to continue motivating them”.