Except for the small metal tag affixed to its facade, 22 Tepeji Street, it looks like almost any of the older houses in the barren part of the Roma neighborhood in Mexico City: painted plaster, an iron grid over the front windows and its flower pots, thin metal slats are geometrically mounted over the carpet glass of the garage door.
But the memorial plaque commemorates the most celebrated Mexican film in decades: Roma, a tapestry of memories woven by director Alfonso Cuarón, which envelops the viewer in the dense images and sounds of the Mexican city of his childhood.
In the 2018 film, 22 Tepeji went home to Cuarón’s orphanage, and his facade and patio appear in some of the most memorable scenes.
And now it’s for sale.
“Life goes on,” said Adriana Monreal, the third of the four generations of the family who have lived in the two-story house for more than half a century.
Cuarón spent the first years of his life in the house across the street, 21 Tepeji, but the light across the house preferred to take his film, and the Monreal family agrees. The production designer, Eugenio Caballero, changed the window grilles and re-covered the patio, which serves as a decade for the first scene of the film, in which the protagonist Cleo, the family’s domestic worker, is introduced while his dog mess of the floor was washed with soapy water.
Cuarón and Caballero reproduced the interior of the house on a set and carefully recreated the details of Cuarón’s memories. In a Netflix documentary about the making of the film, Cuáron describes how he tried to find as much of the original furniture as possible, by contacting family members in Mexico to ask them to borrow pieces.
The Monreal family welcomed tourists when Roma was nominated for 10 Oscars (it won three, including one for Cuarón as best director) and film lovers followed the locations of the film through Roma and the rest of the city.
Monreal’s grandparents moved into the house when her mother, Gloria Silvia Monreal, was a child and raised her there with five siblings.
Shortly after Adriana Monreal was born, her mother moved back in with her parents and raised her only daughter in the home. She recalls a house full of people while her aunts and uncles returned for visits. Now she lives there with her mother, her husband and two young children.
“It hurts,” Monreal said of the decision to sell the home, preferring to keep the reasons for the sale private. ‘It made us very happy, we love it. You can not measure everything we have been through here, everything this house has given us: shelter, closeness, a united family.
“We love it and we will always love it.”
Referring to rumors that started flying over social media, Monreal would not share the asking price for the home. An advertisement for a four-bedroom house on the same street, which is only two blocks long and has not changed much since the 1970s, mentions a asking price of about $ 760,000.
The Monreal family reflects the Roma portrayed by Cuarón in his film, of middle-class families living in the comfort that Mexico’s stratified society offers, even though they were not rich.
A few blocks north, early 20th-century mansions and elegant squares have transformed Rome Norte into a global hipster getaway filled with fine boutiques and gourmet restaurants.
But in the section called Roma Sur, a few blocks from a community garden and the historic elementary school where Monreal’s mother studied, the traditional environment is persistent. It is a place where local shopkeepers still hang on to the odds, homes house multi-generation families and evening walkers recognize each other with a nod.
When the Monreal family leaves, another hairline will open in the Roma.