Domestic plight.

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. Her devotion to him comes through as they play in a sandbox, and she cries when he goes for his first day at school.

Eva becomes pregnant while in Los Angeles, and we see her ambivalence tempered by quiet strength all the way up to delivery. But her new child makes her only more homesick.

The women struggle with their reasons for coming to the U.S. They try to improve the lot of the relatives they left behind by sending remittances, and they dare to hope they can continue to build a life in El Norte.

Evangelina, unlike Telma and Eva, is not a mother. She speaks English, has dyed blond hair and light skin, and studies to become a CPA. She briefly holds down a job, but the closing credits tell us she lost it and was forced to return to domestic work.

The women are all united by their involvement with CHIRLA (the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles), an advocacy and service organization. In the film, we see CHIRLA staging a play, written by a domestic worker, that tells the story of a maid who has hot coffee thrown in her face by an employer. "Super Domestic" rescues her, and Evangelina gets to play the costumed heroine.

The crowning achievement of Maid in America is how it takes a subject that is easily stereotyped and presents compelling stories that are starkly authentic. The women are all determined to succeed in their new country by being willing to work hard and play by its rules. But their motivation is not always the American dream of property ownership and prosperity. It's simply to be taken seriously and, in Telma's and Evangelina's cases, to nurture that sense of family ties that even globalization can't erode.

Ed Morales is a music columnist at Newsday and the author of "Living in Spanglish" and "The Latin Beat. "