SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS -- Carmen Sánchez Gómez’s hand trembles as she stuggles to form the letters her teacher slowly spells out for her. She sits at a table with five other women, each bent over sheets of paper. Children finger paint nearby as their mothers learn to print their names.
These women, all domestic workers in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, meet in a sunny courtyard twice a month for literacy classes and workshops that teach them about their rights as workers and as women.
Beside Sánchez Gómez, Josefa Díaz Martínez’s tired face shows the years she has spent working hard to keep other peoples’ homes impeccable. Like most domestic workers in the city, she is female, indigenous, poor and an immigrant. And like many domestic workers, she has experienced the occupational hazards of mistreatment, sexual abuse and economic exploitation.
Since September 2006, Concepción López, director of Ixim Antsetic, a women’s rights organization based in Palenque, coordinates literacy classes and workshops for a group of six domestic workers and their children in San Cristóbal. The women in the group are united by their hardships and the trying paths that led them to domestic work. They are also united by an absence of rights and legal protections that the Mexican government does not provide to domestic workers.
Díaz Martínez, 33, was orphaned when she was three-years-old and was put into the care of her grandparents. Five years later her grandfather died and her grandmother, “threw herself into vice,” and was unable to care for her. So, Díaz Martínez went to work as a maid in the state capital, Tuxtla-Gutíerrez.
Eight-year-old Díaz Martínez barely spoke Spanish and came from a humble indigenous home, so working in a well-off household meant learning new ways. But she says her employers had little patience. Her boss told her that if she didn’t fry eggs correctly, she would beat her with the skillet. She remembered once being stabbed in the hand with a fork as punishment for setting the table incorrectly.
López says that it is common for such mistreatment to escalate into sexual abuse. Across Mexico, sexual harassment and abuse are two of the most common problems faced by domestic workers.
Virginia Martínez Jiménez, 32, came to San Cristóbal de las Casas in 1994, displaced from her community by the conflict between Zapatistas and the Mexican army. She spent seven years working for the same family, but she was eventually forced to leave. “My boss tried to sexually abuse me and my four-year-old daughter. That was when I left, running from that house,” she says.
Indigenous domestic workers also complain that they suffer racism in the mestizo homes where they work. Díaz Martínez says her bosses shamed her for being indigenous. The children called her a “flea-bitten, smelly Indian.” When she got sick, she says, her boss didn’t help her or give her medicine even though she was still a child. “She said that Indians don’t understand good treatment, that they only know how to work. I had a fever and she told me that Indians just have to bear it,” Díaz Martínez recalls.
Sánchez Gómez, who has worked as a maid since she was seven years old, says that the first family she worked for made her eat off of separate utensils and plates. She came to the city from Lagunas de Teopisca, about 17 miles from San Cristóbal, and wanted to go to school. But her father became ill and she had to start working.
She, like many other domestic workers, scraped by on meager wages. Her first job, as a live-in maid, paid little because her compensation included room, board and school expenses, as well as a allowance of about 500 pesos, about $50, per month. But, the family never followed through with their promise to pay for her education.
Mexican law does not guarantee a minimum wage or an eight-hour work day to domestic workers, though other types of employees are provided these protections. In Mexico, the minimum wage is 50 pesos, about $5, per day or 1000 pesos per month for a five day work week. But live-in maids, who typically work at least six days a week, often make less than half that. Those who don’t live with families make more money, between 600 and 700 pesos, about $60 to $70, per month, but pay for their own food and housing.
The women in the literacy class run by Ixim Antsetic have clear ideas about reforms that would better their lives such as eight-hour workdays, benefits, social security and vacation time. They also understand that they have to educate themselves in order to demand these rights. “We have to be literate. It is incredibly important that we learn to read and write and learn our rights as domestic workers,” says Díaz Martínez.
López says that domestic workers have a lot of responsibility and that their work is often unappreciated. “It’s always been thought that housework doesn’t matter. It’s poorly paid, and especially since mostly indigenous women do this work, it’s even less valued,” she says.
López says that many women start working as children and spend the rest of their lives as maids and servants. That’s a fate that Díaz Martínez hopes her daughter avoids. “I tell [her] to study, so that she doesn’t live the same kind of life as me,” Díaz Martínez says. “Poor people who never had the opportunity to study do this [kind of] work. People who have gone to school can dream of other things, they can find a different kind of work, but us, no.”
