Concepcion Alejo is used to being invisible.
Alejo, 43, touches her face up with make-up on a Tuesday morning, and steps out of her tiny residence on the fringes of Mexico Metropolis. She walks till the cracked gravel outdoors her dwelling turns into cobblestones, and the marketing campaign posters coating small concrete buildings are changed with the spotless partitions of gated communities of the town’s higher class.
It’s right here the place Alejo has quietly labored cleansing the houses and elevating the youngsters of wealthier Mexicans for 26 years.
Alejo is amongst roughly 2.5 million Mexicans — largely girls — who function home employees within the Latin American nation, a occupation that has come to encapsulate gender and sophistication divisions lengthy permeating Mexico.
Ladies like her play a basic position in Mexican society, choosing up the burden of home labor as a rising variety of girls professionals enter the workforce. Regardless of reforms below the present authorities, many home employees proceed to face low pay, abuse by employers and lengthy hours. It’s an establishment relationship again to colonial occasions, and a few researchers equate the unstable working situations to “modern slavery.”
Now, with Mexico on its strategy to presumably electing its first feminine president June 2, home employees hope both former Mexico Metropolis Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum or former Sen. Xóchitl Gálvez may shift the stability of their favor.
“I’ve never voted all these years, because it’s always the same for us whoever wins. … When have they ever listened to us, why would I give them my vote?” Alejo stated. “At least by having a woman, maybe things will be different.”
Born to a poor household within the central Mexican state of Puebla, Alejo dropped out of faculty at age 14, transferring to Mexico Metropolis as a live-in nanny with two sisters.
“It’s like you’re a mother. The kids would call me ‘mama’,” she stated. “I would bathe them, care for them, do everything from the moment I awoke to the moment they slept.”
Whereas some home employees reside individually from households, many extra reside with households and work weeks, if not months, with out breaks and remoted from household and mates.
Alejo stated the calls for and low pay of home work led her to not have youngsters herself. Others advised The Related Press they had been fired from their positions after they fell ailing and requested for assist from their employers.
“When you work in someone else’s house, your life isn’t your own,” stated Carolina Solana de Dios, a 47-year-old live-in nanny.
Their assist is important for working girls like 49-year-old single mom Claudia Rodríguez, as they proceed to struggle to enter skilled areas traditionally dominated by males. In Mexico and far of Latin America, a spot has lengthy divided women and men within the office. In 2005, 80% of males had been employed or in search of jobs, in comparison with 40% of girls, Mexican authorities information exhibits.
That hole has narrowed over time, although massive disparities in wage and management roles nonetheless exist.
Born in a city two hours outdoors Mexico Metropolis, Rodríguez fled an abusive father together with her mom and siblings, taking refuge within the capital. As a substitute of pursuing her dream of professionally dancing, she started to work and research to not “make the same sacrifice” as her mom toiling away in several casual jobs.
She spent years clawing her manner up within the IT trade, however took over all of the home tasks when she had children together with her husband. When her husband left her for one more girl six years in the past, hiring a live-in home employee was the one factor she might do to remain afloat.
Right now, she and her nanny, Irma, each get up at 5 a.m., one making lunch for her two daughters whereas the opposite drops them off at college.
“In the case of women in business, we couldn’t take it all on alone simply because it’s far too much that society expects of you,” she stated.
But a historic variety of Mexican girls are taking over management roles, partially due gender quota legal guidelines set on political events. Since 2018, Mexico’s Congress has had a 50-50 gender cut up, and the variety of feminine governors has shot up.
Whereas neither presidential candidate has spoken explicitly about home employees, each Sheinbaum and Gálvez proposed addressing violence in opposition to girls and shutting the nation’s gender pay hole.
In 2019, the federal government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador handed landmark laws granting home employees fundamental rights like paid depart, limits on working hours and entry to medical insurance paid by employers.
However failures by the federal government to implement these guidelines left home employees unprotected and locked in a “dynamic of power inequality,” stated Norma Palacios, head of the nation’s home employees union, SINACTRAHO.
“Nothing has changed … even if on paper we should have more labor rights,” Palacios stated.
Neither Alejo, the home employee, nor Rodríguez, the one mom, say they significantly establish with both candidate on the poll. Each plan to vote. Even when they see the leaders as extra of the identical, they echoed Palacios in saying {that a} girl chief could be an vital step.
“It’s still a woman who is going to be at the head of a country — a sexist country, a country of inequality, a country of violence against women, a country of femicides,” Palacios stated.
In the meantime, employees like Alejo proceed down a shaky path.
Alejo is among the many 98% of home employees but to enroll in medical insurance, in keeping with SINACTRAHO information.
She lastly works with a sort household that pays her a good wage, however she’s summoning up the braveness to ask the household to pay for her medical insurance, worrying that she’ll get replaced if she asks for her rights to be revered.
“They don’t like that you ask for things,” she stated. “It’s not easy finding work, and if you need to work, you end up accepting whatever they give you.”
