Cinema puts domestic workers in the spotlight | Culture

Women, migrants, racialized people, single mothers who leave their children to travel to another country in the hope of sending money back. They make the bed, cook, soak the clothes in stain remover, scrub the floor, unclog the sink, pick up the children from school, take photos of the children and prepare gin for the guests. Latin American domestic workers, 23% of those that exist in the world, have been represented since the beginning of the century on the big screen as one of the last links in the most unequal region on the planet. A job that “perpetuates hierarchies based on socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity,” according to the International Labor Organizationand which has become a recurring theme in Latin American cinema and, more recently, in Spanish with films like Lover (2010), Freedom (2021) or Quietreleased this Friday in theaters.

“They are in the very center of those environments of opulence and luxury, but they are not part of them and their life is radically different even though they cohabit the same space as their employers,” says Miguel Faus, director of Quiet, which had its presentation at the last Malaga Festival. The feature film stars twenty-something Colombian Ana, a domestic employee for a wealthy Barcelona family who spends the summer in her mansion on the Costa Brava. Her employers repeatedly ask her to be discreet, silent, almost invisible so as not to clash with that ostentatious environment. Taking care of the home becomes an excuse to emphasize the social abysses between one anotherbetween the undocumented migrant and the Catalan bourgeoisie in Quietbut also between the indigenous people of the town of Manchay and the capital in Peru The scared tit (2009); between the one who comes from the Brazilian northeast (the poorest region of the country) and the stylist from São Paulo in the Brazilian one a second mother (2015); or between Cleo, who has to share her tiny room with another employee, and the boss who spends Christmas at her family’s farm in Mexico. Rome (2018).

“Outside of domestic service, social classes do not coincide in Mexico, because the wealthy and upper middle strata do not go to places where they can meet these people who they consider inferior,” emphasizes the Catalan-Mexican filmmaker Xavi Sala, director of the film Guie’dani’s navel (2018). In it, a mother and her daughter of the Zapotec ethnic group leave her town to work in the home of a family in Mexico City. “Those who consider themselves ‘well-off’ do not go to the subway, they do not use public transportation, there are even people who do not want to go to the Zócalo (main square of the Mexican capital) because they consider that it is for the ‘plebs’,” says Sala, who He has lived in the Aztec country for more than 12 years. The relationship between employer and employee in Chile is not so despotic Lina de Lima (2019), but whether with greater or lesser discretion, differences are inevitable: “I didn’t want to show a hate relationship, but I did want to see the disparities. It seems that they have the same conflicts, that there is something that dialogues between them, but no. It was important to teach that class distinction, how we may look alike but our position on the social ladder defines us,” says its director, María Paz González.

To further widen the ends of the social pyramid, Quiet and almost all the productions that address the topic have protagonists who work as interns or bed inside, as it is called in Latin America. They do not live in the guest room, but in “the back room.” While filming the Dominican film Carajita (2021), co-director Ulises Porra visited several families that housed domestic workers in their homes. “When you enter these homes you realize that they are pompous, big, beautiful, but normally from the kitchen to there it is a different area. That area of ​​the house has a different architecture: narrow spaces, tiny, minimal furniture, with rooms that barely fit a cot. And there you see the border that exists, the place that each one really occupies.”

Ending the boarding system is one of the objectives of the Active Domestic Service (Sedoac) organization, which brings together domestic workers in Spain, of which almost 85% are Latin American. “It is an appropriation of the body of the person who works. You sign a schedule of 40 hours a week and end up doing 60. It is modern slavery where you have to ask permission to go outside, visit the doctor. It is a situation of normalized exploitation and abuse,” argues Edith Espinola, spokesperson for the association. The domestic trencha book in which Cristina Barrial compiles testimonies from domestic employees in Spain, tells how some are not allowed to keep the doors to their rooms closed “in case the bosses need something” and how others were kept locked up, unable to leave. six months, at the time of the pandemic.

Espinola believes that many of these film representations of domestic workers perpetuate stereotypes and stigmas. That in that submission, the gaze lowers, the “yes, ma’am; No, ma’am”, they are re-victimized. “You can talk about a job of abuse and exploitation, but there is a before and after when a woman knows her rights, the majority becomes empowered, you cannot talk about pity, but about vindication.” She says she never liked the Oscar winner Romewhich “romanticizes” the paternalization that many employers fall into.

Quiet tries to break that pattern and the protagonist rebels towards the end, not only demanding that her papers be processed, but with small acts of insubordination such as eating food from the refrigerator or having sex at home when the bosses are not there. “There is a whole tradition in fiction about the lower-class worker who stoically endures all the harshness of his environment and who has no voice. He wanted to fight against that a little,” says Faus. Something similar happens with the character of the Peruvian Magaly Solier – who has acted as a domestic worker in at least three films – in Lina de Lima: “In cinema, women are nannies, lovers or mothers and the protagonist has all that: all the layers that women have in life. I am struck by how Peruvian domestic workers have been represented in Chile, that they do not look you in the eye, they are very helpful, that greatly reduces who they are,” says Paz.

Subversion also appears in the daughters of the bosses, who question in documentaries the role that their parents assigned for years to those women brought from the countryside and who arrived home very young. It is the case of Girls (2015), from the Mexican Juliana Fanjuland Nana (2016), by the Bolivian Luciana Decker. They are artisanal films, in which their directors, with camera in hand, follow their “nannies” (nannies) while they do housework. They ask them incisive questions like “Is your bed as big as this one? Do you take baths?” in the case of the first one, or they give them more everyday talks, about the family, everyday life, second. They seek to know what perhaps their parents never wanted to know in the 22 and 40 years, respectively, that they had their servants in the home.

“There is something twisted and very perverse in the relationship between each other that comes from behind and is still repeated in a hidden way. It’s hard to see it when you’re born like this, you normalize it, but leaving the country opened my eyes,” says Fanjul from Switzerland, where he currently lives. Decker had his own revelation: “There is a whole colonial baggage behind his use. Most of them came from rural and peripheral areas, Aymara women who at a very young age migrated to the city with a kind of adoptive family that forced them to do many things with very low salaries.”

The trust between the filmers and those filmed in these documentaries is different from that represented in fiction. A high tone of voice, direct gaze, and jokes predominate, as opposed to whispers and lowered heads in the invented characters. They are evidence of the emotional bonds that are inevitably forged between the children of employers and the domestic workers, with whom they usually spend more time than with their real mother, or between the caregiver and the elderly person they are responsible for caring for. In one of the many sequences of Freedom in which the boss’s daughter and the employee’s daughter are found, the first assures that the housekeeper “is like family”, “except that she wipes your grandmother’s ass and the others don’t”, the second answers.

This emotional relationship can be a double-edged sword because the boundaries between work and love are blurred. “When the person you care for is the person you see the most, it is very difficult for emotional bonds not to be born. But we defend that we do not need a family because we already have one, we want them to be linked as our employers,” says spokesperson Edith Espinola. The writer Cristina Barrial, who is now preparing an ethnography on domestic work for her doctorate, believes that tenderness and dedication are part of the imaginary of Latina girl that Spanish society has.

“There are many factors that explain why domestic workers are mostly Latin American. They range from macroeconomics to more micro aspects that have to do with certain characteristics that are attributed to them when it comes to taking care of and taking charge of the house. It is a stigmatization, yes, but I do not put them in the passive position of victims because these are things that come out in certain contexts,” adds Barrial. Espinola, for her part, is happy that those characteristics are associated with them: “I have always been a defender of Abya Yala.” 12 years have passed since she left Paraguay and she has experienced first-hand the evolution of the working conditions of the group in Spain, such as the right to unemployment benefits or vacations. She is aware of the work to be done ― eight out of 10 domestic workers are hired informally, according to the International Labor Organization ― but since she Sedoac has created empowerment centers she feels the waves of feminism flowing among her colleagues.

Domestic (2001)

Direction: Fernando Meirelles, Nando Olival
Brazil country
Available in: not available on platforms in Spain

Director: Claudia Llosa
Country: Peru
Available in: Filmin

Chance (2009)

Director: Abner Benaim
Country: Panama
Available on: Prime Video

The Lullaby (2009)

Director: Sebastian Silva
Country Chile
Available in: not available on platforms in Spain

Director: Fernando León de Aranoa
Country Spain
Available in: Filmin

Director: Rodrigo Moreno
Country: Argentina
Available in: not available on platforms in Spain

Director: Anna Muylaert
Brazil country
Available in: Filmin

Girls (2015)

Director: Juliana Fanjul
Country: MEXICO
Available in: not available on platforms in Spain

Lullaby (2016)

Director: Luciana Decker
Country: Bolivia
Available in: BoliviaCine

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Country: MEXICO
Available on: Netflix

_