A woman could be Mexico’s next leader. Millions of others continue in shadows as domestic workers

MEXICO CITY — Concepción Alejo is used to being invisible.

Alejo, 43, touches up his face with makeup on a Tuesday morning and leaves his small apartment on the outskirts of Mexico City. He walks until the cracked gravel outside his house turns to cobblestones, and the campaign signs covering small concrete buildings are replaced by the spotless walls of the city’s upper-class gated communities.

It is here that Alejo has quietly worked cleaning houses and raising the children of the wealthiest Mexicans for 26 years.

Alejo is among approximately 2.5 million Mexicans, mostly women, who work as domestic workers in the Latin American nation, a profession that has come to encapsulate the gender and class divisions that have long permeated Mexico.

Women like her play a critical role in Mexican society, shouldering the burden of domestic work as increasing numbers of professional women enter the workforce. Despite the current government’s reforms, many domestic workers continue to face low wages, abuse by employers, long hours and unstable working conditions that some amount to “modern slavery.”

Now, as Mexico is on track to elect its first female president, women like her who feel forgotten by their government hope that having a female leader can tip the balance in their favor.

“I have never voted in all these years, because for us it is always the same who wins. …When have they listened to us? Why would I give them my vote?” Alejo said. “I’m hoping that at least by having a woman, maybe things will be different.”

Still, as two female politicians (former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and former senator Xóchitl Gálvez) lead the race toward the June 2 presidential election, it is unclear to what extent this will change the reality for working women. in the country.

Born into a poor family in the central Mexican state of Puebla, Alejo dropped out of school at age 14 because her parents did not have the money to pay for her to continue studying. Instead, she and two of her sisters moved to Mexico City to do one of the few jobs available to them as lower-class women: domestic work.

Women in Mexico, like much of Latin America, work in informal jobs (tasks like selling things on the street without a permanent contract or benefits) at higher rates than their male counterparts, something that experts who follow the topic attribute to the misogyny in their cultures.

Like many young women who arrive in the city, Alejo began working as a live-in nanny, sleeping in a small room in the home of the family she worked for.

“It’s like you’re a mother. The kids called me ‘mom,’” she said. “Their children were born and I bathed them, took care of them, did everything from the moment I woke up until they slept.”

While some domestic workers live apart from their families, many more live with families and work weeks, if not months, uninterrupted. They are isolated from family and friends, a custom that dates back to slavery, said Rachel Randall, a Latin American studies researcher at Queen Mary University of London.

“In a region like Latin America and the Caribbean, the history of slavery and colonialism continues to weigh on relationships with domestic workers even today in terms of class, race and gender dynamics,” she said.

Alejo said the demands, combined with the low wages for domestic work, led her to not start a family or have children. Others told The Associated Press they were fired from their jobs after falling ill and asking for help and time off from family they have worked with for years.

Carolina Solana de Dios, 47, said she started working as a live-in nanny when she was 15 to escape an abusive home. While she feels free from abuse and knows that her work is important, she added: “When you work in someone else’s house, your life is not your own.”

At the same time, their help is essential for working women like Claudia Rodríguez, 49, who continue to struggle to enter professional spaces historically dominated by men. Rodriguez, a single mother and owner of an IT company, said she has had to work twice as hard to reach half the distance of her male counterparts.

In Mexico and much of Latin America, a divide has long divided men and women in the workplace. In 2005, 80% of men were employed or looking for work, compared to 40% of women, Mexican government data show.

That gap has slowly closed over time, and as of the end of 2023, 76% of men were active in the workforce, compared to 47% of women. There are still large gaps in salaries and leadership roles.

Born in a town two hours from Mexico City, Rodríguez fled an abusive father with her mother and siblings, taking refuge in the capital. After watching her mother work selling food on the streets and doing other work to pay the rent, Rodríguez decided from an early age that she did not want to follow the same path.

Instead of pursuing his dream of dancing professionally, he started selling computers when he was 16 years old.

“I didn’t want to make the same sacrifice she was making for me,” he said. “Then I started working and studying.”

She spent years making her way in the IT industry despite sexual harassment and “men slamming doors in our faces.” But when she got married and had children, he said, he often had to do all the household chores in addition to managing her own business.

Caregiving can change the trajectory of a woman’s career in Mexico, making it difficult for her to reach higher-level professional positions, according to a 2023 survey by the Mexican Competence Institute. While more than half of women in Mexico say they have had to take a break from their careers to care for their children, only one in five men reported the same.

When her husband left her for another woman six years ago, hiring a maid was the only thing she could do to stay afloat.

Today, she and her nanny, Irma, wake up at 5 in the morning, one prepares lunch for her two daughters while the other drops them off at school. While it’s hard to keep up, now at least she can breathe.

“She’s part of our family,” he said. “In the case of women entrepreneurs, we cannot handle everything alone simply because there is too much that society expects of them.”

Despite the burden, a historic number of women in this socially conservative country are taking on political and leadership roles. Between 2005 and 2021, the gap between men and women in government roles and international entities was reduced by more than 25%, according to government data.

This is due in part to a decades-long campaign by authorities to achieve greater representation in politics, including laws requiring that half of political parties’ congressional candidates be women. Since 2018, Mexico’s Congress has had a 50-50 gender split and the number of female governors has skyrocketed.

While neither presidential candidate has explicitly spoken about domestic workers, both Sheinbaum and Gálvez have proposed addressing the growing violence against women in Mexico and working to close the gender pay gap in the country.

“In our government, women will not only be recognized by having a female president, but we will take action in favor of women,” frontrunner Sheinbaum said in a speech on International Women’s Day.

But Norma Palacios, president of the country’s domestic workers union, known as SINACTRAHO, said many of the social advances seen in recent years have not reached the poorest classes of working women, let alone domestic workers.

In 2019, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government passed landmark legislation granting domestic workers basic rights such as paid leave, limits on work hours, and access to employer-paid health insurance.

But the government’s inability to enforce those rules has left women “unprotected” and trapped in a “dynamic of power inequality,” Palacios said.

“Nothing has changed and (domestic workers) continue to face informal working conditions, in precarious jobs, with low wages, facing violence and discrimination, although on paper we should have more labor rights,” Palacios said.

Neither Alejo, the domestic worker, nor Rodríguez, the single mother, say they particularly identify with any of the candidates on the ballot, although both plan to vote. While both say having a woman leading the country would be a step forward, women, long disillusioned by Mexican politics, still see the leaders as more of the same.

They echo other analysts who say having a woman on the ticket doesn’t necessarily mean they will prioritize gender issues. Still, they and Palacios, the leader of the domestic workers union, hope it marks a longer-term change.

“It will still be a woman who will be in charge of a country: a sexist country, a country of inequality, a country of violence against women, a country of femicides,” Palacios said.

Meanwhile, workers like Alejo continue down an unstable path as they fight to defend their own rights.

Alejo is among the 98% of the 2.5 million domestic workers who have not yet enrolled in health insurance, according to SINACTRAHO data. She and many others fear that asking for her new rights to be respected will result in her being fired.

Alejo, who long worked as a live-in nanny, eventually moved alone to her small apartment in a poorer area of ​​the city. After years of low wages and a sexual abuse case, the 43-year-old woman said she finally works with a family that pays her a fair wage and respects her.

Still, as she works up the courage to ask the family to pay for her health insurance, she adds that she knows they see her as replaceable.

“They don’t like it when you ask them for things,” he said. “It’s not easy to find work and if you need to work, you end up accepting what they give you.”