A woman would govern Mexico while millions remain in the shadows as domestic workers

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Concepción Alejo is used to being invisible.

Alejo, 43, puts on makeup on a Tuesday morning and leaves his tiny apartment on the outskirts of Mexico City. He walks until the gravel in front of his house turns to cobblestones, and the campaign signs covering small concrete buildings give way to the pristine walls of the gated communities of the city’s upper class.

It is there that Alejo has worked discreetly cleaning the houses and raising the children of wealthy Mexicans for 26 years.

Alejo is among the estimated 2.5 million Mexicans — mostly women — who work in domestic service in the Latin American country, a profession that embodies Mexico’s long-established gender and class divisions.

Women like her play a fundamental role in Mexican society by taking on the bulk of domestic work as a growing number of professional women enter the workforce. Despite the current government’s reforms, many domestic workers continue to suffer low wages, abuse from their employers, and long hours. It is an institution that dates back to the colonial era, and some researchers describe its unstable working conditions as “modern slavery.”

Now that Mexico is on track to possibly elect its first female president on June 2, domestic workers are hopeful that either former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum or former senator Xóchitl Gálvez can improve their situation.

“I have never voted all these years (…) I realize that it is always the same,” Alejo said. “When have they listened to us, why am I going to give one of them a vote?”

“I hope that unless it is a woman, that this situation will be different,” she added.

Alejo was born into a poor family in the central Mexican state of Puebla and left school at age 14, moving to Mexico City as a live-in nanny for two sisters.

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

Although some domestic workers reside separately, many live with families and work for weeks, if not months, without a break and isolated from family and friends.

Alejo said that the demands and low pay of domestic work meant that she did not have her own children. Others told The Associated Press they were fired when they fell ill and asked their employers for help.

“When you work in someone’s house, life is not yours,” said Carolina Solana de Dios, a 47-year-old live-in nanny.

Your help is essential for working women, like Claudia Rodríguez, a 49-year-old single mother, who continues to struggle to enter professional spaces traditionally reserved for men. 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, according to Mexican government data.

That gap has narrowed over time, although large differences in salary and leadership positions still persist.

Rodríguez was born in a town two hours from Mexico City. She, her mother, and her brothers fled from an abusive father and took refuge in the capital. Instead of following her dream of being a professional dancer, she began working and studying because she “didn’t think about making all those sacrifices” that her mother had made, toiling in a succession of informal jobs.

For years she worked her way up in the tech industry, but took on all the housework when she had daughters with her husband. When her husband left her for another woman six years ago, hiring a live-in maid was the only thing she could do to stay afloat.

Now, both she and her nanny, Irma, get up at 5 in the morning, one prepares lunch for her two daughters and the other takes them to school.

“In the case of women entrepreneurs, we definitely couldn’t handle the whole package, simply because I think society’s expectations are too much,” she said.

However, a historic number of Mexican women assume leadership positions, due in part to gender quotas established in political parties. Since 2018, the Mexican Congress has a 50-50 gender makeup, and the number of female governors has skyrocketed.

Although neither presidential candidate has spoken openly about domestic workers, both Sheinbaum and Gálvez proposed addressing violence against women and closing the gender pay gap.

The government of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, approved a historic law in 2019 that recognized domestic workers’ basic rights such as paid leave, limits on working hours, and access to health insurance paid for by employers.

But the government has not monitored the application of these rules, which left domestic workers unprotected and trapped in a “dynamic of power inequality,” explained Norma Palacios, head of the Mexican union of domestic workers, SINACTRAHO.

In practice nothing has changed, she noted, although “there is already a legal framework of labor rights towards us.”

Neither Alejo, the housekeeper, nor Rodríguez, the single mother, say they identify especially with any of the main candidates. They both plan to vote. Although the candidates seem like more of the same to them, they agreed with Palacios when saying that having a female president would be an important step.

“It is a woman who is going to be in charge of a country, right? In a sexist country, in a country of inequality, in a country of violence against women, in a country of femicides,” Palacios said.

Meanwhile, workers like Alejo continue to walk a difficult path.

Alejo is among the 98% of domestic employees who are not yet enrolled in health insurance, according to SINACTRAHO data.

She is finally working for a kind family that pays her a fair wage, but she is working up the courage to ask the family to pay for her health insurance, and she fears they will replace her if she asks for her rights to be respected.

“They don’t like it when you ask for things,” he said. “It’s not easy to look for work. If you need to work, you end up accepting whatever they give you.”