society
May 18, 2024

Bolivia: The successful uprising of the maids

"Her family" she cares about is not her own family

Shortly after sunriseBefore the sultriness settles like a damp cloth over Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia, Sofia gets up, slips into her skirt and blouse, ties her apron and makes breakfast for her family. Four place settings at the large dining table, for the two gentlemen, the grandmother and the nine-year-old daughter.

Sofia will eat in the kitchen. If she comes to it. If something is left for her.

The people the 37-year-old calls her family are actually their employers. And for them, the maid Sofia is not part of the family, but part of the household, as well as the TV and the fridge.

Sofia is one of about 140,000 womenwho work as a housemaid in Bolivia. Most live with their employers under one roof, wash, cook, clean and educate the children - yet they are not maids, as they are in Europe, with employment contracts and a private life. The maids of Latin America often work 15 hours a day, seven days a week, without holidays, without wages, for a roof over their heads and a warm meal.

It is their only alternative to a life on the street. And because they have no access to education, earn little or nothing, and almost never leave their employers' homes, they have little chance of building their own families.

Most middle-class households throughout Latin America have maids, also because more and more middle-class and upper-class women are well-educated and willing to work, but day-care centers or day-care centers hardly exist.

Cheap household workers, on the other hand, are enough. Bolivia is one of the poorest countries on the continent and it is almost exclusively women from the indigenous population and from the countryside who start as housemaids when they are 12 or 13 years old.

"In colonial times you kept slaves, today you have a housemaid, which is almost the same," says Casimira Rodriguez.

The 51-year-old Quechua Indian woman can tell a lot about the exploitation, lawlessness, sexual assault and physical violence that many housemaids are exposed to: she was one of them for 20 years.

Today, Casimira Rodriguez is something of the patron saint of maids

As a union leader, she has stubbornly fought for the rights of the maids; For a year until January 2007, she was even Minister of Justice in the Cabinet of Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president.

Whether in the cabinet meetings or today, in the living room her small house on the outskirts of the provincial capital Cochabamba: Casimira Rodriguez always wears her traditional Quechua costume, a wide-flared pleated skirt, a short blouse and two long black braids. Her Spanish has the soft, guttural sound of her Native American mother tongue. And when she laughs and cuts faces for her nephew - he lives next door and is almost like a kid to the unmarried one - she looks silly and carefree like a teenager.

Only her cracked hands can be seen in the years of hard work as a maid. "My hands could cut onions in my sleep," she says. If it were not for her mobile phone, which is constantly ringing and chasing the chickens in the small backyard with his "Jingle Bells" ringing tone, you would not get the idea that Casimira Rodriguez is one of the most famous women in the country.

She was just 13 years old when she moved out of her parents' tiny mud hut to earn her own living in the city. "You can go back to school and support your parents with the money you earn," her new employer, who had come by car to the small mountain village to hire a housemaid, had promised. A chance for a better life, the parents thought and let their daughter go.

However, education was soon no longer a topic, Casimira Rodriguez alone had to provide a 15-person household, wash, clean, cook, without ever leaving the house, the harassment and mistreatment of their rule delivered.

"The worst thing is that I found it normal to be mistreated," she says today.

Your employer says to you, 'I'll take you to my house, give you food and a roof over my head, treat you like my own daughter, and you want to be paid for that ungrateful thing? ' When you're young and alone, you believe that. "

None of the women dares to argue

Also Sofia, the maid from Santa Cruz, did not dare to protest against her "family" for a long time. Hardly a bad word comes to her lips, she is loyal, after all, this is the only family she has.Only hesitantly and whispering she tells the dishwashers in the small kitchen of the harassment of the grandmother, who rations her food to save money, she yells at trifles, she begrudge no quiet minute.

It is the little daughter whose heart hangs so badly that she can bear the bad treatment without complaint. The girl she's cared for since his birth and who loves her as if it were her own, the only person in this house who has a kindness and sometimes embraces Sofia. Start your own family? "Reveries," says Sofia. Where would she meet a man when she almost never leaves home?

No, her place is here, she says. And besides, things have been going much better for some time now - ever since Casimira Rodriguez entered Sofia's life, through the tiny transistor radio that sits at her bedside. Sofia heard Casimira talking on the air about her co-founding Federation of Domestic Workers. What she found there mobilized her: she persuaded her employers to get free, at least on Sundays, to attend housemaid meetings.

At some point, the solidarity grew among the maid

"We started as a sewing circle at the end of the 80s," says Casimira Rodriguez. "The neighbor's maid said of it: Every Sunday some of us met with an elderly lady who taught us tailoring." Casimira Rodriguez was immediately interested. And the employers agreed, "because I could learn something that would benefit them, so they let me out of the house for a few hours on Sundays, which was the only way for me and the other maids to meet and talk openly And we quickly realized how well that was, "says Casimira Rodriguez.

The women encouraged each other in the growing realization that they were wronged. They went to the police together when one of them had once again been maltreated, they passed on addresses of good employers among themselves.

Casimira Rodriguez and the Protestant pastor, for whom she worked for a long time and gladly

The sewing circle got bigger and the women started to talk to other housemaids on the street. And Casimira Rodriguez quit her employers, who had not paid her for years, and found a new job with a Protestant pastor. "One of the most important people in my life," she says, she still goes to his church today. He paid and treated her well, supported her commitment, and allowed her to work half-time. So they could expand the sewing circle into a proper organization, printed flyers, organized rooms, aid and protest actions, talked about the problems of the housemaids in free radio stations. And got her school leaving certificate in the evening school.

The union has long been well organized, with local groups, an office in the capital, La Paz and about 5,000 members - even though these are only three percent of the maids of Bolivia. "Most of the women are not allowed to watch TV, they do not have a radio and they have very little contact with others, they just do not know we exist," says Casimira Rodriguez.

She does not want to abolish the house maid system. On the contrary, she wants to see the work, which is regarded by men in particular as a self-evident obligation to women, as a profession in which employers and employees have rights and obligations. At the Sunday meetings of the housemaids in the trade union houses, therefore, three things take center stage: further education, legal advice and strengthening of self-esteem.

Further education is the way to more power

Back instruction in the trade union house. The biscuits are later shared sisterly

"Only those who have something to offer are self-confident, and only those who are self-confident are demanding their rights," says Esther, who gives baking classes every Sunday in the Cochabamba trade union house. A dozen maid jostle around her flour-stained wooden table, very slowly and step by step Esther explains a cookie recipe. The women write with uncertain pedigree, many of them were only briefly in school, if at all. "Now add a quarter of a cup of sugar," says Esther. "How much is a three-quarters cup? More than a whole?" Asks one.

Learning is tedious. But when they learn to bake, cook and sew better, the maids also have a better chance of getting a well-paid job. Even computer courses are offered, most of the women keep this from their employers. "They only talk about the cooking and sewing classes, because otherwise they would not be allowed to come," says Esther. "Many do not want their employees to continue their education and get to know their rights, they are afraid."

Wake up the women, make it clear that they have to take their fate into their own hands, says Casimira Rodriguez. They learn to open their own account, demand a written employment contract, set aside money.

"A housemaid who is too old to work is as good as lost.Many are simply thrown out and have nothing: no money, no family of their own, no friends. They just die on the street, "she says.

There are six emergency beds in the Trade Union House in Cochabamba, where beaten, abused or homeless women can seek refuge for a while. The beds are constantly occupied, the need is huge.

Casimira Rodriguez has ensured that the maids have rights

Although Casimira Rodriguez does not often visit the Cochabamba union house today, she is still omnipresent in the unadorned rooms: each of the women knows and reveres her, her story is the promise that there is something else in life than for others wash and clean.

For many years she was the president of the union. Her photo can be seen on billboards and small leaflets informing about her greatest success: the Domestic Work Law Act, which came into force in April 2003 - fifteen years after Casimira Rodriguez and her comrades first presented it to Parliament , It stipulates that every domestic worker has the right to the minimum wage of 50 euros per month, one day off per week, regular daily working hours and two weeks of paid leave per year.

"The hardest part was getting us recognized as workers, with the same rights as any other employee, just not counting us," she says. "At rallies, other unionists laughed at us and said, 'What do you women want here? Go back to the hearth where you belong!'"

For years Casimira Rodriguez has been cleaning her bill with members of parliament, in the press for their concern, tries to convince delegates.

I was pushy, I annoyed the people with the topic and I was reluctant to be afraid of the high men, she says.

Not that they would normally listen to a rebellious housemaid. But Casimira Rodriguez has presence and natural authority. She argues factually and definitely, looks directly into the eyes of her counterpart. "Remember who cooks your food," she shouted to the men when she was once again rejected, verbally abused or simply laughed at.

"The law is a success, but it only comes with the housemaids claiming their rights," says Esther, the union's backroom teacher. The union women go from house to house, talking to the employers, who often enough slam the door in their face. They travel to their home villages and urge residents to send their daughters to school and not too early to work in the city. They make it clear to the maid that it is in their hands, too, if the children of rich white families treat their domestic servants more respectfully than their parents. That their employers are also a bit dependent on them, the maid.

Sofia from Santa Cruz has taken her courage and for the first time pronounced a threat: "I'm hardworking and a good cook, I could work elsewhere." She finally persuaded her employers to pay her the state minimum wage and give her more days off per year. "Do not be afraid, just like the comrade Casimira," she said, "that's what she's up to for the future.

From her last trade union meeting, she has brought with her a few brochures about the Housemaid Act, her new neighbor. The family in the house next door has recently moved in a young Indian girl.

For some Casimira Rodriguez is a heroine, for others the destroyer of a long-running system of privileges. You can feel it when you step with her in front of the squeaky corrugated tin door of her little house: an admiring look, a short touch on her arm - that is how the simple women on the street of their neighborhood react to her.

But she is also recognized by those who used to be good enough to do her dirty laundry. White waiters who do not serve them. From stewardesses who assign her in the middle of a plane at the rear, while her fair-skinned companion of course gets a window seat in the front.

The racism of the whites remains

Everyday racism, in which little changedWhen Casimira Rodriguez rose to the highest circles in the country, in 2006, the newly elected President of the country, former coca-farmer Evo Morales, called her into his cabinet. The Minister of Justice's post should be filled with a symbolic figure, a woman who knows what injustice is and how to fight it. "It was like a dream and a nightmare at the same time," says Casimira Rodriguez, and her eyes narrow and cloudy.

Because, of course, the expectations of the maids were enormous. One of them at the head of the state, now everything would have to be different: The corrupt judicial system, in which often wins the process, which pushes the judge a few bills. The police, barely responding to ads by abused housemaids, because no one wants to get their hands dirty for an Indian girl.

Too high goals. "The maids were disappointed and I can understand it," she says today. Because all the energy she wanted to put into a judicial reform, she had to spend to ward off intrigues. As a nonpartisan, independent voice, she quickly became uncomfortable with the president and officials of his party. "I did not want to buy myself and forge alliances just to secure my power," she says. In January 2007, a year after taking office, she finally threw in the towel and submitted her resignation.

Today she is Minister of Social Affairs in the Department of Cochabamba, has set up a foundation to better mediate between governments and trade unions, to better connect women's rights groups and to further strengthen the rights of maids. She is a sought-after and respected consultant throughout Latin America, saying, "My life has turned many somersaults," says Casimira Rodriguez.

If she finds time, Casimira Rodriguez seeks contact with Pachamama, Mother Earth.

Sometimes Casimira Rodriguez goes to her home village, five hours over undeveloped mountain roads. The village is so far out in the middle of nowhere in the Andes that only once a year does a priest pass by - and therefore all couples have the same wedding day.

Then the patron saint of the housemaids sits on an upturned saucepan in the dust in front of her aunt's tiny mud hut, next to the chickens and rotting slaughterhouse waste. She takes off her shoes and claws her toes into the ground - making contact with the Pachamama, Mother Earth, letting the bad energies out and the good ones in. There is still much to do, after all.