Domestic Workers and American Ex-pats in Mexico City

by Madeleine Wattenbarger

Source: US News

I don’t like the term, but I could call myself an expat. I have been here, in Mexico City, for five years since spending my senior year of college scouring the internet for NGO work that could land me in North America’s largest city. Every week there are more of us, because post-NAFTA global capitalism has put us in a strange position. A glitch in the system has created the conditions to sustain life for working-class artists from the global North in places like Mexico City. Here, we can churn out advertising copy only 15 hours a week instead of 60; we can have dinner parties; we can do art projects that no one pays us for. We call ourselves writers instead of content creators. But we remain part of one ecosystem. Deep inside, we know the fundamental cruelty of our conditions, but our conditions allow us to forget that we’re being exploited. And that allows us to forget that we, too, are capable of exploitation.

The lack of COVID-19 regulations and the continued devaluation of the peso has made Mexico City more appealing than ever for professionals from the US looking to relocate. Here, a Brooklyn creative can dine out three times a week on the salary that at home afforded them rice and beans. And they can hire someone to clean their home each week for less than a monthly metro pass. Middle-management professionals, released  by their multinational companies from their offices in mid-sized US cities, rent sprawling mansions with manicured gardens. They join the “Foreigners in Mexico City” Facebook group, where they ask questions like, “Can anyone recommend a live-in nanny? We can pay 100 dollars a month.” Here, corporate executives can afford a few houses more than they could in Houston or New York or Paris. A former Cambridge Analytica executive recently posted looking to buy an apartment in Polanco, the elite Mexico City neighborhood where residents move in Escalades and their workers line up each afternoon to board the first of a series of packed busses back to the city's periphery.

At home, their corporate careers were facilitated by the labor of immigrant workers who scrubbed their bathrooms, walked their dogs, picked up their children from school, and taught them second and third languages. Those high-net-worth individuals are following the flow of human capital back south. Here, they can live even better, because they can pay even less. Meanwhile a sector of working-class gringos come in order to eke out a life slightly more stable than the one left behind in Boston or Chicago or LA: writers, artists and social workers whose income makes barely a living wage in the US, but in pesos allows for a comfortable, albeit uncertain, life.

Earning dollars in a country where everyone else is earning pesos puts us in a weird place that necessarily engenders either cruelty or class anxiety or solidarity. In The Gentrification of the Mind, Sarah Schulman describes the peculiar class position of novelist Kathy Acker, who was killed by cancer in 1996. Acker’s inherited wealth gave her means far beyond your typical Village lesbian novelist. “Her life was not a consequence of her actions,” Schulman writes. “Having someone else pay for your education, your home, your equipment, clothing, gym, bar bill, whatever, separates one from the experiences of most people.” For working-class gringos in Mexico, that “someone else” is the exchange rate. It is confusing. We don’t know whether we deserve this life or not. Or rather, we know we deserve it, but so does everyone else, and yet they don’t have it, and we do. 

It’s weird to feel oneself a part of the working class and enjoy access to material benefits elsewhere available only to the capitalist class. It’s disorienting and intoxicating: the deep peace of encountering conditions to sustain a dignified life coupled with the queasy unease of knowing one’s comfort necessitates another's exploitation. It can wreak a violent psychic transformation. As Schulman puts it, “Many people who are not the sources of their own financial lives are both infantizilied and tyrannical.” We find ourselves in a contradiction we must either resolve or forget. We have few ways of dealing with that unease. It is easier to quash than to confront. We have forgotten that comfort and exploitation are not blood brothers. We poorly understand our connectedness, the basic principle of solidarity: when one bleeds, we all bleed.

***

Not long ago I heard a story from a housekeeper about a young business owner, recently relocated to the city from the US. After a two-hour commute brought her from the periphery to the client’s luxury apartment in a painfully hip neighborhood, the client shook her head at the woman’s quote of 600 pesos, about thirty US dollars, to clean the sprawling home. “That’s way too expensive,” she said. “I can offer you 250.” That comes out to twelve US dollars and fifty-nine US cents.

Mexican cultural production has historically portrayed domestic workers, particularly indigenous domestic workers, as folkloric martyrs. Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film Roma puts it on display: the all-suffering, silent maid, perhaps at times underappreciated by the family that hires her, but ultimately a martyr and a muse. (A friend of mine, after seeing the film, scoffed, “It’s not a love letter to maids. It’s a love letter to people with maids.”) Luxury houses and apartments are designed with separate entrances. In gated communities, domestic workers are prohibited from walking on the road between the entrance and their employer’s house, lest they disturb the aesthetic of the manicured landscape. It’s common for families who employ domestic workers to allocate them their own set of dishes. Some commute two or four hours each way. Others live in their employers’ houses, which, as the logic goes, is a privilege: they get to eat our food and live in our house—but only in the kitchen, on a different set of dishes; in the servant’s quarters built by default into most Mexican middle- and upper-class houses.

Working-class expats—as I will call them, because that’s how many like to call themselves—have a different take. We feel slightly guiltier. They were probably raised cleaning their own homes, and before moving to Mexico City, they’d never before imagined outsourcing their domestic labor. They fail to realize, though, where that indignity really comes from: not the cleaning, but the miserly wage. They fail to realize that when even the most peripheral artery breaks, the whole city bleeds.

I imagine it’s what a Spanish or Puritan serf must have felt arriving in America. To step on fertile soil, to breathe clean air, to finally cultivate crops to sustain their community’s life. They encountered an ecosystem where they could finally thrive. They failed, though, to teach their children that the ecosystem includes not only soil and trees and animals, but the people and the prayers and the practices. They accepted the lie that only domination permits us a dignified life, that exploitation—of the land, the animals and other humans—is a necessary tool for thriving.

We can call it alienation, or we can call it, as Sarah Schulman does, the “gentrified mind.” She writes about the generation of young, queer artists who arrived in New York after the worst years of the AIDS crisis. Schulman, when she wrote in 2012, characterizes their work as all form, no content. They arrive enraptured by the mythology, the idea, the aesthetics of New York. But they no longer can access the art-making conditions that their predecessors could: affordable rent, diverse and healthy neighborhoods, vibrant community structures. The last decade has only exacerbated those conditions. Most cities in the world have more social media managers than artists.

***

I recently started paying someone else to clean my home for the first time ever, an exchange previously unfathomable for me because I was raised, like working-class people everywhere, to sweep my own floors and scrub my own tiles. I began paying someone because the demands on my body and my labor made it impossible for me to sustain my own life. Those demands included several months of 14-hour days researching state violence for international media outlets that pay as if war correspondence is a hobby; the psychiatric medications that allow me to maintain that pace, their respective strain on my muscles and liver; the isolation of a global pandemic that plundered my emotional and mental resources. I knew I needed my house to be clean, in order to work at the pace the system demanded, in order to pay for the sustenance—food, medications, internet, a roof—that allows me to work. I did the cost-benefit analysis. I was making more than 600 pesos a day. It made more economic sense to pay someone else to clean my house, so I could fulfill the system’s demands.

Several months of that pace left an unbearable strain on my body. I had to stop. I have less work now, and I have time to clean my own house. When I do the numbers, it makes more sense for me to do so. As a freelance human rights journalist, I can’t maintain a lifestyle in which I make more than 600 pesos a day and remain physically and mentally healthy. But Carmen is now part of my ecosystem. Every week we talk about the traffic, the metro, the routes, the new crush of workers in the bus after the metro collapse redistributed that flow to other, already-clogged arteries.

The collapse of Mexico City’s metro line 12 in May made visible the rifts in the city. The images of the derailed train show a disjointment, a broken artery with the blood spilling out—blood of 26 people dead, 80 more wounded. Like most of the line 12 passengers, they were on their way back to the periphery, where they live, from the center, where they work. The line runs from Mixcoac, in an elite neighborhood in the city’s southwest, to Tlahuac, the far southeastern edge of the city where until the metro’s construction less than a decade ago, public transportation was sparse and crowded. What once took three hours now takes one. The pre-pandemic traffic flows are starting to return, and the workers who previously rode line 12 now find themselves forced to create new constellations of movement, bus to shuttle to metro to shuttle to metro to bus. Many of them take that route to sell their wares on the street to wealthier clientele. And many of them take that route to the gleaming luxury apartments that they, themselves, maintain.

Carmen and I sit at the kitchen table for a coffee. We talk about our health issues. We are both looking for work. For me, it is easier. There will always be another massacre that an international newspaper needs covered for three hundred dollars. At least today, I can report over the phone from my desk in the city center, and I don’t have to ride the metro. When I go into the field to report, I find myself in her neighborhood, as if switching places, but I can afford an Uber at least one way—depending on the traffic, one hour instead of three. Always, always, our paths will cross as we each return home.

Madeleine Wattenbarger is a freelance writer in Mexico City, where she covers politics and culture.