I first met her at my door on a blistering hot Easter Sunday
afternoon. She always has a knack for showing up on holidays; Christmas
morning, Thanksgiving. She seems to be unaware of any dates or time of day that
might be inappropriate for interruption. She doesn’t mean any harm, because after all,
when you are desperate for food, medication or just struggling to survive,
holidays are a luxury. Also, when you never learned to read,
calendars are irrelevant.
She stood sweating in the heat holding her toddler son’s
hand. I asked her what I could do for
her. She never looked at me, her eyes staring at the ground. “Senora, ¿Usted no necesita ayuda en la casa? Con la limpieza,
los ninos?” Here she nodded in the direction of my 2 year old son, hanging off my
hip, and then down at my 4 year old who was buzzing around like an airplane, colorful
confetti from the cascarones (confetti eggs) still stuck in his hair . She
explained that the neighbor told her the White family surely needed help. We often had folks come to our door asking for
money and/or work. Neighbors borrowed gas money, wrinkled men on
bicycles offered to cut our grass with a machete; cheerful ladies sold us empanadas. But this
was different. She seemed defeated.
I didn’t have a housekeeper, never had. Sure, I paid my friend’s mother a fair wage to babysit my boys while I worked, and for that I was uber-grateful. But first we were friends, and then she cared for my kids. Someone just to clean the house was way too bourgeois for me. My parents had had house help in Mexico of course, because everyone did. But growing up in California only really rich people had housekeepers so my working mom (and my sister and I) did all the housework. Here in Brownsville, where labor is cheap and there is always a supply of undocumented folks in need of work, almost every “middle class” person I know has a housekeeper. Many of my friends have live-in full-time help from the time they have their babies, whether they work outside of the home or not. So I’m not sure why I had been so reluctant.
In fact, my parents
had a 13 year old Indian girl living with them in Chiapas, Mexico. She watched
my sister and helped around the house. "She came from a very poor
village where she was only a burden to her parents and at least with us she had
plenty of food and a nice place to live.”
But still, with childish honesty I was always concerned. In my parents defense, they sent her to school, but I also remember hearing how little work she did around the house. I wonder how much help my 13 year old would be if we sent him away to live in a strange city with people he didn't know. But I digress.
Marta* and her young son stood at my door asking, no begging, for work. We were getting ready to go to the beach for an Easter picnic, and I really didn’t want to deal with making a commitment, so I handed her some money and said, “Why don’t you come back tomorrow morning?”
“Si Senora.” She
grabbed the money and turned and continued down the street. No “thank you”, not
even a smile. I admit it sort of irked me. She should be grateful for my
generosity, right?
Marta was a stranger first. Then she was a “housekeeper”, and
now she is my friend. I think. The relationship between the people who employ
house help, and the women who care for our babies, fold our underwear and clean
our bathrooms, is often an awkward dance between powerful and powerless,
dependent and patron characterized by intimacy, distrust and obligation.
First she depended on me—to give her work, cash, drive her
son to the doctor, fill out forms she couldn’t read, intervene when her abusive
drunk husband threatened her. But over
the years I’ve come to depend on her—to mop my floors, fold my laundry and make
my kids sopita for lunch.
Crisis seems to follow Marta. But isn’t that how it is when
you live in the margins, undocumented, illiterate, unwanted, abused, barely
surviving? Over the years Marta has slowly shared bits and pieces of her story
which has made me respect her journey all the more.
Born on a dusty ejido outside of the town of Rio Verde in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, Marta was the second oldest of 10 kids—the first daughter. They harvested mangos and corn on their land and lived in a two room shack with palm thatched roof, outdoor cook stove and an outhouse. She describes her father as enojado (angry), her mother as very religious. She remembers most of her conversations with her mother being about how she needed to remain a pure virgin. “She never explained what a virgin was. It was always a mystery yet I knew I had to strive to remain in this illusive condition. Of course we never talked about sex or our bodies or even menstruation. When I started my period, I thought I was dying. I had seen a lot of animals being butchered, and a couple of people die, mostly in car accidents along the highway that ran a few miles down a dirt road from our rancho. Every death I had seen involved a lot of bleeding, so I assumed I was dying as well. I ran crying to my mama about the blood and she shushed me and led me behind the house where she told me I was now a woman and needed to wrap my chest with a tight cloth so boys wouldn’t see my developing breasts. She also warned me that if I ever lost my virginity she would kick me out of the house. I asked her again what the word meant and she said, ‘Only dirty girls want to talk about this stuff. Just stay away from boys and don’t let them touch you!’ I went away in shame, knowing that I had already lost the battle, no longer a virgin. After all, just the month before I had let Jose Angel, a boy from the ejido, hold my hand as we walked the lunches out to our fathers working in the fields.”
According to Marta, that was the beginning her of habit of
self-loathing that she continues to this day. It wasn’t until she was working
as a maid in a house in Harlingen, Texas a year later that she learned the hard
way the meanings of the words virginity, sex and rape.
Marta spent her childhood helping her mother make tortillas,
get water, hand wash clothes, gather the lena (wood for their cook stove) and
take lunch out to her father in the fields. She did have some free time in the
early afternoon to wander the dusty ranch and play with the other kids on the
ejido, picking fruit from the trees and letting the sweet mango juice drip down
their arms as they sat in the shade. She went to school for a couple of years
until the last two babies were born and her father told her to stay home and
help her mother, who was very ill after the birth of the twins. “I never learned
much at school because we were all crammed into one room, ages 6 to 12, with a
teacher who mostly made us repeat and memorize long arithmetic problems. She
never really got around to teaching us to read.
Shortly after Marta “became a woman”, her father sent her
away to work en el otro lado (the other side of the Rio Grande). He arranged everything,
including the coyote (trafficker) whose
breath smelled of Tequila and who fondled her in the back of the truck on the
way to the border. He was also the one who showed up at the house where she worked
as a maid to collect her earnings--$30 every week. Some of the money,
she learned later, went to her father but most was kept by the coyote to pay off her debt of transport and river
crossing.
So here she was, 13 years old and already working as a live
in “servienta”. She slept on a mattress on the floor of the family’s 6 month
old baby’s room and tried to learn how to clean and cook very different food in
a kitchen with equipment she’d never seen. She was often scolded for not using the
dishwasher or vacuum cleaner, both of which scared her with their loud noises.
As the eldest daughter of ten kids, she had had lots of experience watching
young children back at home, and there were only two in this household. But the
five year old boy was a terror and seemed out to destroy the young Marta. He
would yell at her, bite her and order her around. He found ways to
purposely get her in trouble. And then there was the father. That is another
story, and perhaps the beginning of Marta’s real troubles.
*Her name has been changed.
