Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn
There are strong parallels with the Chilean case, as documented by Carolina Stefoni and Rosario Fernández in their analysis of domestic worker and employer relations in Santiago historically and in the present.21 In the past in Chile, women in these roles in Santiago were likely to be internal migrants from the South, and they were of indigenous descent (mainly Mapuche) or mestiza. In the present, Chilean women who are employed as domestic workers are still largely mestiza or of indigenous descent. But in the past two decades the Chilean women who carry out domestic work have been joined by growing numbers of transnational migrant domestic workers, initially predominantly from Peru but increasingly from countries such as Bolivia and Colombia as well. Indeed, 12.3 percent of the total foreign-born population in Chile is employed in domestic work, compared with 6.1 percent of the Chilean-born population.22 Migrant women from other Latin American countries have proven to be a “natural fit” in a labor niche that, as Gill and Stefoni and Fernández indicate, serves to reproduce a hierarchical social order because it is filled by those considered to be of lower social standing based on gender, race, and/or nationality. Those who fill these roles are excluded from full citizenship, in both symbolic and substantive terms.
As in the migrant cités, in the houses where women work puertas adentro, migrants’ multiple exclusions from spaces of citizenship become articulated in place. Of course the big houses—typically in the wealthy eastern suburbs of Santiago—where women employed as nanas work and live are vastly different from the migrant cités in terms of the material comfort they offer. Nonetheless, as in the migrant cités, the very private sphere of the family home in which nanas work and live is hidden from public view. Nanas in these places are cut off from family, social networks, and normal, everyday social life. Although all work in Chile, caring work included, is nominally subject to public sphere regulations (see chapter 4), in the houses where migrant women work as nanas a liminal borderland is created as private and public, work and life are blurred. This was made starkly apparent to me when I interviewed Magdalena, age thirty-eight, from El Alto, near the house where she worked and lived.
Like Magdalena and the vast majority of migrants who participated in this research, I did not have a car and was dependent on public transportation. To travel from the center of Santiago to the house where Magdalena was a nana puertas adentro, I had to take the metro and then two buses, the second of which ran only once every sixty minutes. The journey by public transportation took an hour, not including time spent waiting for the bus, after which I walked for fifteen minutes to reach the house in Alto Macul, in the foothills of the Andes in the southeast part of the city. The house was in a gated community with a small plaza. The properties had high walls and fences, and many were guarded by large dogs that growled at me from within the confines of manicured gardens.
In the plaza I sat on a bench with Magdalena while we talked. She couldn’t invite me into the house and wouldn’t, in any case, have wanted to host me in her small bedroom off the kitchen. The position of her bedroom within the home was typical of the floor plan of houses in Chile’s upper-middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. They continue to be built with a dormitorio y baño de servicio (domestic worker’s bedroom and bathroom) next to the kitchen and laundry, which speaks strongly to the position occupied by nanas puertas adentro within the household and wider society. One can easily connect the dots backward in time to the location of the servants’ or slaves’ quarters in colonial houses.23
Such comparisons do not end with the layout of houses in contemporary Chilean condominiums. Magdalena only had forty minutes for our interview because, although it was 7:00 p.m. and she had started her working day at 8:00 a.m., her employer required her to finish cooking the evening meal and then clear up. She worked Monday to Saturday but thought she might look for a job in another house on Sundays because of living and working in such an isolated place. As she had little chance of forming a social life in her time off, she thought she might as well spend it working.
The great irony, of course, is that it was Magdalena’s vital participation in the fabric of another family’s social life that disallowed her own. Naturalized and normalized by generations of gendered and racialized labor relations within the homes of the upper social classes, this contribution was barely recognized. Indeed Magdalena, like many other nanas puertas adentro, faced the constant worry of losing her job without notice and having nowhere to go. Insecurity becomes a feature of the daily lives of nanas puerta adentro, as does the cloak of invisibility from the outside world that such a role confers.
BODEGAS, SANTIAGO AND ARICA
In October 2013 I interviewed the Bolivian consul in Santiago, pressing him to tell me what he knew about the labor conditions of his compatriots in the capital city. In response to my queries, he recommended I visit the wholesale clothes shopping arcades along Santiago’s main avenue, La Alameda, where it traverses the comuna of Estación Central. The day after our interview I did just that. In the very first arcade I entered, in a shop toward the back, I met a young Bolivian woman who was prepared to chat with me. She was looking tired and disconsolate, leaning on the shop counter, with her straight black hair nearly sweeping its surface.
Her name was Cata; she was twenty-five and from El Alto. It transpired that she was working twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, and had not been paid for five months. Moreover, she had been lured to Santiago on false pretenses. She was living with several other people in what she referred to as a bodega (warehouse, storage space) near the clothes shop where she worked. The ease with which I found Cata, and subsequent interviews and conversations with other migrants, made it clear that this area of the city abounded with such places of marginality and exploitation. It is potentially comparable, though on a smaller scale, to the sweatshops of São Paulo and Buenos Aires in which Bolivian migrants labor (see chapter 1).
Kinberley, age twenty-six, from La Paz, whom I interviewed soon after meeting Cata, had previously been working and living in similar circumstances in an arcade almost adjacent to the one where Cata was. Kinberley’s “room” was provided for “free,” and she was required to live there as one of the conditions of her employment. She described the experience of first arriving at her new sleeping quarters:
It was a room and beside it was the warehouse. But there were some people who slept in the warehouse, they slept like that.
“Ooh,” I said, “What should I do?” Because the first time I arrived and entered the house, the house was dirty, and I said to myself, “Where have I ended up?”
I went upstairs. I don’t know, I didn’t like it. Now, “What should I do?” Like that. I’m here but I can’t go back.
This was a place that made her fearful, but she felt she could not leave. Cata and her fellow worker, Marta, age thirty-five, from a rural community in the departamento of Oruro, also described feeling trapped; they were generally only able to leave the building where they were living on Sundays. Moreover, there was a sense of danger and clandestine activity in the area. Like the facades of the migrant cités, the shopping arcade and house fronts along La Alameda in this part of the city hid the reality within. In the small shopping arcade where Cata and Marta worked, most of the shops sold clothing at wholesale prices. Cata informed me—and I could verify—that nearly all the shops were staffed by migrant workers. She told me that most of them lived and worked in conditions like her own.
Furthermore, in the same arcade there was a café con piernas (literally, café with legs), a euphemism for a café where the waitstaff are women wearing minimal clothing. In the mildest of these cafés, the women wear blouses and very short skirts. At the other end of the spectrum, such establishments are essentially strip clubs. Cafés con piernas are a fairly accepted and normalized part of Santiago culture, and most are openly advertised. There are, however, some that are not openly advertised and that may be fronts for brothels, which are illegal in Chile. The café con piernas in the arcade where Cata and Marta worked seemed highly likely to be one of the latter. It was hidden away at the back of the arcade, and the door and windows were blacked out. Cata and Marta said that the women working there were mainly Colombian migrants,