Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn

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СКАЧАТЬ really flows in badly here. No, here it fills up with water.Megan:And is it cold in the winter?Cristina:Yes, it’s cold. Ugh, in the winter you truly get cold. It’s horrible, we walk around numb from cold.

      As I noticed in the passageway outside Cristina’s room, exposed electric cables hanging in the passageways are another common feature of many migrant cités. This is because rather than being officially connected, it is common for the residents to colgar de la luz (hang off the mains), circumnavigating the system in order to pirate electricity. These cables, drooping slightly above head height, can pose a serious fire hazard, not only because they may get wet but also because inhabitants must cook over open gas flames in their rooms or in the passageway and hang up their clothes to dry here as well. These multiple hardships—cramped conditions, lack of the most basic facilities, intense cold, and the potential for flooding or fire—become the daily bread of many migrants who live uncertain citizenship in Santiago. But these are places of quiet deprivation, unknown to the average passerby because they blend so seamlessly into the scruffy but respectable downtown streetscapes.

      WORKING PUERTAS ADENTRO, SANTIAGO

      Nana puertas adentro (live-in maid/nanny) is a job description set out in a turn of phrase that seems to be peculiar to Chile. While of course the concept of domestic workers “living in” is widespread throughout Latin America and much of the rest of the world, it appears that the term nana puertas adentro is a Chileanism. Nana is the word generally used in Chile to refer to female domestic workers. There is a less demeaning term—asesora de hogar (loosely, female household employee)—but I use nana here deliberately because of the connotations of gendered and racialized power relations that it conveys. Moreover, the sense of “behind closed doors” implied by puertas adentro makes the phrase unwittingly appropriate given the exploitative labor and living conditions to which many women working as nanas are subjected.

      As has been discussed more extensively in a US context, in crucial ways women (it is almost invariably women) in these roles “have been denied full citizenship —that is, they have not been recognized as fully independent and responsible members of the community, entitled to civil, political, and social rights,” as Evelyn Glenn writes.¹⁶ Gender, race, and class have all played a central role in constructing and enabling these exclusions, which are rooted in a history of slavery and servitude. In the colonial era and on into the period of independence prior to the abolition of slavery, in many countries in the Americas the role of domestic workers was commonly filled by African and Afro-descendant slaves. Indigenous women in conditions of servitude, who were frequently unpaid, also performed these roles.¹⁷ The long shadow of this oppression has been cast into the twenty-first century. Women of indigenous or African descent still predominate in domestic work in many contexts in the Americas. Many of these women are migrants—both internal and transnational—from low-income backgrounds. Labor exploitation and discrimination continue to characterize this type of work.¹⁸

      In Bolivia many of the women working as live-in domestic workers have been, and continue to be, of indigenous descent. As indicated above, many have migrated from rural communities to cities like La Paz to engage in such work. Lesley Gill provides a powerful indictment of the racism and classism that permeated labor relations between Aymara female domestic workers and their employers (who are generally white-mestizo, although sometimes wealthy urban Aymara) in La Paz over the course of the twentieth century. As Gill argues, the “most enduring feature” of domestic work is that workers “are drawn from groups considered inferior by those in power…. [T]he women who carry out paid household labour invariably represent a subordinate race, class, ethnic group, or nationality.”¹⁹ Although Gill was writing in the mid-1990s, her analysis continues to resonate. In spite of the progress that Bolivia has made in indigenous rights (see chapter 1), within private homes domestic workers continue to face gender and racial discrimination.²⁰

      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 СКАЧАТЬ