Lupita was 15 years old when she was brought to Mexico City from Jiliapa, a small town in the municipality of Tlatlauquitepec in the state of Puebla, to work as a cleaning lady in a house in Coyoacán. The conditions of extreme poverty in her community forced her parents to accept a family to take her away. Back then, the agreement was that they would pay her 300 pesos a month. They only gave her half of her salary, and the rest was kept by her employer to hand over to Lupita''s parents. The employers took her every four months to see her family.
She worked every day of the week from seven in the morning until everyone slept. Lupita did not have the right to use silverware, "the people from small towns do not know how to use them, and their silverware is their own hands," her boss told her. Every day I ate beans with stale bread, which was leftover from a day before. I couldn''t sit in the dining room or the living room, "I had to eat by the stove," she says. She slept on the roof, "in the "junk" room. They gave me a mat to sleep on that''s it," she tells La Cadera de Eva.
"The people from small towns do not know how to use them, and their silverware is their own hands"
In addition to cleaning the house, she had to help with the business of his boss''s daughter, a bakery; "I had to count the loaves of bread," she says. It was there that other co-workers advised her to leave that job, that she did not deserve that treatment. This young woman''s experience dates back to 1993. She only lasted a year and a half there.
"They gave me everything, but I felt I was in a cage,"
Lupita decided to return to her hometown. But they contacted her again, to work in another house in Cuautitlán, Izcalli. She accepted. "They treated me well, gave me everything, but I felt like I was in a cage." The second family that she worked with provided everything she asked for. "They gave me everything I thought I needed," she says. On weekends, she helped water plants and bathe pets, but she didn''t have a day off. The lady she worked for offered to enroll her in a sewing workshop, where she studied for a year. It was there where she began to make friends and learn what it was like to have time for herself. Her absences made the family uncomfortable and persuaded her to leave the workshop, "Since I would do everything they told me, I listened to them," reveals Lupita. "A brother told me that I should have free time on the weekends, or even just a day off. So I tried to quit three times. ''No Lupita, what are you going to do to your town,'' said the lady? At the insistence of the brother, Lupita, after ten years, decided to leave the cage.
"In two years, I knew what I couldn''t in ten"
For the third time, Lupita returned to her town, but she did not get used to it because the relationship with her parents was increasingly difficult. "I no longer wanted to be told what to do," she says. She found a third job in Coyoacán, a house where a single woman lived, who helped her value herself. "She encouraged me to do many things, to value myself, she told me you are intelligent, you have to study something. It helped me a lot. It was beneficial because she gave me freedom and lots of advice. What I didn''t have in ten years, I had in two. "Lupita decided to leave the inhouse jobs because she married and had her first daughter, who is visually impaired.
For this reason, she spends time with her. I take hourly jobs in houses. Every time she had to walk through the first house where she worked, which is in front of the Cineteca, she felt tense.
"Now, with YouTube, we can learn many things"
At the end of 2019, Lupita stopped working at home because she decided to dedicate more time to her second daughter, who is one month old. Now her goal is to start a food business. While being in quarantine with her daughters, she has learned many things through YouTube.
"It is with the cell phone that we do our homework when we don't understand something because we don't have access to the Internet on the computer. We are already considering hiring an affordable plan."
Homeworks are sent to her via WhatsApp so that Caro her daughter can do them. She needs to download a speaker through an application to the computer. However, it was not possible due to not having access to the Internet.
After 24 years of working at home, Lupita believes that there is still a long way to go before domestic workers are valued, and they are no longer seen as maids, she says. "More than the employers valuing us, I think it is we who must learn to do it, not feel less, we must know that we do a normal job."