Concepcion Alejo is used to being invisible.
Alejo, 43, applies makeup to her face on Tuesday morning and leaves her tiny apartment on the outskirts of Mexico City. She walks until the cracked gravel outside her house turns to cobblestone and the election posters adorning the small concrete buildings are replaced by the immaculate walls of the city’s upper-class gated communities.
It was here that Alejo worked quietly, cleaning houses and raising the children of wealthier Mexicans for 26 years.
Alejo is among the estimated 2.5 million Mexicans (mostly women) who work as domestic workers in the Latin American country. The profession embodied the gender and class divisions that have long permeated Mexico.
Women like her play a fundamental role in Mexican society, shouldering the burden of domestic labor as more professional women enter the labor market. Despite the current government’s reforms, many domestic workers continue to face low wages, abusive employers and long hours. It’s an institution that dates back to colonial times, and some researchers have equated precarious working conditions to “modern-day slavery.”
Now that Mexico is on track to potentially elect its first female president on June 2, domestic workers are hoping that either former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum or former Senator Xochitl Galvez can tip the balance in their favor.
“I have never voted in all these years, because for us it is always the same, no matter who wins. … When they ever listened to us, why would I give them my voice?” – said Alejo. “At least if we have a woman, maybe things will be different.”
Alejo was born into a poor family in the central Mexican state of Puebla and left school at 14, moving to Mexico City as a nanny with his two sisters.
“It’s like you’re a mother. The kids called me “Mom,” she said. “I bathed them, took care of them, did everything from the moment they woke up to the moment they slept.”
While some domestic workers live apart from their families, many others live with their families and work for weeks, if not months, without breaks and isolated from family and friends.
Alejo said demands and low pay for domestic work meant she herself was childless. Others told The Associated Press they were fired from their jobs after falling ill and turned to their employers for help.
“When you work in someone else’s house, your life is not your own,” said Carolina Solana de Dios, a 47-year-old live-in nanny.
Their help is vital for working women like 49-year-old single mother Claudia Rodriguez as they continue to struggle to enter professional fields that have historically been dominated by men. In Mexico and much of Latin America, a divide has long separated men and women in the workplace. According to the Mexican government, in 2005, 80% of men were working or looking for work, compared with 40% of women.
This gap has narrowed over time, although large differences in salaries and leadership positions still exist.
Born in a town two hours from Mexico City, Rodriguez fled her abusive father with her mother and siblings and found refuge in the capital. Instead of pursuing her dream of dancing professionally, she began working and studying so as not to “make the same sacrifice” as her mother, who toiled in various informal jobs.
She spent years trying to make it in the IT industry, but when she and her husband had children, she took on all the housework. When her husband left her for another woman six years ago, hiring domestic help was the only thing she could do to stay afloat.
Today, she and her nanny, Irma, wake up at 5 a.m., one preparing lunch for her two daughters and the other driving them to school.
“For women in business, we can’t do it all alone simply because society expects too much of you,” she said.
However, a historic number of Mexican women are taking on leadership roles, in part due to gender quota laws imposed on political parties. Since 2018, Mexico’s Congress has seen a 50-50 gender split, and the number of female governors has risen sharply.
Although neither presidential candidate spoke directly about domestic workers, both Sheinbaum and Galvez proposed addressing violence against women and closing the country’s gender pay gap.
In 2019, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government passed a landmark law giving domestic workers basic rights such as paid leave, limits on working hours and access to health insurance paid for by employers.
But the government’s failure to enforce the rules has left domestic workers unprotected and locked in “power dynamics,” said Norma Palacios, head of the national domestic workers union SINACTRAHO.
“Nothing has changed… even if on paper we should have more labor rights,” Palacios said.
Neither Alejo, a domestic worker, nor Rodriguez, a single mother, say they particularly identify with either candidate on the ballot. Both plan to vote. Even if they see the leaders as more similar, they echo Palacios in saying a female leader would be an important step.
“The country will continue to be led by a woman – a sexist country, a country of inequality, a country of violence against women, a country of femicides,” Palacios said.
Meanwhile, workers like Alejo continue on a precarious path.
According to SINACTRAHO, Alejo is among the 98% of domestic workers who have not yet signed up for health insurance.
She finally works for a kind family who pays her a decent salary, but she musters up the courage to ask the family to pay for her health insurance, fearing that she will be replaced if she asks for her rights to be respected.
“They don’t like you asking for anything,” she said. “Jobs are hard to come by, and if you have to work, you end up taking whatever they give you.”