[ Narrative Studies Capstone ]

Each time I close my laptop, I see a white sticker that reads, “echale ganas mija.” The Spanish phrase, loosely translated, means to “put in an honest effort” or “try harder.” I smile or -- sometimes, I sit up a bit straighter -- each time I see it because they are the words my mom has told me my whole life.

 

We, truly, are from two different worlds and have only gotten to see a glimpse of each others’. Her childhood was spent side-by-side with her 11 brothers and sisters in rural Mexico. School was encouraged, not prioritized. She emigrated to the United States with my father when she was 23 years old, shortly after my oldest brother was born.

 

Some of my earliest memories involve hopping on and off the bus with her to go to work as a housekeeper. The lively chatter of her and her other housekeeper friends kept me entertained as I stayed put on my mother’s lap. We walked hand in hand into the enormous homes she spent all day cleaning, which always came as a surprise to me because they never really seemed all that dirty.

 

When I was younger, there were parts of me that often resented my mother’s career. Growing up in poverty while attending schools with peers who belonged in the middle to upper middle class meant having to say no to a lot of my friends. It meant having to start working at a young age. It meant being hyper-aware of finances and appearances because I did not want others to think that having less equated to being less. However, it indefinitely demonstrated that each sacrifice, even if it seemed as simple as those ten dollars my mother gave me to buy a packet of bows that were in-style in the seventh grade, meant that much more.

 

While I have had my fair share of complaints, I have honestly never heard my mother grumble or groan. After waking up at sunrise and coming home at sundown after cleaning a number of people’s houses, she still comes back waiting to see if there is anything else she can do for her family. The thing about people like her is that they live difficult lives to ensure everyone else’s is easier. There is no time to wish for more when there is work to be done.

 

I am able to attend a prestigious school like the University of Southern California because I have had the support of women like my mother. This campus itself is an entire universe away from what she’s used to and trying to explain college life to her has not been an easy task. There are language barriers, class barriers. But, each time my mom tells me that she had a conversation about my graduation from USC to the people she works for, her smile grows wide. The work was worth it.

 

I often have all-nighters in the Wallis Annenberg Hall here at USC. I type away on my laptop responding to emails, writing essays, and adding finishing touches to my journalism assignments until the sun starts to rise outside its large glass windows. The first sounds I always hear on those early mornings are the custodians wheeling in large trash cans with their cleaning supplies attached to the handles. As sleepy as I am when I see them, I instantly think of my mom when I see their rough hands. How lucky am I to be stressed about school? I touch my “echale ganas” sticker and get back to business.

 

This project was inspired by my mother’s coarse hands, which could tell far more about her and other women in her line of work than I ever could. Four of her friends, who also bare the characteristics of working hands, generously shared their stories with me without any hesitation. I spent the past four months researching, photographing, interviewing, transcribing, writing, and editing to allow readers a glimpse into their lives. By clicking on each portrait of their hands, you will be able to read about that specific housekeeper’s journey to the United States and their experience as a low-wage worker in Los Angeles through text and audio. The amount of work I put into this project was extensive, but it is nothing compared to what these women endure on a daily basis.

 

This multimedia work was initially influenced by The Warmth of Other Suns by the decorated journalist Isabel Wilkerson. The book carefully and intelligently tells the story of the Great Migration in just over 600 pages. Wilkerson spent 15 years researching and writing the true epic; interviewing over 1,200 people, uncovering archival materials, and weaving together the voices of millions of African Americans who fled the South over a period of different decades in the 20th century. The Warmth of Other Suns directly follows three individuals who migrated from their respective Southern cities, detailing what propelled them to leave and the complexities that came along with living in a new world. As Wilkerson states, “Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it” (261). Wilkerson’s work solidified for me what I was already familiar with within my mother and her friends’ universe, but in a different context. The truth is that the world is not as clear cut, black and white as many might have been conditioned to believe. The idea of pulling yourself by your own bootstraps, which is so deeply ingrained in the American ethos, can ignore the economic and social structures that people of color did not create for themselves and more often than not, cannot avoid. And these people, who are made invisible, deserve to have their voices heard. They are the ones who make the lives of the next generation to come easier, and easier, and easier.

 

The migrant experience described in The Warmth of Other Suns from South to North is not very dissimilar from the treks these women took from various cities in Mexico to Los Angeles. Without the Great Migration, “What would Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, and Oakland look like?” (12). I asked myself this same question when thinking of a Los Angeles devoid of Latinx immigrants, let alone the populations of female housekeepers whose lives revolve around absorbing others’ burdens, others’ messes. Los Angeles proved to be a landing destination for the women I interviewed. For some, it was meticulously thought out, and for others, it was simply an opportunity that could not be declined. In all, it was the best option for their circumstances. Wilkerson wrote, “They did not so much choose the place as the place presented itself as the most viable option in the time they had to think about it” and it could not be more true for every single one of them (185).

 

Los Angeles is tightly knit up of many threads, which represent human beings from all different paths of life. By seeing it as a whole made up of only its glitz and glamour, we avoid acknowledging the rough hands that have helped keep it all sewn together. The bodies these hands are attached to have withstood sacrifice without objection, homesickness, spine-chilling fear, and the most taxing of them all -- physical labor. These immigrants, like those depicted in The Warmth of Other Suns, “journey[ed] across rivers, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land” (179). And for these bodies, whose backs ache after years of kneeling to dust hard to reach corners; whose hands are cracked and dry from the chemicals of cleaning products; whose wrists are sore from scrubbing and folding; whose eyes crave a vacation in the form of sleep, Los Angeles has not always been an oasis. What it has provided though for the four women I interviewed, was the chance to lay a new foundation for themselves and for their families; something not to be taken for granted. After all, not everybody who wants to leave can or will.

 

Although I could not interview 1,200 or even one third of that, I hope to give these women a glimmer of recognition by presenting their hardships and successes through this project. The author of a New York Times op-ed titled “My Undocumented Mom, America’s Housekeeper,” wrote “housekeepers are the heroes of the immigrant economy — they do their work silently, efficiently, and find money on the table after the job is done.” This is reality for these women and their counterparts, and the many that came before and after them.

 

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich also contributed to my understanding of this project as a whole. This book, which was written by Ehrenreich as an undercover journalist, sought to chronicle the lives of women in the low-wage workforce during the 1996 welfare reform act. She worked as a waitress, in a nursing home, as a cleaning lady, and at Walmart. She wrote, “Work is supposed to save you from being an 'outcast', but what we do is an outcast's work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditch-diggers, changers of adult diapers – these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society." This statement from the book which was published in 2001, still resonates today. Those who are frequently even more outcast though are those whose first language is not English and whose first home is not in the United States. Ultimately, Ehrenreich strikes down the idea that low paying jobs are for the unskilled. She notes that these lines of work require fast learning, quick thinking, attention to detail, and stamina. I agree. Aside from the sheer physical energy it takes to clean multiple homes a day, the women I interviewed have astonishing amounts of mental strength. That is not something to look past or take lightly.

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When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice for you .... The "working poor"... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone. (Ehrenreich p. 221)

 

It is time that these “nameless donors” who are part of the “working poor” be seen for the people they are; people with hopes, dreams, aspirations, feelings, pasts, and futures. As people.

 

Lastly, Working by the broadcaster Studs Terkel put the working world these women live in into perspective for me. Working, written in 1974, tells the different narratives of work and how people in all kinds of different professions find meaning in what they do. In the introduction, Terkel writes, “No matter how demeaning the task, no matter how it dulls the senses and breaks the spirit, one must work. Or else” (XIV). The women I spoke to became housekeepers out of necessity; not by choice. It was an act of survival that many could not muster. This is to say that hard work does not always equate to riches. If they did, I have no doubts that the four women I wrote about would be living lives of luxury.

 

These women’s stories and those whose hands are not depicted on this screen are extremely undertold. Negative stereotypes of Latinx immigrant workers persist not only in Los Angeles, but across the nation. Anti-Latino sentiments are a part of this country’s history. “Everything from their language to the color of their skin to their countries of origin could be used as a pretext for discrimination” (History). Words like lazy and undeserving became associated with members of the Latinx community and violence and segregation are not to be forgotten either.

 

Present day unfavorable attitudes towards the Latinx community have been amplified by President Donald Trump and his administration. When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he said “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best...They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” This language, full of disparities, further pushes the marginalized into an even more silent corner. But, I refuse to let this language persist by being complicit in not telling the lives, the stories of those who so desperately need to be heard.

 

I long for people to not see these women, the ones I interviewed, my mother’s friends, my own mother, as nameless women, as stereotypes, as incompetent, as inferior to others. When all is said, a woman who left everything she knew behind to put herself second by keeping her head down in a new world in order to make ends meet is fully deserving of respect as the next is.

 

Each of their stories are bound together by friendship. These women came to the United States with hope in their hearts for a better future, completely willing to face the unexpected head-on. When push came to shove and the promised land was not as fortuitous as they might have believed it could be, they turned to each other. In other females, they found not competition, but a helping hand from someone who was once in the same place. And thus, they grew their interconnected networks with one another.

 

Through a combination of the skills I’ve learned in both of my majors, Broadcast & Digital Journalism and Narrative Studies, I hope to give names and life stories to those who continue to do their work quietly, but are so much more than just their working hands. Not many may have known that these women, currently living in poverty, ran businesses and were nurses and accountants. That these women, full of hope, completely changed the trajectory of their children’s lives.