Tlazolteotl: ‘The Filth Deity’ and the sexualization of paid domestic workers in Mexico

Abstract

This article presents a case study of the sexualization of paid domestic workers in the city of Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. The author argues that the sexualization of workers is linked to historical concerns around purity and contamination. The article looks at the figure of Tlazolteotl, a pre-Hispanic goddess patroness of dust, filth and promiscuous women. It identifies the way colonial acts of translation might have informed concerns, meanings and practices that link ideas of dirt, sexuality and morality. The article explores experiences of sexual harassment among domestic workers that were interviewed and the role of female employers on the reproduction of ideas that define workers’ sexualities as ‘deviant’ and potentially contaminating.

Keywords

Dirt domestic work Mexico sexuality

According to a recent national survey, one in three domestic workers in Mexico perceived the main problem with their occupation to be abuse, mistreatment and humiliation in the workplace (ENADIS, 2010). Among the international literature there is ample evidence of a high incidence of sexual harassment in the lived experiences of paid domestic workers (see Anderson, 2000; Chang, 2000; Colen, 1989, Constable, 1996). In Mexico and Latin America the extent of the problem is still unknown as the issue of paid domestic work is still a highly neglected subject in academic and grey literature (For exceptions see Blofield, 2012; Chaney and García Castro, 1989; Durin, 2008; Goldsmith, 1993).

Drawing from qualitative research done during 2008 in the state of Guanajuato, Irapuato, Mexico, this article looks at the sexualization of domestic workers in Mexico and explores notions, discourses and practices that work to reproduce ideas of workers’ sexuality as ‘deviant’. Ten unstructured interviews were conducted with the participation of domestic workers and six with female employers. In addition, two group interviews inform this study, one with seven domestic workers and the other involving three female employers. Interviews were complemented with participant observations at domestic workers’ community and at middle-class children’s parties, at which domestic workers usually accompany female employers.

The next section explores the figure of a pre-Hispanic goodness, Tlazolteotl or the ‘Filth Deity’. It suggests that colonial interpretations and appropriations of notions that link dirt to morality and sin might still work to reproduce ideas that inform the sexualization of those considered as contaminating.

After that, the subsequent section explores workers’ experiences around sexual harassments and the strategies that women use to resist the violence involved. It is argued that sexual harassment works to inscribe shame onto the workers’ bodies and by doing so justifies their exploitation. The article then goes on to analyse the role of female employers on the reproduction of ideas that define the workers’ sexuality as deviant. The article concludes that the sexualization of domestic workers in Mexico must be seen not as an individual but rather as a group fantasy; one that works to maintain the status quo and the privilege of upper- and middle-class employers.

Tlazolteotl: Pollution and sexuality in pre-Hispanic Mexico

In his book Sex and Race in Latin America Peter Wade (2010: 53) argues that the ‘elective affinity’ between sex and race could not be explained solely as an effect of the management of power and difference without entailing ‘some aspects of the workings of desire’. Wade (2010: 53) calls to reconcile psychoanalysis and anthropology because of its explanatory power when looking into self-formation and Otherness, he argues:

In a situation of social hierarchy, the categories that are defined as subordinate and inferior (women, working classes, non-whites) come to occupy the position of other and become the subject of ambivalent emotions which are deeply entangled with sexuality.

Colonial studies have had an ambivalent relation with psychoanalysis since many have often implicitly subscribed to Freudian theories and ‘the psychodynamics of empire’ (Stoler, 1995). The power of these theories to explain the sexualization of racialized women has been linked to the way reproductive work is socially allocated. Often racialized women in domestic and care work, become ‘second mothers’ of middle-class children. Thus, their reproductive work mediates processes of self-formation and the reproduction of sexualized Otherness (Wade, 2010; Walton, 1995). Freud’s own theory of self-formation is founded upon his own childhood relationship with a nanny who was replaced by a mother figure (McClintock, 1995). However, the exclusion of women in domestic work could also be linked to the work they do. As Cox argues (2006: 7), in this sector the status of worker and work are inseparable as it would be impossible to change the status of the worker ‘without challenging deep-stated feelings about dirt’.

Social preoccupations over dirt and contamination are inherently contextual (Douglas, 1966). In her book, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (1989), Burkhart explores concepts of purity and pollution in Nahuas’ culture. She looks at the moral discourses around the concept of dirt – tlazolli – and its connection with Tlazolteotl, a deity of Huaxtec origin that was eventually adopted by the Aztec empire (Cabada Izquierdo, 1992). This goddess was the patroness of dust and filth but also of adulterers and promiscuous women. For this reason Spanish missionaries such as de Sahagún and Torquemada described her as ‘another Venus’ (de Sahagún, 1999) and asked ‘what can she be but a dirty, filthy and stained goddess?’ (Burkhart, 1989: 93).

The figure of Tlazolteotl was represented by a woman carrying a broom as a symbol of dirt – tlazolli – and its removal, and wore unspun cotton in her headdress; something that carried a sexual connotation because of its association with spinning and weaving (McCafferty and McCafferty, 1991). Tlazolteotl represented the embodiment of complex symbols of dirt, sexuality and fertility and she had the power to provoke lust but also to forgive the moral faults that came with it (Burkhart, 1989; Cabada Izquierdo, 1992). Tlazolteotl was also a deity to be feared, one of the personifications of tlazolli-dirt was the Cuitlapanton – a naked female figure that would creep along the ground hunting people near refuse deposits and places where people urinated; causing death to anyone who saw her. As Burkhart (1989: 95) suggests, tlazolli carried more than one meaning and the effects of her powers were many:

Death, cosmic disturbance, filth, and immorality were intermingled in such a way that harmful forces, once unleashed could affect anyone or anything in their path. Brooms had to be kept outside the house and away from children because of the tlazolli they carried; a man could seduce an unwilling woman if he collected the straws that fell from her broom when she swept.

Nahua’s notions of dirt and morality preceded colonial idiosyncrasies and they were eventually transformed by Spanish missionaries to facilitate Christian education. Burkhart argues that missionaries’ interpretations of the tlazolli complex ignored crucial differences between Nahua and Christian thought. For instance, Christianity understood the body and the soul as coming from two separate domains while the Nahuas understood these as parts of a single reality (Burkhart, 1989).

Most of what we know about pre-Hispanic ideas of sexuality is the production of (male) Spanish conquerors and friars whose interpretations and translations were colonizing acts, often biased and filtered by their own structures of thought. As Young (1995: 170) suggests, the colonial enterprise required the cultural space of indigenous societies to be ‘disrupted, dissolved and then reinscribed according to the needs of the apparatus of the occupying power’. Peter Sigal (2007) looks at cross-dressing individuals and gender inversions in Nahua’s culture at the time of the Spanish conquest. For Sigal, colonial misinterpretations worked to promote particular psychological notions that differentiated normalcy from perversion and to create sexual identities that did not have any place in Nahua’s discourse. It is possible to suggest that colonial misinterpretations of pre-Hispanic ideas of dirt and sexuality still inform the lived experiences of women whose daily job is to clean the dirt of others. Notions that linked sex and dirt were not a colonial invention but were transformed to absorb race into the equation. Using Collins’s (1994) terms, sexuality might have worked to glue intersecting oppressions together.

Wolkowitz (2007: 16) compares domestic labour and prostitution and argues that these occupations are both considered as ‘dirty works’ since they entail people ‘whose paid work involves contact with disgusting substances’. For Wolkowitz,

[i]t makes it possible to consider similarities between sex work and paid domestic labour, for instance, wherein some employers may also seek ‘a person who is not a person’ to do work they consider too dirty or humiliating to do themselves, that is where the connections between dirt, dirty work and power are also central to the work relationship. (Wolkowitz (2007: 23)

Wolkowitz is right to highlight the link between dirt, dirty work and power, however, she seems to overlook an important element, that is, the level of intimacy that both works require. The relevance of this element lies in the way proximity of differentiated selves has been shown to be a core element of class and racial formations (Foucault, 1999; Stoler, 1995). This is especially relevant when looking at paid domestic workers in Latin America. If, as Douglas (1966: 184) states, ‘purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise’ then mestizaje, as a lived experience, could be seen as an arena where people still negotiate belonging through racist practices that remain invisible through the myth (and social anxiety) of mixture (Moreno Figueroa, 2010).

Mestizaje in Mexico has been generally understood as a process of cultural and biological miscegenation between Spaniards and Indians (Wade, 2005).¹ Many have argued that mestizaje has historically privileged individuals’ progressive whiteness (Appelbaum et al., 2003; Gall, 2004; Stutzman, 1981). Peter Wade (2005: 240) argues that mestizaje, in lived experience, entails the dynamics of homogenization and differentiation that are lived simultaneously. The idea of ‘progression’ and the dynamic movement from one ‘racial origin’ to another has important implications for those imagined as in-between those imagined origins.

Jelke Boesten (2008: 206) looks into the sexual violence of women in Peru during the internal conflict of the 1980s and illustrates how concerns over transgressions of order were deeply entangled with sexuality. She shows that women that were considered cholas were more sexualized (and abused) than indigenous and white women since their image trespassed ethnic and spatial boundaries. As indigenous women were out of the private realm of ethnic communities and entered into the public realm of the city they were imagined as dirty/ambiguous and sexually available. Boesten argues that the intersection of gender, class and race seemed to ‘legitimise’ sexual violence especially among women that were considered ‘cholas’ (my emphasis). As Weismantel (2001: 90) argues, the racial identity of the Chola is often described by academic literature as ‘an Indian who approaches – but never achieves – whiteness.’

Cholas are regarded as synonyms of ‘servants’ in some parts of Central America (Flores Galindo, 1999). Similarly, in Mexico domestic workers have been historically imagined as racialized bodies ‘but not so ‘Other’ as to be inaccessible’ as indigenous woman are perceived to be (López, 2002: 300). This idea of domestic workers as ‘white but not quite’ might be deeply linked to their sexualization. A colonial saying regarding the place of women according to the caste system stated: ‘the black woman for cleaning, the mulatto woman for bedding and the white woman for marrying’ (Gutiérrez Chong, 2008: 530). The woman that is particularly sexualized is that placed as in-between the two racial origins that are imagined as dichotomous. This might be partly explained by the way our ideas of contamination also express symbolic systems of thought where cherished social classifications are maintained by constant rituals of separation (Douglas, 1966).

What has been suggested here is that the sexualization of paid domestic workers in Mexico might be deeply linked to notions around dirt, morality and sin and with broader concerns over the permeability of the individual and the social body. As the following section demonstrates, the sexualization of paid domestic workers in Mexico is not only a product of an individual fantasy but instead the ‘libidinal unconscious of political economy’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972 cited in Young, 1995: 160) whereby the exploitation of some women is maintained with the complicity of the state and the media.

‘You better not tell my mother!’ Domestic workers’ experiences of sexual harassment

Wives and servants have often been seen as the antagonistic pair par excellence where a woman draws her identity from her opposite and is divided into ‘pure/dirty’ ‘Madonna/whore’ and so on (Anderson, 2000; Davidoff, 1974). The problem with this argument is that it might paradoxically work to fix the identities of women (workers); denying them any form of agency in their highly scripted biographies (Mohanty Talpade, 1991). However, highlighting such antagonism helps to visualize some aspects of gender contradiction, especially between two women whose domestic and reproductive work are performed for the benefit of the same man and children and therefore might be perceived as overlapping. A domestic worker interviewed describes how she sometimes feels as if she is being asked to literally replace the female employer as a mother and wife,

I said to myself, if I was like them [female employers] I would have ten children, why not? With three muchachas to look after them, to do the housework, to do the laundry, to iron, everything short of saying ‘sleep with my husband’ … you end up being the mother of the children.

As Ann Stoler (1995) suggests, racial thinking was produced not to confront distant others but to manage intimacy with them. Thus, the more ambiguous the roles of the worker and the wife, the more rituals of separation are needed to reaffirm bodily boundaries. Amelia is a 25-year-old domestic worker; she described the consequences of the Mistress’s jealousy as she was not allowed to stay at home alone with the Master and was obliged to accompany the female employer everywhere she went. This meant that the worker had to work overtime to finish the housework of the day.

The sexualization of domestic workers in Mexico happens within a social context of institutionalized violence against women. According to a recent national survey of household dynamics (ENDIREH, 2011), up to 46% of women in Mexico suffered from some form of violence at the hands of their partners. This context is aggravated by the reluctance of legislators to acknowledge women’s rights at home. For example, it was not until the year 2005 that the Supreme Court in Mexico decreed rape within marriage to be a crime and it was not until 2007 that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa passed the first law proclaiming women’s right to a life free from violence. Guanajuato, the site of the study, was the only state in the country that refused to ratify the law. In 2010, after numerous social protests and a recommendation from the United Nations, the state approved the enactment of the law that, in theory, protects women from domestic violence.

Femicides in Mexico illustrate the way some women are more vulnerable to sexual and physical violence than others. In the northern city of Ciudad Juárez the femicide of more than 1000 women since 1993 has had race, class and age-related overtones. For instance, while doing political activism and research, Julia Monárrez Fragoso (2002: 6) was assured that she was safe as she didn’t have the profile of the victim: ‘you are not young, you are not seventeen years old and you are not dark’. This is the social context that mediates the sexualization of domestic workers, a context that makes them particularly vulnerable due to the absence of state regulation. A recent national survey on discrimination states that up to 12.2% of workers are not allowed to leave the house of an employer when they need to, 37.9% cannot use the telephone at their workplace and up to 44.7% of workers do not have a fixed working schedule (ENADIS, 2010). The appalling working conditions that many domestic workers endure are aggravated by the absence of effective labour legislation on the rights of paid domestic workers in Mexico. For instance, the Federal Labour Law defines a domestic worker as a person who ‘provides cleaning services, assistance and other [tasks/services] that are inherent to a household, a person or family’ (Ley Federal del Trabajo, Capítulo XIII, 1997). Under this definition the law implicitly allows the employer to define what tasks and services are inherent to his/her needs. As this article shows, sexual services are in some cases demanded by employers. In Mexico, labour conditions for domestic workers have not improved; to the contrary, over time the state has reduced its commitment to domestic workers in comparison to the total working population (Blofield, 2012).

States’ omissions are deeply interwoven with the media’s portrayal of workers as sexually deviant. Numerous soap operas, variety and comedy programmes in Mexico constantly depict domestic workers as sexually available. Flora Cornelia Butler (1989) looks at the representation of domestic workers in Latin American photo stories of the 1980s and argues that workers are often portrayed as sexually deviant or as passive victims. Similarly, popular films and classic novels from the Mexican counterculture of the 1960s, such as José Agustín’s De Perfil (2007 [1966]) and José Emilio Pacheco’s novel Batallas en el Desierto (2001 [1981]), vividly expose the sexualization of workers by their Master and the young man of the house. Fed by the media’s representation of workers as sexually available, experiences like the one described by interviewee Amelia are not only socially tolerated but also encouraged:

He was eleven or twelve. I was two years older than him … I was going up the stairs and then he pinned me against the wall, I mean, I couldn’t even move … he wanted to grab me and I said ‘Don’t, you’ll see, I will tell your mother’ and he said ‘No, she is not going to believe you’. Sometimes I used to get away and would run down the stairs and one day the mistress saw me running and asked me ‘What is the matter with you?’ and he would threaten me ‘You’d better not tell my mother’, It wasn’t just the one time, there were many times.

As this account shows, the domestic worker is not to be trusted ‘she is not going to believe you’. The meaning and experience of ‘trust’ is deeply linked to a processes of inclusion/exclusion and the negotiation of membership (Sztompka, 1999). The physical and symbolic violence of this account manifests the intergenerational transference of symbolic power from parents to the children of the house. Pierre Bourdieu (1991: 164) defines as symbolic power that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subjected to it or even that they themselves exercise it’. Even if parents are unaware of the incident, both the child and the worker seem assured that the mother would never believe such an accusation.

The sexualization of this occupation is fed by popular culture and media portrayals of domestic workers as sexually deviant (Durin and Vázquez, 2013). Numerous popular films and soap operas such as Maria Isabel (1968) and Anoche Soñé Contigo (1992) are also illustrative of the way the sexuality of workers is often portrayed as ‘wild’ or ‘deviant’. These ideas make experiences like the one described by Susana not only socially tolerated but also encouraged. Susana was only 16 years old when she experienced the violence of sexual harassment,

I was cooking and washing dishes and his son tried to abuse me and I threatened him with a knife, I resisted, I was really scared and never went back because I was afraid. I was washing the dishes and he came to me, he put his hand like this [around her waist] and then he said ‘has anyone ever told you that you are very pretty? And I said ‘yes, but get off of me!’ and then he grabbed me and I was very angry and I said ‘get off of me, get off of me or I will tell your father!’ … [days later] the Master called me and he paid me for the week. But he was very cynical, shameless. Instead of saying ‘I am so sorry’ nothing, he was smiling, he didn’t say anything to me. Maybe he did it on purpose so that he wouldn’t have to give me a Christmas bonus.

Susana, like many other workers, neither denounced the aggressor to the authorities nor told any close relative or friend about the incident because of a sense of shame. As Nussbaum argues (2006) humiliation is about publicly exposing someone to shame and marking the subject as low status. By inscribing shame onto the workers’ bodies their labour conditions can be conveniently ignored and the exploitation maintained. As this account shows, many domestic workers are forced to leave a job because of sexual harassment and this entails a financial burden for themselves and their families. It seems that part of the occupation is to find a ‘good’ home to work in by learning to identify potential aggressors. As Rose’s description of her ‘journey’ to find the ‘right’ job shows, women’s right to work is often constrained by sexual harassment,

I was twelve or thirteen years old, the Señora was very good but her brother lived with her and he tried to abuse me and I got very very scared and I left and never came back … And then I worked for a Señora as a live-in worker, I was about 15 years old and then I didn’t want to work there because the Señor was always going about around the house in trousers and I was afraid, I was ashamed; instead of him being ashamed I felt ashamed! And then, after that I worked in another neighborhood and the Señor would stay at home sometimes. But I left, I became nervous because the Señor would constantly pick me around my waist and would say things like ‘did I scare you little Rose?’ so I left.

As Lisa Adkins (1995) argues, sexual harassment is not an outcome of a gender division of labour but it is instead involved in its production. However, the gender division of housework is, in its paid form, further subdivided by race and class (Glenn, 1994). During a group interview, Elena, a 37-year-old domestic worker, describes how, on the first night of her first job as a domestic worker she was approached by her male employer, who offered her to ‘save’ her family in exchange for sexual favours,

It was my first job and my worst experience. I started as a live-in and the woman that worked there before advised me to ask a room with a lock, so I did. He called me into the living room, he started to ask me about my family, how my parents were and what they did and then he said: ‘Wouldn’t you like to sleep with me? I am alone’. And I said ‘no’ and I didn’t know what to do. I prayed to God to help me remember my cousin’s phone number and then I called her crying and asked her to pick me up. I was 18 years old.

They [employers] see us coming from the ranch and think ‘this poor girl’, he actually told me ‘Don’t worry, I would help you and I would give you money for your family’. If I had been another type of woman I would have accepted because my family was in great financial need, I was the oldest and the only one working. I asked myself how many girls in my position actually accept because of need.

This section has looked into domestic workers’ experiences of sexual harassment by male employers and younger male members of the house. It has exposed the social context that informs the sexualization of women in Mexico and how institutional violence affects women differently. The sexualization of paid domestic workers involves state policies and the media. Cases of sexual harassment or abuse are not merely the result of individual or isolated experiences. As Deleuze and Guattari (1972 cited in Young, 1995: 168) argue, ‘desire is a social rather than an individual product; it permeates the infrastructure of society’. The next section looks into female employers’ roles in the sexualization of domestic workers and the continuous reaffirmation of bodily margins that work to maintain unchallenged the status quo and the exploitation of working-class women.

‘There is no way to help them, as women they don’t value themselves’: Female employers, gender contradiction and deviant sexualities

There is ample literature on the role of white women in the exploitation and mistreatment of domestic workers (Anderson 2000; Davidoff, 1974; Kwok Pui-lan, 2002; Rollins, 1985; Stoler, 1995). In the case of paid domestic work in Mexico such exploitation often entails the reproduction of ideas that link the workers’ imagined ‘race’ with a supposedly ‘deviant’ sexuality. The following account illustrates how, through ideas that link morality with pollution, female employers reaffirm individual and national margins:

If you find yourself a wild girl, like many of them are out there in the ranch, a lot of them now pick up things from people who’ve gone to the US then come back. They come back with addictions and gang tricks, and all that stuff spreads [around]. I have to scold her when she tells me things like she got in a car with young married men.

The female employer makes a spatial reference to the workers’ world: wild and rural. The term ‘wild’ carries a sexual connotation that throughout history has been associated with racial difference (Collins, 2004). Similarly, as Alonso (2004: 469) suggests, ‘space is a boundary marker of ethnoracial identity in Mexico. The South and the rural are coded as “Indian,” whereas the North and the urban are coded as “Mexican.”’ This account illustrates the way ideas around sexuality and morality are shaped by concerns regarding pollution. As the employer suggests, immorality has an outside source, and like dirt, it ‘spreads’ throughout the workers’ community and ultimately into the workers’ body. As the worker is contaminated, bodily margins are deployed to avoid transgressions of order.

In the foregoing account, the imagined deviance of the worker and her community also demarcates national boundaries and this might be linked to the way America’s society is perceived as immoral (DeFleur and DeFleur, 2003). Guanajuato has the highest number of international immigrants in the country (INEGI, 2010). The employer dismisses the emotional and financial burden that emigration represents for the women left behind, their families and communities (Durand and Massey, 2004). Instead, she engages with discourses that define those who have transgressed national boundaries as dangerous. Female employers often engage in transforming class problems into moral ones, conveniently ignoring their own role in the reproduction of a status quo that allows the exploitation of workers. For Skeggs (1997: 44), a concern with sexuality has historically served to provide the framework for considering the ‘problem’ of the working class as one of morality rather than class conflict:

By transferring the debate from one of revolutionary threat onto questions of familial and moral responsibility the structural and social relations of class conflict could conveniently be ignored and attention could be shifted onto specific aspects of working-class organisation.

Collignon Goribar et al., (2010) look at Love, Sexuality and Youth in Mexico during the XX Century. The authors show how poverty and lack of education were equated to moral degeneration and this shaped the way domestic workers were perceived. For instance, in 1908, a book on prostitution affirmed that most servants in Mexico City were also the prostitutes of their Masters ‘where it was very probable they developed the practice of vice that led them to the brothels’ (Collignon Goribar et al., 2010: 105). As the following account shows, class and racial conflicts are still described through a language of morality and backwardness,

Their situation is very difficult but there is no way to help them. In cultural terms they are shockingly backward: they don’t value themselves as women. They are very advanced for their age with fashions like tattoos and piercing. Mine had a tongue piercing and I said to her ‘In my house you have to take it out because my children don’t have any and I don’t want them to have any!

However much they see of real life, living with their boyfriend, the boyfriend getting them pregnant and after … and I think, ‘It’s amazing! Generation after generation and they don’t learn!’ The one I have now is 16 and my daughter is 15, and of course the maid looks older and I think, ‘Imagine my daughter doing all the work she does!’ I can’t get my head around it. She talks non-stop … tells me everything about her life, and I’m constantly going on at her.

When talking about a supposedly generational cycle of sexual deviance, the employer dismisses the fact that Guanajuato has one of the poorest levels of sexual education in the country² and instead concludes that the problem is a moral one where ‘they don’t value themselves as women’ and are unable to learn from experience. The employer’s fear regarding the worker’s body piercing illustrates how moral concerns over the potential contamination of children are not confined to sexual transgressions but involve other ‘cultural longings’ (Stoler, 1995) that constitute racial and classed selves in Mexico.

The perceived need to ‘educate’ workers (the way you educate a child) seems to contradict the view of their sexuality as irremediably deviant. Bhabha (1983: 34) notes that to depict the colonial Other as the embodiment of a rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child is to dramatize ‘a separation – between the races, cultures, histories, within histories – a separation between before and after that repeats obsessively the mythical moment of disjunction.’ In the foregoing account, the distance between the employer’s daughter and the worker is assured by such disjunction. Employers often scold workers and advise them on ‘good’ moral values, however, scolding is not a neutral exercise as it involves power relations. The following quotation is the account of a female employer who wavers between guilt, fear and pride when reflecting on a past experience with a child worker:

The worst experience with her is that I felt guilty because she was of a very young age [the worker was 12 years old] and I felt bad because she worked a lot … She used palabras de rancho (rural expressions); she used to say ‘se me afigura una víbora’ (I see snakes) and I thought, ‘How scary this girl is!’ and I think it was a reflection of all she lived through. Her father was a drunk; he would rape her mother in front of them, she never said that to me but I think that was the case … I started to be afraid of her because I would sometimes go out and leave her with my sleeping baby and I used to think, ‘She is going to do something to him!’ I tried to be very patient with her because she had never worked before and she asked me to give her work. But she stayed with me for a long time.

The exploitation of young workers is justified by the ‘need’ of the child/worker to be morally educated, the virtuousness of a patient employer is highlighted as well as her willingness to ‘save’ the worker in spite of the potential threat that the child represents. Kwok Pui-Lan (2002: 64) explores how ‘saving brown women’ was used to hide the violence and brutality of colonialism. She argues that:

Under the pretext of saving brown women, colonial desire and imperialistic advances have been masked and collectively reconstituted in a blatant reversal as ‘social mission’. The perceived backwardness, illiteracy, and promiscuity of native women were contrasted with the Victorian ideals of womanhood, such as education, hygiene and sexual restraint.

In the previous account, the employer engages in a detailed representation of the worker’s world as poor, rural and immoral just after she states feelings of guilt for employing a child to do a highly demanding job. Child labour is common in Mexico and some estimates suggest that the majority of domestic workers enter the occupation at between 12 and 14 years of age (La Jornada, 2010). This data coincides with the average age that the workers interviewed reported as their age of entry into the occupation and it also coincides with female employers’ accounts. One of the employers interviewed talked about her experience with another child worker:

When I had my first baby, a boy, I hired a chamaquita (little girl) that was 12 years old to help me with the boy while I did housework. One day I found her in the hammock with the boy and I saw that she was caressing the baby on his stomach, but it was his penis! She was caressing his penis! … After that I was always mistrustful every time I had a new servant. I was always alert; I never liked to leave my children with them.

This account closely resembles Freud’s observations of the mother/nurse as a seducer: ‘it is well known that unscrupulous nurses put crying children to sleep by stroking their genitals’ (McClures Magazine, 1899 in McClintock, 1995: 85). Stoler (1995) shows how discourses on children’s sexuality were one of the main sites where the bourgeoisie defined its interests, racial hierarchies were reaffirmed and national identities formed. As the foregoing account shows, this experience fed the employer’s perception of domestic workers as threats, conveniently ignoring the issue of child labour.³ In the following account an employer talks about a 19-year-old worker who had what the employer believed was a self-induced abortion. The employer found the ‘service room’ full of blood,

The neighbour told me that she drank some kind of tea because she was pregnant but she was going to go off with another boyfriend that wasn’t the father of the child … she is one of those who run off with men and that [In Mexico, women that are not married by the Roman Church are said to be ‘stolen’ or ‘taken’ by the male partner].

Women have been historically defined as polluted because of bodily fluids and imagined permeability of their bodies (Lamb, 2005; Nussbaum, 2006). As this account shows, bodily fluids (in this case blood) seem to be linked to notions about the worker’s sexuality, morality and lack of caring skills. As the employer later states: ‘She was very good with the children, very good … we would never have thought it’. In the state of Guanajuato abortion is heavily penalized and socially stigmatized. During the last 10 years more than 40 women have been prosecuted for abortion and some of these women have been sentenced to up to 30 years in prison (El Universal, 2010a). According to the last national survey on employment (INEGI: ENOE, 2011) up to 96.6% of domestic workers have no access to any kind of health services and this might have important implications for health-related problems associated with unsafe abortion procedures (Juarez et al., 2008).

The employer was forced to deal with the demystification of workers’ imagined or expected asexuality. For Collins (2009), ‘the mammy image is one of an asexual woman, a surrogate mother in blackface devoted to the development of a white family’. Following a moral logic that links ‘good’ caring with asexuality, the more deviant the sexual behaviour of a worker, the more dangerous the perceived transgression of order becomes. In the following account, a domestic worker shows not only an active sexuality but one with a ‘degree of deviance’ that automatically classed her as a threat to the child and as a potential thief. In this case the employer found her female worker with another woman in the service room and she fired her. According to the employer, both women were fully clothed but were lying in bed one hugging the other.

I am not judgmental; she can go out with whoever she wants to go out with, I have no problem with that, although I would think twice leaving my baby girl with her. Anyway, I was frozen and I told her ‘I don’t want you to get someone (raro) weirdo in my house again’ [she laughs and hesitates] ‘weirdo’ that’s an ugly word. No, I actually said ‘stranger’ in my house. And I left and when I went back to work that day my boss told me ‘how do you leave two women there, you might go back to your house and find it empty!’

From the beginning of the working relationship, the employer thought that the worker looked masculine, so she decided to hire the worker but keep her under observation. Beverly Skeggs (1997: 102) argues that for working-class women, femininity is never a given: ‘appearing to be is different from appearing as; there is a fine line between embodying and displaying dispositions’. The seeming oscillation between judging or not the worker’s sexuality is framed by the fear of contamination from worker to child. Studies have linked the stigmatization of particular groups (i.e. gays and prostitutes) to their association with disease and contamination (Andersson, 2007; Janes, 2007). As moral discourses are deeply entangled with ideas of purity the worker’s imagined ‘deviant’ sexuality seems to define her as a threat to the moral and even the physical integrity of the home. For Collins (2009), racism and heterosexism both share a common set of practices that are designed to discipline the population into accepting the status quo.

In the context of paid domestic work in Mexico, the social and moral order that the sexualization of workers maintains justifies the exploitation of millions of women for the benefit of the privileged classes. However, efforts have been made to resist the subordination of women in this occupation. For instance, organizations that started as church initiatives during the 1950s to provide housing to indigenous immigrant women in the city were able to transform into job centers and advocacy groups (Goldsmith, 1993). Today, Colectivo Atabal and the Centro de Ayuda a la Trabajadora Doméstica (CATDA) are two of the most important advocacy groups in the country although they have not yet been allowed to form a union and their attempts to reform the Labour Code regarding workers’ rights have been hampered by other Labour Unions. During the last decade, both organizations, along with some left-wing deputies and legislators from the right party, have unsuccessfully attempted to reform the Labour Code (Blofield, 2012). The absence of a real political commitment has constantly hindered the improvement of the labour conditions of paid domestic workers in Mexico, leaving millions of women workers vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

Conclusion

Psychoanalytic theories offer interesting ways to explain the sexualization of paid domestic workers in Mexico as this process occurs within a social context of racial hierarchy and institutionalized violence against women. Roger Bastide (1972: 187) was right to suggest that ‘the question race always provoked the answer sex’. However, as the figure of Tlazolteolt and the tlazolli (dirt) complex suggest, the question sex has also provoked the answer dirt and in the case of paid domestic work the symbolism of dirt and pollution should not be dismissed.

Female employers’ involvement in the reproduction of workers’ sexuality as ‘deviant’ could be understood as another ritual of separation that works to mark distance and differentiate the ambiguous roles of both women within the house. The sexualization of workers is part of various strategies deployed for the protection of cherished classifications. This article argues that a social context of institutionalized violence against women informs the sexualization of domestic workers and that such violence affects women differently depending on the particular set of social hierarchies in which women are enmeshed.

Men as young as 12 years old are involved in the sexual harassment of workers, this shows that there is an implicit transference of symbolic power from parents to children and that through such process racial, gender and class hierarchies are reproduced. The sexualization of workers is also informed by ideas that define workers’ bodies and their communities as contaminating and transform class conflicts into moral ones. Employers seem to justify exploitation by establishing a link between the supposedly ‘deviant’ sexuality of workers with an imagined ‘need’ to ‘save’ them.

Finally, women’s narratives illustrate how good caring skills seem to be deeply linked to images of workers’ bodies as asexual. Thus, the more deviant the sexual behavior of a worker is seen the more dangerous the perceived transgression of order becomes. Just as racism and heterosexism, the sexualization of workers entails a set of practices designed to maintain and reproduce the status quo regarding the exploitation of women in this occupation. The sexualization of domestic workers is not only about men’s appropriation of the workers’ bodies or female employers’ self affirmation but also a question of a collective construction that involves the complicity of other institutions such as the media and the state and even the educational system. Thus, the collective sexualization of domestic workers maintains the status quo of a social, racial and a political order from which the middle classes benefit significantly. After all, female employers’ surveillance of the workers’ sexuality is deeply entangled with concerns over ambiguity and the permeability of the individual and the social body.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Brian Heaphy, Colette Fagan, Bridget Byrne, Peter Wade and Bethan Harries for their invaluable comments and guidelines throughout the writing of this article. I am ever so grateful to the women that shared their experiences with me. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions.

Funding

This research is part of a PhD project on women and paid domestic work in Mexico at the University of Manchester. I would like to thank the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) for the scholarship to carry out this research project.

Notes

Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is a lecturer at the Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Manchester University, and has published on the areas of work–life balance, and the sociology of food in the context of paid domestic work in Mexico. Her research interests include paid domestic work, the sociology of food, sexuality and motherhood in Mexico, mestizaje, and social work.

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