Talk examines the servant-employer relationship

Talk examines the servant-employer relationship

BY DANA BENSON
Rice News Staff

Journalist Alma
Guillermoprieto has written numerous articles, but none
of them received quite the same reaction as her 1999 article
about her “servant problems.”

“Normally
I write about Latin America and social reality, but I’ve
rarely gotten myself embroiled in so much controversy as
when I decided to write about a very intimate part of the
Latin American experience, which is the relationship between
servants and their employers,” she explained in her
Nov. 13 President’s Lecture Series talk.

“That relationship
is what I’m still interested in examining tonight because
in this country the servant-employer relationship is a metaphor
for the way the United States is changing and the directions
family life and domestic arrangements are changing, which
are in so many ways directions we find deeply troubling.”

Guillermoprieto
was the second speaker in the 2000-2001 President’s
Lecture Series. Her talk, “The Servant Text,”
was the series’ annual Dominique de Menil Lecture.

First published
in Spanish, her article about her servants ran in English
six months ago in the New Yorker, where Guillermoprieto
is a staff writer.

The article,
which details her experiences with two maids, was judged
by one of her friends in Mexico City as charming and funny
while another friend who was working on the English translation
begged her not to let it run, she said. Guillermoprieto
suggested that people in the United States do not want to
talk about domestic help because it involves issues such
as exploitation, wages, gender discrimination, powerlessness
and labor relationships.

In Latin America,
Guillermoprieto said, people hire servants “with a
clear conscience because, like me, they know that there
are thousands of needy women out there, millions of them,1.5
million in Mexico alone.

“Nice people
like me make a point of paying them well and treating them
right because this is the way the world works if you’re
Latin American and because poverty alters the order of the
moral issues. But the United States is a country that takes
its equalitarian beginnings very seriously. It is predicated
on the notion that all men and women are created equal and
that equality begins at home.”

In the United
States today, though, more and more couples are considering
hiring a household servant. One reason is the increasing
wealth among the top 10 percent of the population coupled
with a tidal wave of migration from Latin American countries.
Modern technology also is a contributing factor, Guillermoprieto
said, with parents feeling like they don’t have time
for family meals or quality time with their children because
“they’re always being pushed to answer the phone,
the cell phone, the beeper, send off a fax or respond to
another e-mail.”

Women in the
United States, Guillermoprieto said, are left with the question “Can we do it all,” but at the same time they
don’t want to take the burden of domesticity off their
own shoulders and dump it on the backs of other women.

Women in the
United States and Europe face another problem: the decline
of the family network. “What urban couples raising
their children alone in this country are trying to accomplish
is something that until relatively early in the 20th century
was achieved by an entire family network,” she said.

Guillermoprieto
showed a short video of interviews with domestic servants
in Latin America, most of whom were recruited from provinces
where unemployment is high and where women can be found
to work for as little as $8 per month plus room and board.

Most of the
women were content with their situations, likely because
of Latin American “fatalism,” she explained. Guillermoprieto
pointed out, however, that there is no connection between
the wages they are paid and the services they provide.