As a Latina, I grew up hearing that house work was a woman's responsibility. I had to constantly fight the cultural expectation of taking on all of the work and pushed back so that my brothers also contributed to our household. Now, as a young professional who balances a full-time job and school work, it's difficult for me to keep my own space clean and orderly. I don’t like how consistently it needs to be done and how time consuming it all is. It’s especially overwhelming after it piles up and everything becomes a mess; it takes eons to clean and it completely throws me off.
Though, I do love how the feeling when everything is neat and orderly. There’s a big difference in how clear my state of mind is based on the state of my room. Though I value greatly the contribution that domestic worker adds to my quality of life, I know many others do not.
Society rarely values women’s contributions to anything; our labor is devalued, considered easy or not requiring skill and attention. The majority of women don’t get paid to do care for their own households, it’s an invisible burden that most don’t acknowledge.
In my role as the Domestic Worker Organizer for the Miami Workers Center, I’ve been working diligently to raise dignity, standards, and pay for domestic workers. I would like people to know that society owes its success to domestic workers and that they deserve to work in conditions that recognize and respect their importance.