Mucamas, Maids or Domestic: synonyms of a single history of exclusion.
“Xenophon writes: People who engage in manual labor are never elevated to high positions and it is reasonable. Mostly condemned to be seated all day, some of them even enduring a continuous fire, they cannot fail to have their bodies altered and it is very difficult that the spirit does not resent it. “(PAUL LAFARGUE, Right to Laziness, LCC, electronic publication)
In this brief article we chose to deal with genealogy, so to speak, domestic work, we could have chosen any other function and / or assignment considered residual within the capitalist society, where wages and status are equally residual; this is the case of street sweepers [1], bricklayers, servants, cold buoys, and the full range of professions whose specialization and degree of proficiency are minimally required, that is, they are considered activities of a rudimentary nature, where cognitive ability would not be so relevant , compared to other areas, conspicuous positions whose accreditation would be linked to the intelligence of the individual and for his ability to perform complex tasks, unintelligible for insipients.
These simplistic premises seek to legitimize the gradations and the social division of labor, whoever says that Fordism had died, that the difference between the office and the factory floor had been dissolved by methodologies and paradigms of inclusion and co-participation, but the reality that escapes the theories of great administrators, shows that specialization and functional segregation in contemporary capitalist society has inexorably offended people, whose opportunities offered them a limited existential field, history shows that reality is multiple, that is, rich and poor; Catholics and Protestants; young and old, even being in the same historical time, decode their reality and circumscribe it in a peculiar way, thus building an identity, their interface with the world, therefore, much of what people are, or will become, will depend on the cultural and / or existential apparatus made available to them. In other words, what would become of the geniuses of our time if they were not equipped with the knowledge that gave them the basis for their discoveries, it would be like waiting for an Xingu Indian to build an atomic bomb, in the first place, their cultural framework would not conceive of such an apparatus , there would be no logic, no raw materials, no previous knowledge, in short, it is as some anthropologists say:“We have a biological apparatus prepared to live a thousand lives” , depending, of course, on which one we are awarded.
From the above, we can define that the ambiguities of professional activities and their corollary of satisfaction or marginalization come from artificial inequalities, historically delimited conventions, whose roots we can find through a careful resonance of the history of civilizations and our case more precisely, of the Brazilian slave past, which engendered at least mistaken classifications, anamorphoses that deliberated what would have value and what would not, building virtual walls that protected the fortunate from the underprivileged.
The freed faced the competition of the European immigrant, who did not fear degradation due to the confrontation with the black and absorbed, thus the best opportunities for free and independent work (even the most modest ones, such as shining shoes, selling newspapers and vegetables , transporting fish or other utilities, exploring the trinket trade, etc.). […] eliminated for residual sectors of that system, the Negro was left out of the process, taking from him personalized, secondary and occasional benefits […]. In short, Brazilian society has left black people to their own destiny, placing on their shoulders the responsibility of re-educating and transforming themselves to correspond to the new standards and ideals of man, created by the advent of free labor, the republican regime and of capitalism. [two]
Obviously in the case of domestic workers [3], which over time their designation has undergone synonymous changes, but semantically the predecessor terms, namely: mucama [4]; created [5] and servant [6], crystallized and / or internalized functional and therefore remunerative mediocrity; so much so that only recently, after five hundred years, domestic servants have acquired some of the rights that have been enjoyed for decades by other workers in other activities, obviously their wages remain infinitesimal, even though it is hard work, vital for the substantiation of both the model as much of the current sanitary, where the cleanliness and organization are essential characteristics of a “good people” house; as well as the family structure of today, whose parents also work outside the home and leave their homes in the hands of people who had no choice but to perform “undesirable” jobs, as if what the housekeepers did was something dirty, degrading. But unfortunately that is what is evident when we observe the bonus intended for them, we know that human speeches contradict each other when observing their actions.
The history of Brazilian maids is confused with the history of our slavery, not only it but almost all the discredited functions, since, to the former slave, residual occupations remained, as Florestan Fernandes would say, for this statement corroborate the newspapers of the time and more precisely the classifieds of jobs, which concomitantly denounce the options aimed at people of color, who even after the abolition and proclamation of the Republic, were evident not only economic inequalities, but, and above all, existential inequalities, to those that make it possible to glimpse, to hope of conquering a clod of the homeland.
We will mention the most offered occupations among the several delimited and deliberately reserved for blacks, even after the abolition, already in the middle of the Republic, they are: “box loader”, “cook”, “cupbearer”, “cashier”, “dressmakers”, “Candy vendors”, “bread carrier”, “washerwoman”, “maid”, “saieiras”, “basket carrier”, “guava extractors”, “tailor’s assistant”, “cigar”, “official barber” , “Baker”, “ovenman”, “carpenter”, “wet nurse”, “wet nurse”, “kitchen helper”, dishwasher ”and appearing in an overwhelming way the function of“ maid”, In all verified classifieds, the reference to color is what endorsed, accredits the occupation of these posts and, in those cases where we mentioned above where the functions are the least paid and therefore those that require less qualification, that is, they are residual functions , “Inferior” within the capitalist occupational hierarchy, as they still are today, is the case of the maid, our domestic servant, the class with the lowest salary levels and who has the least legal guarantees for the worker. We will transcribe some texts from these newspapers in order to contextualize our inferences.
“A black maid is needed: Rua Visconde de Sapucahy n. 169th “; “You need a black maid, who will cook and wash; on Rua Guarda Velho no. 30. “; “A black girl is needed for house arrangements and to deal with children, we pay 15 $; at the Ouvidor Center n. 20, 1st floor. ”. “You need a middle-aged black woman who knows how to cook, in Rua da Ajuda n. 27, 1st floor ”; “You need an old black woman to cook and wash, to sleep in the house; on General Polydoro Street n. 24. “; a black girl is needed for a dry nurse; on Rua Senador Eusébio n. 9, townhouse. ”; “We need a black grocer, who is faithful and free from vices, at Haddock Lobo n. 18F. ”; “You need a little girl from 12 to 13 years old to walk with children from year to year; Rua da Passagem no. 67, Botafogo. ”“ You need an old lady or an old black woman for light duty; on Rua da Ajuda nº 187, 2nd floor. ”[7]
Don’t stop now … There’s more after the publicity;)
The modest modalities offered to the black do not allow him to reverse his situation of exclusion, of social anomie, since his allocations were analogous to the slavery period, which insisted on internalizing the underlying gender of the black in social idiosyncrasy.
Blacks and mulattos were left on the sidelines or found themselves excluded from general prosperity, as well as from their political earnings, because they were unable to play this game and uphold its rules. As a result, they lived within the city, but did not progress with and through it. They constituted a social congérie dispersed by the neighborhoods, and they only shared in common an arduous, obscure and often deleterious existence. In this situation, instead of correcting, the state of social anomie transplanted from captivity almost […] half a century after the abolition, blacks and mulattos had not yet conquered their own and safe niche in the world. that would make that stage an episode of transition, inevitable, but transposable. They paid with their own lives, uninterruptedly, the yearnings for freedom, of independence and consideration that encouraged them to “try their luck”, making the most of the material and moral compensations of urban civilization … The most coveted positions remained “closed” and inaccessible; the “open” positions were selective according to criteria that only episodically could favor a small number of “colored elements”. [8]
Veiled, unconscious or deliberate strategy, it does not matter, the point is that the smallest roles within the labor market offered to those who were slaves, helped and have helped to perpetuate the economic and, therefore, social weakness, silencing their voice in the face of a economic system rooted in racist selection practices, feeding anachronically a colonial feeling, whose perpetuity forged a kind of collective unconscious. Soon, unprepared, disbelieving, abandoned to his own fate, the black man lacked almost everything, there was no planning to evict them in a world whose logic would be unintelligible for an ex-captive. So, without time to adapt, re-educate and internalize the ethos of a free worker, without the means to compete with whites,
We bring this issue up in a moment of real revolt and as a form of protest, yes, without worrying about criticism about our scientism, because, as we also witness the brazenness and the total absence of embarrassment with which the media highlights activities such as: cleaning ladies , street sweepers, pawns, in short, are stereotyped as being the consubstantiation of failure, because it is very common for telenovelas to report these professions in a disrespectful way, even if camouflaged in rice powder of a grotesque ingenuity Everyone must remember the character lived by Guilhermina Ginle who, at the end of the soap opera “Paraíso Tropical”, received as “punishment”, so to speak, an “unhappy” ending, at least that was probably what the author should have in mind when he “ridiculed” it by putting it on skin of a street sweeper from Rio de Janeiro,as if this profession was a penance, the same thing happened recently to a couple of gentlemen in the soap opera Sete Pecados who simply had an aversion to the work of janitors at a luxurious hotel and achieve a majestic ending by winning the lottery and getting rid of this “martyrdom” that would be the cleaning service.
The worst thing is that the authorities also reverberate this prejudiced idea, so much so that they have adopted as a penance for young offenders, the “punishment” of carrying out street sweeper services for a few days, a situation that had been received with indignation by the class that claims to be insulted, because their profession should not be seen as a mere punishment and treated with disgust, they say they are proud to do what they do. Another aspect evident in telenovelas concerns the established pattern of domestic workers, that is, the majority of them are black, so far we have agreed, since this is unfortunately our reality, as, as we have already explained, it has roots in our slavery.
The question is even when we will treat such hard-working people with such disdain, doing what graduates and men find humiliating to do, that’s why they bequeathed to the “underlings”, but as if the workload and paradoxically low wages were not enough, still they find other ways to vilify the simple people who shamelessly struggle to survive from the means at their disposal, defying with open chest a world whose glamor depends on their work that they take on the heavy and the dirt, but whose hands are not as dirty as those that are responsible for the immobilization in the Brazilian social structure.
Grades:
[1] Gari [From antr. (Aleixo) Gary, developer of an old company responsible for cleaning the streets of Rio.] Noun of two types. 1. Employee of public cleaning that sweeps the streets; garbage man: “There were no papers in the gutters; street sweepers kept the streets spotless ”(Maria Julieta Drummond de Andrade, Um Bouquet de Artichokes, p. 32). New Aurélio Electronic Dictionary version 5.0 © The New Aurélio Portuguese Language Dictionary corresponds to the 3rd. edition, 1st. printed by Editora Positivo, revised and updated by Aurélio 21st Century, The Dictionary of the Portuguese Language, containing 435 thousand entries, phrases and definitions. © 2004 by Regis Ltda.
[2] FERNANDES, Florestan – The integration of blacks in class society.São Paulo: Editora Ótica, 1978, p. 19-20.
[3] Domestic [F. domestic (4).] Feminine noun. 1. Domestic worker; maid, maid. [Cf. domestica, from v. domesticate.] Op. Cit.
[4] Mucama [From the quimb. mu’kama, ‘slave amásia’.] Feminine noun. 1. Bras. Angol. The young black and pet slave who was chosen to assist with home services or accompany family members, and who was sometimes the wet nurse. [Var. (bras.): mucamba and camba2. Macuma.]. Idem, ibidem.
[5] Created [Fem. of servant (2 and 3).] Feminine noun. 1.Women employed in domestic service; housekeeper. Idem, ibidem.
[6] Servant (is) [From lat. servu.] Male noun. 1. One who has no rights, or does not have his person and assets. 2. In feudal times, an individual whose service was attached to the land and transferred with it, although he was not a slave. 3. Created, server, servant; servant. 4. Slave (6): servant of duty. Adjective. 5. That it is not free. 6. Who provides services; servant. 7. Who has the condition of servant or slave. [Cf. deer.] servant [From lat. servant.] Feminine noun. 1. Created, employed. 2. Woman absolutely subject to others; slave. [Cf. deer.]. Idem, ibidem.
[7] National LIBRARY. Microfilm sector. Jornal do Commercio, January 1, 1888; January 8, 1890; and April 14, 1901.
