Nothing Personal, but It Isn’t That Hard to Be Inhuman

Maybe you saw the story in the paper about the woman at the Fountain Valley bus stop. How the woman, 28-year-old Tomasa Sanchez, had waited there every morning between 6 and 7 for the bus to take her to work as a housekeeper. And how, off and on over those months, the same two white teen-agers drove by and either yelled ethnic slurs or threw things at her. And how, after suffering in silence all that time, she finally notified police when a rock thrown from the boys’ car cut her below the eye. Police staked out the corner last week and arrested the boys.

Case closed, but the image lingers of a lone woman standing, day in and day out, at a bus stop in the early morning--an anonymous, faceless woman absorbing all that malice from total strangers. In a way, it was nothing personal.

Is hate the right word for their motivation? Hate requires some intensity, some passion of thought. I’d suggest that they had such indifference, such little respect for her that hate didn’t motivate them. They had such little regard for her humanity that the thought of hurling tomatoes or coins at her didn’t give them much pause.

She was a non-person--a symbol of disdain but devoid of flesh and blood.

Nothing personal. That notion kept churning in my head . . .

We all know the Tomasa Sanchezes of Orange County. They wait for buses every day or drive junky cars and trucks, then arrive at our homes and provide vital functions of caring for our children and houses and property. We entrust our most important possessions to them, but what do we know about them as human beings?

For the last five years or so, a woman has cleaned my townhouse on a sporadic basis. Our system is that I call and make the appointment, and she comes when I’m at work. I leave her money on the TV. Our paths never cross.

She sees my family photos, what kind of clothes I wear, what music I like, what books I read. Depending on how nosy she is, she could explore personal papers and correspondences.

I surrender all that to her, without thought. Things I hide from friends and relatives I don’t hide from her. In fact, she’s been in my house more than most of my friends.

And yet, I know nothing about her. It suggests to me that I also have treated her as a non-person. I have relegated her to invisible status--a non-threatening presence who comes and goes without leaving an imprint.

Thinking about the faceless woman at the bus stop has changed all that. I telephoned my housekeeper Friday, not to arrange business but to find out who she is. I told her why I was doing it, and she laughed and probably thinks I’m crazy. She said she had nothing interesting to tell me, but I said I didn’t care.

She was born in Mexico but has lived in Orange County for 13 years. She’s 31 and has a daughter who’s 12 and a son who’s 6. She’s expecting her third child next month. She works from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. for a housecleaning company and does my place as a free-lance job after her regular workday. Her husband works for a landscaping company and works the same schedule.

She describes herself as happy but says she and her husband want to resettle in Mexico someday. “Sometimes, I don’t know what is my life,” she said. “I hear things happen and it makes me sad, but in the other way, I live with my family, so I’m happy. I have work, and I’m happy for that, too.”

I ask if she’s encountered hostility, like the woman at the bus stop. She said she hasn’t, but she’s aware of anti-Mexican feeling that exists. “When people attack Mexicans, I don’t like to hear that. When people say we do bad things, they think all Mexicans do it.”

How does she deal with that? “I can’t do anything about it. I just listen and say nothing. I don’t like to have problems with anyone, but I’m sad when I hear bad things.”

She has been a housecleaner throughout her 13 years in Orange County but said she’d like to improve her English so she could work with computers. Her family speaks Spanish at home, but she wants her children to be fluent in English to enhance job opportunities.

I asked what the family does for fun. “We just work for payments,” she said. “We don’t have extra money for taking the kids somewhere.” She says she and her husband go to a movie once every three or four months. Asked when they last went out for dinner, she laughed and said, “I don’t remember. Maybe never.”

Finally, I asked if she thought people respect what she does. “I think some people don’t respect my work. Some people, they don’t care if I work hard or not. Some people praise my work and say, ‘Oh, you work hard,’ and some people, because they pay me, they don’t care.”

We talked for about 10 minutes.

I’m embarrassed I didn’t know any of this before. I’m embarrassed that when I’ve mentioned her to friends in the past, she’s been “the woman who cleans my house.”

She’s not “the woman who cleans my house.” She’s Estella Rodriguez, a wife and mother and working woman, trying to make a living and find her place in the world.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.