Close Encounters With Ambivalence--and the Servants Who Inspire It

LAST YEAR, I FACED A CRISIS IN NATIONAL identity. My one-bedroom apartment was just not getting cleaned often or thoroughly enough by its sole resident and was becoming an embarrassment. Meanwhile, an enterprising Guatemalan woman recommended by a friend was willing to take on the task (plus my usual basket of laundry) once every two weeks for $45.

I had to interrogate myself: Was this the sort of thing a self-sufficient, unpampered, small-r republican kind of guy ought to be getting involved in? Having a hireling come into his private space to scrub his bathtub, wash his underwear and otherwise lay hands on the residues of his cooking, his eating and his body emanations? Wasn’t there something vaguely un-American about it? Wouldn’t this amount to having. . . . a servant?

I’d never had a housekeeper. During our long marriage, my now ex-wife and I did all the cleaning, cooking, yardwork, child care, etc. Moreover, I cling to a belief that if being an American means anything, it means scorning privilege. This is probably more a knee-jerk reaction born of my blue-collar upbringing than a tenable national definition, but by this time in my life, it is instinctive.

And yet, what could be more American than making enough money to live on a par with the old aristocracy?

My place is sparely furnished, and I reasoned that the cleaning lady could do the job in less than three hours. If she pushed herself, I reasoned further, she could do it in two, so her per-hour pay wouldn’t exactly be exploitative.

So I hired her, and now I bless her name whenever I walk into my washed, dusted, vacuumed, newly company-suitable apartment.

But I always make a point of not being home when she comes to work, even if it means wandering the streets or hanging around a coffee shop for a couple of hours. I wonder what she thinks while she’s separating my soiled handkerchiefs from my musty socks, or scrubbing a tomato-y rind from one of my saucepans, but I don’t want to observe any specific clues.

Southern California is the nation’s capital of in-home worker employment, on the books and off. According to the most recent figures from the state Employment Development Department, nearly 82,300 people were employed as “private household workers” in L.A., Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties in the second quarter of 1999.

These, however, represent only those workers whose employers pay unemployment insurance. “You probably have two or three times as many people who are not reported,” says Ted Gibson, chief economist for the state Department of Finance.

The latest official figures represent a 45% increase over 1992, the earliest period for which statistics are available. Much of the increase is due to the managerial and professional classes working longer hours and therefore having less time for child care and domestic chores than ever before. We ordinary middle-class people can afford housekeepers and nannies and gardeners because no other place in America has as ready a supply of poor immigrants glad for menial work.

Wherever we go in L.A., we’re greeted by servants. We find them at restaurants, parking valet stands, hand-wash car washes. Something far more personal, however, kicks in when we bring them into our homes.

For a book to be published next spring, USC sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo has interviewed and surveyed more than 200 female home workers and the women who employ them in Los Angeles. Among the latter, she has found a deep-running disquiet.

“L.A. leads the nation in income inequality,” she says. “Those kinds of inequalities are exposed in a real close-up fashion in paid domestic work. Americans are profoundly ambivalent and uncomfortable about the whole notion of being employers in their own homes. I think it has to do with the absence of a feudal past in the United States, the notion of ourselves as a democratic society where equality reigns. All those kinds of American myths are hard to sustain in the face of the new institutionalization of domestic work.”

Like me, many of the employers she talked to (and Hondagneu-Sotelo herself) admit that they duck out when their house cleaners are due to arrive, rather than face their own ambivalence.

I’d feel better about all this if I thought the people we employ at home had a reasonably good chance at least of seeing their children rise above servant status, as earlier generations of immigrant (and African American) domestic workers did. But the primary instrument of such social elevation--effective public schools--hardly exists here anymore.

Are we creating a large, permanent servant class? Will this make us more South American than American?

These days, my apartment is a lot cleaner than my social conscience.

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James Ricci’s e-mail address is james.ricci@latimes.com