Seen but not seen

HOW remote yet purposeful they seem, women walking on an upscale city street, each loaded down with a bag containing lunch, a pair of work shoes, perhaps a book to read on the bus. In our cars, we pass them in the evening as they ride the bus home, women mute with weariness after working a 10-hour job and then attending night classes to learn English, or cosmetology, or medical record-keeping. Or perhaps we don’t see them at all, intent on our own conversations, our own thoughts, our own lives on the other side of the 10, the 405 or the boundary of your choice. Yet they are as much a part of our lives as our spouses and children, inasmuch as they interact with us in the most intimate of settings -- our homes, where they clean and cook, or tend to our children or our parents, enabling us to work or play or just take a nap.

Until the recent marches in support of undocumented immigrant workers, these women were, for many of us, little more than enablers -- supporting players in our ongoing life drama, not unlike Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy to Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind.” There but not there; invisible.

But recent events have opened fissures in our cultural barriers, through which percolate the stories of immigrants and how they came to work and live and struggle in the United States. These stories are often mediated by third parties -- television, newspapers, radio stations and other outlets, most of them motivated certainly by the desire to get it right but also possessed of a keen eye for what the public wants to know.

Frank Cancian’s “Orange County Housecleaners,” a collection of oral histories and photographs of seven female domestic workers, is of a different order. Cancian’s book began six years ago as a documentary photography project, long before the debate over illegal immigration or the attendant media interest had reached its current fever pitch. An anthropology professor at UC Irvine, Cancian decided to do a photo-essay project of his own, like those he assigned to his students. For inspiration he had to look no further than his own home and a woman, Esperanza Mejia, who had cleaned it every other week for several years.

Her sister Leidi and her sister-in-law Julieta Noemi (Mimi) Lopez did similar work in Orange County. Cancian began recording these Guatemalan housecleaners’ life stories, to which he added those of two Mexican women -- Victoria Rua and Sara Velazquez -- and two native-born Anglos, Tina Parker and Sharon Risley. It was a process that continued after Cancian’s class was over and concluded in late 2002, with photographs taken of Esperanza at her wedding. The book is also different because the women were active agents in constructing their stories -- contributing family photos to supplement the ones Cancian took and reading their interview transcripts (some translated back into Spanish) to ensure clarity and accuracy.

What emerges from this collaboration is a social and anthropological record whose significance derives partly from the current immigration debate, partly from the women’s honesty and resilience and partly from the skill and compassion Cancian brings to the project as a social observer. “Orange County Housecleaners” breathes life into the statistics he provides in the introduction -- numbers that reveal a sea change in the makeup of women in private household employment, which, in the Los Angeles area, was 86% Latina in 2000, up from 23% in 1970. In Orange County, where these seven women toiled, the degree of Latina participation was even more dramatic, having risen from 14% in 1970 to 86% 30 years later. Cancian wryly notes that were his book to exactly mirror reality, it “would have to include six Latinas and only one non-Latina.” Yet the histories of the women he’s chosen give the book balance and diversity; readers will be as much moved by the narratives and photos as engaged by the social forces that underlie them.

Although one hesitates to extrapolate from so small a sample, the book suggests a commonality. These women come from families whose strength of purpose and stubborn unwillingness to give up masked a grinding poverty. They made do: cardboard dolls for Sara Velazquez’s Christmas, just one child (the only boy) in Leidi Mejia’s large family sent to college, a single dress and pair of shoes for Victoria Rua to wear until she came to this country seeking work. Reading of this and other sadnesses in Victoria’s life, of Sara’s problems in her marriage, of Leidi’s yearning to join her husband, who had already immigrated, one begins to understand why Latinas risk capture, rape, even death, to cross into the United States. Such simply told stories are, in their way, as compelling as those of another deliverance, that of slaves on the 19th century’s Underground Railroad, heading toward the North and freedom.

For the Latinas in the book, freedom has come in the guise of housecleaning, which gives them a measure of control over their schedules and an independence they did not have in their native countries or in their initial jobs in the U.S. as live-in nanny/housekeepers -- work that in 1986 paid Esperanza $60 a week, an appalling sum even then. For Orange County natives Parker and Risley, housecleaning was also a means to exert control over their lives and escape from less dire but nonetheless difficult situations. One can’t help but feel, though, that the Anglo women have had more opportunities and options: Tina’s housecleaning has evolved into a business in which she employs helpers, and Sharon, who has a bachelor’s degree from the Art Institute of Southern California, is more focused on her art and on her family in Laguna Beach (where she owns a small home in an artists’ enclave) than on her housecleaning work.

The income from housecleaning has enabled several of the women to improve their lives: Tina to start her own business, Leidi to become a cosmetologist and graduate from a community college, Esperanza to undertake formal training as a medical assistant. For all the triumphs, there have been heartbreaks too -- separation from loving parents who nonetheless understand their daughters’ need to improve their circumstances, separation from children who feel abandoned as their mothers seek a better life, husbands who prove unfaithful in their wives’ absence. Yet there are solaces: a healing church service, a daughter’s graduation, a child’s success at tae kwon do, a quinceanera (15th birthday) party.

Leidi, resigned to being a single, middle-aged mother, has found strength in her achievements. “I considered myself a part of California, where I live very well,” she tells Cancian. “I have grown economically.... I was humiliated many times in some of my jobs, but all that made me mature.... I have had a very hard life, but I never got involved with drugs or prostitution, and I never will, because my parents taught me to fight, to be honest, to be a hard worker, and I will continue that way as long as my body permits me.”

That she and the other Latinas look to the future with such hope and courage inspires confidence -- in them and in the outcome of the country’s struggles with immigration issues. One hopes that the voices in “Orange County Housecleaners” find a broad audience, for they have much to teach us about our common humanity and our kinship with those women who work virtually unseen and unsung among us.