Marcelina Bautista

Marcelina Bautista is leading the movement in Mexico to unite and elevate the social status of domestic workers and to secure for them the same rights enjoyed by other laborers, including fair wages, sick leave, and freedom from sexual exploitation.

Marcelina has created a unique program that combines education for domestic workers, their employers, citizen sector organizations, and community members across Mexico. Unlike other human rights advocacy programs, Marcelina engages unlikely allies like the women in the households that employ domestic workers, the majority of whom are female. She does more than conduct outreach programs in the places where domestic workers can be found daily, for example, public parks and on public transportation. She also extends her work to help provide formal training in job negotiation, advocacy, association building and media correspondence. The domestic workers themselves then lead the effort by training their peers, promoting their rights, initiating public policy campaigns, and transforming the way Mexican society views domestic labor and its workers.

In Mexico, approximately 1.5 million people work as domestic employees, of whom nearly 90 percent are women. Over 12 percent of all working women are domestic employees, making domestic work the third largest profession in Mexico. Despite their significant numbers, these women are, in many regards, an invisible population, subject to a wide range of labor and human rights abuses. Female domestic workers regularly fall victim to sexual exploitation by their employers, receive low wages, and work an average of 16 hours per day. The vast majority of domestic employees arrive in major urban areas like Mexico City with little or no education and many do not speak Spanish. They are routinely treated as inferiors and deal with a wide range of emotional and physical mistreatment. In most cases, domestic employees who encounter abuse quit their jobs or silently bear the abuse rather than speak up and demand better treatment.

The Mexican Federal Labor Law does not recognize domestic service as a profession on par with other trades. Instead, it is designated as a "special service," thereby limiting domestic workers' ability to enjoy the same rights as other workers. To date, legislators have shown little interest in amending labor laws to include a wider range of rights for domestic workers. At the same time, human rights organizations have done little to intervene on behalf of domestic workers or to educate them about their rights, and very little research has been done on the challenges faced by this population. The few programs that do work for the benefit of domestic workers tend to focus on the broader issue of women's rights, rather than on specific labor topics, and they rarely involve the active participation of the women themselves. Until Marcelina began her efforts, there had been no attempts toward building a domestic labor movement of trained leaders and advocates.

Marcelina is spearheading the Mexican domestic labor movement through her Center of Support and Training for Female Domestic Workers (CACEH) in Mexico City. The movement is led by current and former domestic workers and targets workers, their employers, the media, and citizen-sector organizations. CACEH provides outreach, education, and support services to domestic employees in and around Mexico City, while collecting information on their experiences and the issues they face in the workplace.

Because long hours on the job allow domestic workers little free time, Marcelina creatively incorporates seminars and trainings into the activities of their busy lives. She brings services and information directly to these women by holding group meetings in local parks on Sunday afternoons when the workers tend to congregate. She has started a job placement service for new arrivals to the city, including trainings on such difficult issues as salary negotiation. Outreach activities are often carried out during the course of a day in subway stations and bus depots, allowing potential participants to learn about CACEH without disrupting their schedules.

In order to make the women effective promoters of their own rights, CACEH conducts trainings on legal rights, public policy, and advocacy. Participants are recruited through flyers strategically posted around the community and through television and radio announcements. The center also holds communications and leadership-building workshops through which the women build self-esteem and gain skills to disseminate their new knowledge among their peers. This is CACEH's first step toward building a national network of domestic labor rights promoters from within the work force.

Marcelina's strategy finds great success in the avid use of media and the staging of events to promote public awareness. She appears regularly on television and radio programs to discuss current topics in society and politics and organizes special events like the Annual International Workers' Day in March and the International Day of the Domestic Worker in July.

Through her involvement in a Latin America-wide network of domestic workers, Marcelina find similar challenges faced in each country. She believes that CACEH Mexico can serve as a model for adaptation in other countries, and she plans to develop her international network further in order to continue a fruitful exchange of ideas and best practices throughout the region. Similarly, the center will continue to extend its services and expertise to other major urban areas of Mexico. In coordination with the International Education Institute, Marcelina plans to lead a survey of domestic workers in Oaxaca. She is also exploring the condition of labor rights in Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city.

Marcelina first experienced the difficult life of a domestic worker at the young age of 11, when she was sent to live and work, without salary, for a wealthy family in her home state of Oaxaca. While her parents hoped that the experience would allow her to learn Spanish (not her native language) and continue in her studies, Marcelina found the people and customs strange and unfamiliar. She witnessed the sexual abuse the male head of household inflicted on her older coworkers. After a year, Marcelina returned home to finish primary school.

At 14, Marcelina moved to Mexico City with dreams of improving her stake in life and becoming financially independent. She still did not speak Spanish, however, and she was unfamiliar with the city and had nowhere to live. Her only viable option was to work as a domestic employee, where she was again exposed to the discrimination and exploitation that she had witnessed in her first job. Nevertheless, she continued working in different homes–many times caring for the children of her employers, seeking opportunities to learn new skills. She took courses in sewing, hairdressing, weaving, and guitar.

In Mexico City Marcelina became involved with the local Catholic Church and the global Christian Youth Workers movement. At 17, she took her first communion and became involved in a group of workers organized by the church, through which she voiced her frustrations and overcame her shyness. Marcelina also began to learn about human rights and workers' rights in conjunction with her ongoing Bible study. In January 1988, she and a group of fellow domestic workers founded the group La Esperanza, ("The Hope") with the goal of educating female domestic workers about their rights. Later that year, Marcelina was selected to represent Mexico at the first conference of Latin American domestic workers in Bogotá, Colombia with representatives from 11 countries.

Though she has remained involved over the years with La Esperanza, Marcelina quickly became frustrated by its lack of impact. After a month-long trip to Cuba in 1996, where she learned how to develop and implement social change projects, she began to design projects to assist female domestic workers in a new, more direct way. In 1998, as a maintenance worker for the citizen-sector organization CENCOS, she was invited to participate in regular staff meetings. For perhaps the first time in her life, she was received as a peer and was encouraged to continue her studies in courses that would enrich her leadership skills. She enrolled in a communication and civil society course at the Iberoamerican University and had one of her articles published in the CENCOS magazine.

Building on her work in Cuba and at CENCOS and La Esperanza, Marcelina presented a proposal to create a union of female domestic workers to the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded her a fellowship in September 2000. Since that time, she has left her housecleaning jobs to work full-time on building CACEH. She is in the process of finishing her secondary studies and envisions herself pursuing a university degree in law or communications–both of which she sees as necessary for ensuring that her work has far-reaching impact.