One thing I really liked in the television show “Downton Abbey” was the aspect upstairs / below. It was a period shows that, for once, does not only focus on the tests and tribulations of a rich family. It was just as much about the life of the vast staff who directed the house – workers whose long hours allowed the rich family to live as they did with all their strict expectations and habits.
Just think about the simple habit of changing for dinner, for example: first of all, you need someone to make your clothes. Someone must also wash your clothes and make sure they are both dry and in a hurry when you want to wear them. Someone must make sure your clothes are installed in a place where you or your personal servant can find it. And for a large part of the fashion of the time, you need someone to help you.
As an American citizen in Mexico, I clearly be part of the “upstairs” crowd. I can’t help people park their cars and I don’t drive anyone to a taxi or a shuttle. I do not clean after the revelers returned home, and I do not put back the freshly washed and folded clothes. I don’t ask people what I can get them behind a stand on the market, and I don’t make sure there is toilet paper in the coffee bathroom.
In short, I am always served, never the server.
My partner, however, is not. He grew up like many small cities and cities here: with a mother raising three children per herself and a father sending money to his home exhausting work in the United States. According to Mexican standards, they lived quite well. According to American standards, it was fundamentally poverty.
He did not go to restaurants, with the exception of very special occasions. He did not even see a film in a theater until it was almost finished with primary school. The air conditioning was practically unknown, even in his warm tropical city. He and his brothers and sisters took care of the own house and washed clothes.
And while everyone went to the university and obtained stable jobs and the middle class, the luxuries that allowed them only meant very occasional “life upstairs” experiences.
Mexico can have the reputation of a more relaxed lifestyle, but Mexicans work more than those of any other OECD nation. Although it was discussed there shorten the work weekWhich is currently taking place from Monday to Saturday for the most part, the realities of the low salary and the increasingly high costs of this economy make most of the proposals out of words.
If you work in the vast informal sector, for example, these working rules are not enforceable anyway. The formal sector, in the meantime, knows what is happening: if workers do not want to respect their punishment times, there are a long line of other workers who are waiting for a job. If you need to feed and host your family, then you do what you need to do.
Mexico clearly does what many of us north of the border do not want to admit: hard work is only linked in the most cowardly ways to the material gain – with approximately a million warnings.
Being with my partner allowed me to see the “stairs” of the Mexican experience. While tourists could have a good meal, then return to their hotel rooms, workers who serve them often stay until 3 am before returning to their lean subdivisions, which are often kilometers.
The reason why I have seen this if lately is because of my partner’s current employment to manage a restaurant. Because the positions are so difficult to fill, it often does the work of two to three people at a time, exploiting the place where it is supposed to supervise. It does on average about 80 hours of work per week, which often precedes sleep and food. If things are not improving soon, he will look for something else, but as people often say here: is there. (That’s what is available.)
I do not write this to ensure that anyone who feels hard to have fun in Mexico. A job is a job, and we all do what we can to help and also try to relax from time to time. In fact, one of the things I recognize and that I am proud of my own culture is that most people are fairly fair.
But having a seat at the forefront of these jobs gave me a different perspective. Almost everyone literally does everything they can, for not much monetary return. And despite this low return, they are always mainly friendly and jovial.
My partner And The servers sing with the artists paid by the song while they work. Whoever is available to wash the dishes washes dishes (sometimes it’s me). Even the holidays like Christmas and the New Year, they are there, generally without additional salary (Christmas day and the day of the year are the holidays, not the “Eves” which for those of the catering industry are only regular working days).
Many things do not work, and funds are not available to make them work. It is very difficult for Americans, above all, to understand, I think, because we are very used to things that work as they are supposed to do. Here, however, most companies operate on the thinnest margins. This is what the owners always say, anyway.
When one of the many hawkers with whom I interact – who surely keeps punishing hours – I hear “gracias”, they still answer with “Okay, have a good day!” They make jokes: “These are stolen, but they are authentic!”
Good humor certainly helps things, but it is not a replacement for a life that allows you to sleep and eat well. I often wonder if workers here and on the other side of the border will never see their conditions improve.
For the moment, no place seems ready for a workers’ revolution despite the low probability of considerably improving its financial prospects.
There is a song by the great Strummed Belgian singer on workers. The main choir is, roughly – I do not speak French – “We celebrate for those who cannot celebrate.”
So the next time you go out, you may throw a drink to those who make your time possible. It may not be the rise in wages they need, but knowing that they are appreciated can still go very far.
Sarah Devries is a writer and a translator based in Xalapa, Veracruz. It can be attached via its website, sarahedevries.substack.com.
