Dual Discourse About Peruvian Domestic Workers in Santiago de Chile: Class, Race, and a Nationalist Project, The

Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2006 by Staab, Silke, Maher, Kristen Hill

ABSTRACT

This article examines the functions of the "dual discourse" about Peruvian migrant domestic workers in contemporary Santiago. A 2002 field study found that middle-class employers of Peruvian workers simultaneously praised them as superior workers and denigrated them as uneducated and uncivilized. While this response is not unique to Santiago, this study argues that it fulfilled particular ideological functions in this context. The praise served to discipline the Chilean working class, who middle-class employers claimed no longer knew their place. The epithets served as a foil for Chilean national identity. Stories about Peruvians serve as tools in ongoing ideological contestations over class, race, and nation in Chile and, at the same time, shape the working conditions and integration of the migrants themselves.

Ten years ago, domestic workers in Santiago were largely migrants to the metropolitan region from rural southern Chile. Today, Peruvian migrant women are a visible, much-debated presence in this sector. When this study began, the transition from internal to international migrant domestic workers was the main puzzle. How had this new migration been shaped by the conditions in both Peru and Chile? To what extent were women migrating in response to a shift in demand among Santiagan employers of household workers, either for larger numbers of workers or specifically for foreign domestic workers?

This case seemed especially interesting, considering that the composition of Peruvian migration was largely female and that it was occurring between states in the developing world. The existing literature on the international "maid trade" (Heyzer et al. 1994) has tended to focus on the market for foreign domestic workers among the wealthiest states, identifying women from less-developed countries as "servants of globalization" (Parre�as 2001) whose displacement and migration destinies are shaped by neoliberal economics and the structural inequalities between states, as well as patriarchies both at home and in receiving societies. The migration into Santiago has been shaped by similar global forces, but strikingly, it is taking place in a developing country with no substantial history of labor immigration. Field research for this study was undertaken in 2002, aimed at making sense of the transnationalization of domestic service in Santiago.

As often happens, new puzzles arose once the field study began. The most striking aspect of the interview material gathered was the "dual discourse" among middle-class employers about Peruvian domestic workers. On the one hand, employers who hired Peruvian domestic workers claimed that they did so because the Peruvians were superior to Chilean household workers in some critical ways. They maintained that Peruvians were harder-working, educated, and clean; that they spoke better Spanish; that they cooked well; and that they were more devoted, caring, submissive, and service-oriented than Chilean workers. On the other hand, widespread beliefs and narratives were expressed by these same employers (as well as in the media and among job placement agencies) stereotyping Peruvian women as dirty, criminal, lazy, backward, uncivilized, uneducated, slow, and childlike. That is, Peruvian workers were simultaneously praised and stigmatized, sometimes in the same breath by the same person.

This kind of dual discourse is not unique to the Santiago context. It bears some resemblance to the representation of "natives" by colonial powers (as spiritually pure but subhuman), to the kinds of stories told about immigrants virtually everywhere (as hardworking but criminal), and to common representations of servants by masters who need them as individuals but revile the classes of people from which they come. While dual discourses have arisen in various situations marked by servitude, conquest, and social inequality, they appear to serve different functions in different social and political contexts. The following analysis interrogates what the dual discourse about Peruvians makes possible in both material and ideological terms in contemporary Santiago.

This study found that both the negative and the positive stories about Peruvian workers reflected some of the logic of the shifting labor market in the greater metropolitan area. They served to rationalize hiring choices and migrants' poor working conditions in a context of heightened tensions between native-born workers and middle-class employers. Simultaneously, they seemed to serve as a foil against which Chilean identities could be constructed. That is, employers who described Peruvian women as backward, uneducated, or indigenous thereby positioned themselves as civilized, modern, and white. Such stories did not seem to be simply a matter of individual status definition. Instead, they appeared to be part of a larger public contestation over the boundaries of class and national identities in Chile, which arguably became more actively disputed with the end of the dictatorship. The nationalist project evident in employer discourse strongly parallels hegemonic state discourse that resurrects some of the common historical themes of Chilean nation building, such as Chile's claims to exceptionalism in Latin America and its imagined whiteness and modernity in contrast to Peru and Bolivia. The dual discourse about Peruvians in Santiago appeared to have broad political resonance in addition to rationalizing the labor relationship.