MEXICO CITY — Concepcion Alejo is used to being invisible.
Alejo, 43, applies makeup to her face on Tuesday morning and steps out of her small apartment on the outskirts of Mexico City. She walks until the cracked gravel outside her house turns to cobblestones, and the campaign posters covering small concrete buildings are replaced by the pristine walls of gated communities of the city's upper class.
It is here where Alejo has quietly worked for 26 years cleaning the homes and raising the children of wealthier Mexicans.
Alejo is among the roughly 2.5 million Mexicans — largely women — who serve as domestic workers in the Latin American nation, a profession that has come to encapsulate the gender and class divides that have long pervaded Mexico.
Women like her play a fundamental role in Mexican society, shouldering the burden of domestic work as a growing number of female professionals enter the workforce. Despite reforms under the current government, many domestic workers still face low wages, abuse by employers, long working hours and unstable working conditions that in some cases amount to 'modern slavery'.
As Mexico moves toward electing its first female president, women like her, who feel forgotten by their government, hope that having a female leader can shift the balance in their favor.
“I have never voted in all these years because it is always the same for us, no matter who wins. … If they ever listened to us, why should I give them my vote?” Alejo said. “I have hope that maybe, at least by having a wife, things will be different.”
But with two female politicians – former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and former Senator Xóchitl Gálvez – leading the race to the June 2 presidential election, it is unclear how much this will change the reality of working women in the country.
Born into a poor family in the central Mexican state of Puebla, Alejo dropped out of school at the age of 14 because her parents had no money to keep her studying. Instead, she and two of her sisters each moved to Mexico City to do one of the few jobs available to them as lower-class women: domestic work.
Women in Mexico, like much of Latin America, work in informal jobs – tasks such as selling things on the street without a permanent contract or benefits – at higher rates than their male counterparts, something experts who track the subject say attribute to misogyny in their cultures.
Like many young women who came to the city, Alejo began working as a live-in nanny, sleeping in a small room in the home of the family she worked for.
“It's like being a mother. The kids called me 'mom,'” she said. “Their children were born and I bathed them, cared for them and did everything from the moment I woke up to the moment they were asleep.”
While some domestic workers live apart from their families, many more live with their families and work for weeks, if not months, without breaks. They are isolated from family and friends, in a practice that dates back to slavery, said Rachel Randall, a Latin American studies researcher at Queen Mary University of London.
“In a region like Latin America and the Caribbean, even today, the history of slavery and colonialism continues to weigh on relationships with domestic workers in terms of class, race and gender dynamics,” she said.
Alejo said the demands, combined with the low pay of domestic work, kept her from starting a family or having children of her own. Others told The Associated Press they were fired from their positions after falling ill and asking for help and time off from the family they had worked with for years.
Carolina Solana de Dios, 47, said she started working as a live-in nanny at 15 to escape an abusive household. Although she feels free from the abuse and knows her job is important, she added: “When you work in someone else's house, your life is not your own.”
At the same time, their help is essential for working women like 49-year-old Claudia Rodríguez as they continue to fight to gain access to professional spaces traditionally dominated by men. Rodríguez, a single mother and owner of an IT company, said she had to work twice as hard to get half as far as her male counterparts.
In Mexico and much of Latin America, there has long been a gender gap in the workplace. In 2005, 80% of men were employed or looking for a job, compared to 40% of women, Mexican government data show.
That gap has slowly closed over time, and at the end of 2023, 76% of men were active in the labor market, compared to 47% of women. Major disparities in salary and leadership roles still exist.
Born in a city two hours' drive from Mexico City, Rodríguez fled an abusive father with her mother and siblings and sought refuge in the capital. After watching her mother toil at selling food on the streets and doing other jobs to pay the rent, Rodríguez decided at an early age that she did not want to follow the same path.
Instead of pursuing her dream of dancing professionally, she started selling computers at the age of 16.
“I didn't want to make the same sacrifice they made for me,” she said. “So I started working and studying.”
She has worked her way up in the IT industry for years, despite sexual harassment and 'men slamming doors in our faces'. But when she got married and had children, she said, she often had to do all the housework on top of running her own business.
Caregiving can change the trajectory of a woman's career in Mexico, making it more difficult for them to reach higher-level professional positions, according to a 2023 study from the Mexican Institute for Competition. While more than half of women in Mexico say they have had to pause their careers to care for children, only one in five men report the same.
When her husband left her for another woman six years ago, hiring a live-in domestic help was the only thing she could do to keep her head above water.
Today, she and her nanny, Irma, both wake up at 5am. One makes lunch for her two daughters, while the other drops them off at school. Although it's hard to keep up, at least she can breathe now.
“She is part of our family,” she said. “In the case of women in business, we can't do it all alone, simply because society expects way too much of you.”
Despite the burden, a historic number of women in the socially conservative country are taking on leadership and political roles. According to government data, the gender gap in roles in government and international entities decreased by more than 25% between 2005 and 2021.
That's partly thanks to a decades-long push by authorities for greater representation in politics, including laws requiring political parties to draw half of their congressional candidates from women. Since 2018, the Mexican Congress has had a 50-50 gender split and the number of female governors has increased dramatically.
While neither presidential candidate has explicitly discussed domestic workers, both Sheinbaum and Gálvez have proposed addressing rising violence against women in Mexico and working to close the country's gender wage gap.
“In our government, women will not only be recognized because they have a female president, we will take action for women,” said leader Sheinbaum in a speech on International Women's Day.
But Norma Palacios, head of the country's domestic union known as SINACTRAHO, said much of the social progress of recent years has not reached the poorer classes of working women, especially domestic workers.
In 2019, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's government passed landmark legislation granting domestic workers basic rights such as paid leave, restrictions on working hours and access to employer-paid health insurance.
But the government's failure to enforce these rules has left women “unprotected” and trapped in a “dynamic of power inequality,” Palacios said.
“Nothing has changed and (domestic workers) still face informal working conditions, precarious work, low wages and violence and discrimination, even though on paper we should have more labor rights,” Palacios said.
Neither Alejo, the domestic helper, nor Rodríguez, the single mother, say they particularly identify with any of the candidates on the ballot, although they both plan to vote. While both say having a woman head the country would be a step forward, the women – long disillusioned with Mexican politics – still see the leaders as more of the same.
They join other analysts who say having a woman on the ballot doesn't necessarily mean they will make gender issues a priority. Still, she and Palacios, the head of the domestic workers union, hope this will mark a longer-term shift.
“It is still a woman who will head a country – a sexist country, a country of inequality, a country of violence against women, a country of femicides,” Palacios said.
Meanwhile, workers like Alejo continue to walk a shaky path as they struggle to stand up for their own rights.
According to SINACTRAHO data, Alejo is among the 98% of the 2.5 million domestic workers who have yet to enroll in health insurance. They and many others fear that asking for respect for their new rights would get them fired.
Alejo, who worked as a live-in nanny for a long time, eventually moved alone into her own small apartment in a poorer part of the city. After years of low wages and one case of sexual abuse, the 43-year-old says she is finally working for a family that pays her a fair wage and respects her.
But as she works up the courage to ask the family to pay for her health insurance, she adds that she knows they consider her expendable.
“They don't like you asking for things,” she said. “It's not easy to find work, and when you have to work, you end up accepting what they give you.”
