{"id":68915,"date":"2022-02-28T12:01:26","date_gmt":"2022-02-28T15:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=68915"},"modified":"2026-01-24T15:43:34","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T18:43:34","slug":"a-deeply-personal-in-depth-account-of-the-typical-racism-of-domestic-work-in-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=68915","title":{"rendered":"A Deeply Personal In-Depth Account of the Typical Racism of Domestic Work in Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Original artwork by Raquel Batista<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

This article is the latest contribution to our\u00a0award-winning<\/a>\u00a0reporting project,\u00a0Rooting Anti-Racism in the Favelas: Deconstructing Social Narratives About Racism in Rio de Janeiro<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

This story, told by writer and former domestic worker Neuza Nascimento<\/a>, begins in the 1960s in the Jo\u00e3o Gomes Velho neighborhood of the city of Santos Dumont, located in the interior of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.<\/em><\/p>\n

The first time I felt racism directed at me, I didn\u2019t even know what it was. I must have been around seven or eight years old. We were really short on food, with hardly anything to eat, so I used to fill up on cornmeal and collared greens soup. We ate a lot of persimmons, since we had a tree in the backyard. We didn\u2019t have electricity, running water, or a sewage hookup. We made use of everything we had, we didn\u2019t even produce garbage. In spite of our condition, I didn\u2019t realize that we were poor because there was nothing else to compare it to\u2014until I was eight and went to work in another family\u2019s home.<\/p>\n

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From left to right: Veronice (Neuza’s youngest sister), a child from next door, and Ana do Nascimento Araujo (Neuza’s older sister). Source: Neuza Nascimento’s personal archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My job was to take care of a young boy, who was larger than me, while his parents were out working. The father made coconut candy, which I got to taste for the first time only because I scraped the bits off the marble stone that I had to clean. I thought it was strange to take care of such a big boy, but now I realize that he was only bigger and better fed than me, but not older. The arrangement made with my mother was that I wouldn\u2019t do anything but take care of the boy, but in reality I cleaned the house, too. That was where I first saw a real bed, a toilet, a faucet, and other things that were common in any home. Although I cleaned the whole house, I couldn\u2019t move freely through it, much less use the toilet. After I finished cleaning, I could only stay in the kitchen or in the covered backyard that had an outhouse attached, which was what I used. I kept the boy company, but I couldn\u2019t touch him. He said that if I touched him “he’d catch black,” as if it were a contagious disease. What color was this family? White, of course.<\/p>\n

Thinking I was just a regular child, I found out in that house that I was a poor child and thought that I was treated differently for this reason. But it didn\u2019t take long for me to become aware of the color of my skin and to find out that this brought with it inferiority.<\/p>\n

Around the time of my first communion, we received a visit from a woman that my mother worked for, washing and ironing her clothes. She came with her daughter, who was around 13, and brought a big package in her arms. Our living room had hardly any furniture; there was a wooden cot with a handmade grass mattress, covered with a simple cloth that we used as a blanket. Besides the cot, we had a china cabinet and a bench for sewing.<\/p>\n

When they came in, my mother offered them coffee and invited them to sit down. The girl started to move towards the cot, but her mother shot her a look and she stopped. Then, Dona Rosinha\u2014that was the woman’s name\u2014unwrapped the package and out came a beautiful white dress that she handed to my mother. I had never seen such a beautiful piece of clothing. But when I saw what our visitor did next, I felt something terrible inside of me, a feeling that has taken me years to understand, and which I think I have never gotten over. She took the wrapping paper and spread it out on the bed for them to sit on. I didn\u2019t understand why they did that, but that\u2019s when I lost my innocence \u2014I became conscious of my skin color, of the texture of my hair, of my poverty, and of my insignificance. I felt dirty. Just because I was a different color, because I was of a different race.<\/p>\n

My mother washed and ironed clothes for some white women in our neighborhood, and whenever me or my sisters went to deliver the clothes, pick up leftover food, or have any other type of contact with them, my mother would say:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you get there, what do you say?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To which she’d answer herself:<\/p>\n

\u201cYes sir, yes ma\u2019am, no sir, no ma\u2019am.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For as long as she lived, that\u2019s what she always told us to do.<\/p>\n

These instructions followed me around for decades, long after she died, and truly jeopardized my development in all areas of life. And what\u2019s worse, of course my older sisters had the same discourse. Later on, though, I couldn’t really blame her. I think my mother only wanted to protect us.<\/p>\n

In all the places we lived in Minas, we never owned or rented our home. We always traded work for a place to live. For instance, my father would work the fields for the farmer, and my mother did the domestic work in the farmhouse. Neither of them received a salary for their labor. When they got paid, it was in the form of groceries. The boss had a store, where we’d pick up what we needed for the month. On payday, my father didn\u2019t have anything left as payment. Do I need to point out that the farmers were white?<\/p>\n

One day, a couple showed up on our street looking for girls to work, and of course the neighbors brought them to our house, since my mother had so many daughters. They talked about the advantages of letting one of us go with them so we could have a better life; we would study, and my mother would receive a payment every month. Goodhearted, my mother believed them. Under these terms, I went to Nova Igua\u00e7u<\/a>, Rio de Janeiro, and my other sister, whose story I’ll tell later in this text, went to Paran\u00e1. Today I recognize this as trafficking of young black girls, but who would think such a thing at the time? My mother only ever thought of what was best for us.<\/p>\n

The house in Nova Igua\u00e7u had four rooms. I slept on a cloth on the floor, in a corner of the living room. I did all the housework, except the cooking, and took care of a baby. I didn\u2019t meet anyone the whole time I was there. I’d only leave the house early in the morning to buy bread and come back. The rest of the day, I worked until nighttime. I don\u2019t remember being physically abused, but I was a prisoner. I don\u2019t remember how long I was kept that way. One day, one of my older sisters came to get me.<\/p>\n

When I was 11, my older sisters bought a shack in the Cordovil<\/a> favela and we moved to Rio. It was a dirt-floor shack, with plank walls and a zinc roof. It was the first favela I lived in and there I suffered deep and cruel racism. I was just a child. In the second favela where I lived, Parada de Lucas<\/a>, it was the same thing, but I could defend myself by then. I understood the situation better.<\/p>\n

The residents of Cordovil were mainly from Northeastern Brazil, many from the state of Para\u00edba. Those who were black didn\u2019t identify themselves as such, they called themselves \u201cmorenos”<\/a> (tanned). They laughed at my braids<\/a>, called me \u201clittle black girl with the skinny legs,\u201d \u201cmonkey\u201d and other pejoratives. But that’s racism in the favelas, and that\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n

We lived in Cordovil for more or less two years, and soon after that the favela was forcibly evicted<\/a> and resettled in the neighborhood of Del Castilho. A year or so later, my mother died and one of my older sisters took me to live in the house where she worked, on Joaquim Nabuco Street, in Copacabana<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Neuza’s mother in Rio de Janeiro after the forced eviction from Cordovil, already living at the Del Castilho apartment. Source: Neuza Nascimento’s personal archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My sister\u2019s employer, Dona Luiza, embraced me when I arrived. She said that I was cute and that she would raise me as her own child. I was enrolled in the Castelnuovo Municipal School, on Francisco Otaviano Street, which is now a high school. She bought my school supplies and uniform. I was very happy.<\/p>\n

On my first day of school, I put on my uniform and, feeling beautiful, headed for the front door to leave. Dona Luiza called after me and told me I had to leave through the back door, the service entrance.<\/p>\n

OK. I could forget about being treated as her own child.<\/p>\n

When I got home, I was told I would be working as a cleaner and kitchen aid after school. And so it was. I walked the dog, cleaned the house and served their food. I could only eat after serving dinner, dessert, coffee, and clearing the table. The leftovers. I had to wear a headscarf so that my \u201crough\u201d hair didn\u2019t show. But I still wasn\u2019t sure if this was because of the color of my skin. My new boss had a boy and a girl in their teens who obviously received treatment completely different from mine. One day, I did something wrong without knowing what, and the boy said, \u201cyou little sh**, you black monkey, you should be tied to a tree and beaten!\u201d And from that day on, they decided they would “put me in my place.” I left this house and school when I was 14.<\/p>\n

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Neuza, 14, looking after her boss’s dog. This woman had told her she would be treated like a daughter, which never happened. Source: Neuza Nascimento’s personal archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Since I didn\u2019t have any references for any other kind of work, I found another job as a domestic worker.<\/p>\n

They were a Lebanese couple, who also lived in Copacabana. I did all the housework and took care of two boys, a six-year-old and a four-year-old. Every night Dona<\/em> Jeorgete and Seu<\/em> Aniz went downstairs to play cards with friends and I stayed with the children. The apartment had four rooms and I slept on a sofa in the living room. One night, I woke up with Seu<\/em> Aniz touching me. I jumped and he grabbed me by the arm, telling me to be quiet; saying that I was going to enjoy being his because, as black as I was, no one was going to want me, and that I should thank him. I said I was going to tell Dona<\/em> Jeorgete, and he said she would never believe me. I managed to get away from him that time, and other times as well. I wanted to get out of there, but I had nowhere to go. My sisters didn\u2019t know where I was, and I had no days off. One day, I told Dona<\/em> Jeorgete that I needed to go to school to get a document, and she let me go. When I got to school I went to the office. The headmaster was happy to see me and asked what I had been doing. I told her what had happened and she invited me to work in her home. I didn\u2019t go back to the apartment in Copacabana.<\/p>\n

I started a new life, this time in Botafogo<\/a>. But the way I was treated didn\u2019t change, I was still the little black maid. I couldn\u2019t move through the house freely, except when I was cleaning. One time, I didn\u2019t clean the bathroom walls right, and the woman boss grabbed me by the ear, and after showing me the dirty spot, rubbed my face against it and said, \u201cClean it right, little black girl!\u201d Because of this episode, there was no celebration on my 15th birthday. When they had visitors, I couldn\u2019t be seen, I don\u2019t know why. At this house, I went back to school and the woman scheduled my housework around my classes. One day, I told her I wanted to take a typing class, that I wanted to be a secretary. She and her husband laughed a lot and offered me a sewing course! Another thing that was different at this house was that I was paid, about half the monthly minimum wage. I left there when I was 16, just turning 17.<\/p>\n

If I were to write here about all the racism, humiliation, shame, sexual abuse, prejudice and perversities that I suffered as a domestic worker and as a person, this would become a book instead of an article. I don’t consider myself a victim, I am a survivor. I was only able to survive because, in all the houses where I worked\u2014and there were a lot of them\u2014my body was there, but my spirit wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Don’t think, however, that this covers all the racism I experienced as a domestic worker, there’s more. I worked for a single man, and when I got pregnant, he asked if my child was going to be King Kong or light-skinned. Another boss laughed at me when I asked if I could borrow a book from her bookcase. I also used to clean for a journalist, and one day I wrote a text and asked her to have a look. The following week, I asked what she’d thought and her answer was: \u201cOh, Neuza, forget it. I didn\u2019t even bother getting past the second line, it was so awful. This isn\u2019t for you, you’re better off as a cleaner; raise your child and forget the idea of being a writer. It’s really not for you, why would you even think that\u2026\u201d I put away the text in a corner of a dresser in the maid\u2019s room and didn’t dare writing again. Three years later, I came across it and discovered that it was an article about defending human rights in the favela. I didn\u2019t feel rage. Instead, I felt deep sadness towards the perversity of human beings.<\/p>\n

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Neuza, 23, already living in Parada de Lucas, during a weekend off while she worked for a Jewish family in S\u00e3o Conrado. Source: Neuza Nascimento’s personal archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There was also the time, when I worked for a Jewish family in S\u00e3o Conrado<\/a>, when I wasn\u2019t allowed near the window at night\u2014I had to stay in my tiny room, with a bed and a small dresser. My food was rice, beans, egg and a banana. Quite often, the egg was rotten. I’d make thousands of meatballs, which my boss counted and separated out for each meal. I wasn\u2019t allowed to eat them.<\/p>\n

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A thoughtful Neuza Nascimento. Source: @sandradelgado<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The sad part is that these aren\u2019t isolated instances, they didn’t happen to me alone. It was the same, and even worse, for my sister, Ana do Nascimento Ara\u00fajo, since she suffered more and for longer than I did. I don\u2019t really know if these experiences of racism at work affected all of us. After all, we are eight sisters. Most are unable to talk about their childhood and adolescence and say that they never suffered racism while they were domestic workers, or in their lives in general. It\u2019s too heavy to remember, too heavy to talk about. They’re all over 70.<\/p>\n

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Neuza’s sister, Ana do Nascimento Araujo, also tells her experiences with racism working as a domestic worker. Source: Neuza Nascimento’s personal archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Talking with my 66-year-old sister, Ana, about her journey, she says that racism is mostly veiled these days, and that we have legal defenses against it. But it wasn\u2019t always like that. Ana says:<\/p>\n

\u201cI became aware of racism when I was eight years old, when the girls at school didn\u2019t want to take my hand during the games we played at recess. One boy called me ‘Tiziu’ (which is a very dark bird).<\/p>\n

Our teacher took our class on outings around the school. Along the way, we had to cross a small bridge which was about two palms wide. I’m afraid of heights, and this teacher, instead of trying to help by holding my hand, as she did for the other children who were white, offered me the tip of her sweater to hold onto. I felt humiliated, like I wasn\u2019t normal.<\/p>\n

When I was 11, a couple came around asking our neighbors if anyone knew of any girls to work as domestic help for a family. They pointed at our house and said, ‘The woman over there has a lot of daughters.’ They came to the door and spoke with my mother, who allowed me to go with them, with the attitude that ‘we can\u2019t spoil you, everyone has to work.’ This couple was from [the southern Brazilian state of] Paran\u00e1, and no one had any idea where Paran\u00e1 was. My mother, being a good person, thought that everyone else was good, too. The woman was very nice, and said she would take care of me as if I were her own child, and my mother believed her.<\/p>\n

So off I went to Paran\u00e1. They had three children. I did all the housework. I waxed the floors of the entire house on my knees, and even though they had a floor polisher, she wouldn’t let me use it; I had to use a brush. I washed the fruit, which the boys counted, but I wasn\u2019t allowed to eat any. She served me my food. At breakfast, I don\u2019t remember what I drank, but she spread yellow lard on my bread instead of margarine. I was supposed to eat it, but when she served me that, I just threw it away. When she made rice casserole, I got regular rice with chicken neck and feet. I didn\u2019t understand any of this, since she had told my mother that she was going to treat me like her daughter, and instead she treated me like a slave. My hair was curly, big and full. When I left home, my mother had braided it and it stayed that way for over a month because I couldn\u2019t brush it on my own. The husband took me to the salon to have my hair done. He took me at night because I had to work during the day and his wife wouldn’t let me go anywhere. My hair looked really pretty, but the girl at the salon said that in order for me not to get sores, I had to put vinegar on my scalp. So I got some vinegar and put it on my head. The wife smelled the vinegar and gave me a hard time because I had used her vinegar. My hairstyle didn\u2019t last more than two days: she took me to another salon and told them to cut my hair off just because I had used her vinegar. I think she was angry because her husband had treated me with humanity. I was only 11.<\/p>\n

One day, I spilled oil on the kitchen floor. Since it was nighttime and I was very tired, I left it to clean up the next day. Soon after that, she asked if I had cleaned it up and I said that I was going to do it the next day. She started yelling, ‘This is why I can’t stand black people, I\u2019m allergic to black people.’ She went into the kitchen, and while I was on the floor cleaning, she grabbed me by the hair. Her husband realized what was happening and came after her. He grabbed her arms and said ‘I won\u2019t let you beat her; let\u2019s just take her back the way we brought her.’<\/p>\n

Furious, she pointed at me and said to her husband: ‘Even with my arms hurting [because he had grabbed them] I\u2019m going to beat this black girl up!’<\/p>\n

Later, she got pregnant and they hired a girl to work with me who got to go home every day. Seeing that I was treated like a slave, she was indignant, and told me to write a letter to my family, telling them everything that was happening to me, and said that she would mail it. I was scared because I was far from home and didn\u2019t know anyone since I never left the house except when they went out and needed me to help with the children. Sometime later, this girl stopped working there and, without me knowing it, wrote a letter to my family.<\/p>\n

Just when I had lost all hope that I would ever escape that suffering, one of my sisters showed up to save me. She arrived one morning and I was so happy! The woman boss treated her very well, offering her breakfast, spreading butter on her bread\u2026<\/p>\n

My sister took my clothes and put them on the table so the woman could see what we were taking with us, because she had already accused me of being a thief and stealing a pen.<\/p>\n

What a marvelous day, when my sister showed up by surprise. It used to be that black domestic workers were treated like slaves, like nobodies. But that\u2019s in the past, today I\u2019m a happy person. The scars are there, but the wounds have healed and I\u2019m here. I can\u2019t remember the face of the girl who helped me, but I will always be grateful to her, wherever I go.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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In this photo, Ana do Nascimento Araujo had already left her bosses’ home in Paran\u00e1 and returned to her parents’ in Minas Gerais. Source: Neuza Nascimento’s personal archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Someone might ask: \u201cWhy put up with all of this?\u201d All the \u201cYes sir, yes ma\u2019am, no sir, no ma\u2019am?\u201d<\/em>\u00a0I, Neuza, didn\u2019t know any better, and was all alone. I thought it was normal, as did my sister Ana.<\/p>\n

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Neuza Nascimento. Source: @sandradelgado<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Neuza Nascimento today. Source: Neuza Nascimento’s personal archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019d like to finish this text on a positive note, since not everything is lost. Around 2003 or 2004, I worked in a home as a day worker where I was treated by my boss, Wagner Moura<\/a>, as a human being and not as a piece of furniture or a kitchen utensil. He called me sister and treated me as one. I knew he was sincere and I’m eternally thankful to him for that.<\/p>\n

I am very grateful to be able to tell a bit of my life\u2019s story. It was cathartic, and liberating!<\/p>\n

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Listen to the Accompanying Podcast in Portuguese\u00a0Here<\/a>:<\/h3>\n