Historia de vida de Omaira: dominación, resistencia y resiliencia en la experiencia del trabajo doméstico en Colombia

Abstract

This work is based on an autoethnographic research, which reconstructs the life trajectory of my maternal grandmother, from her experience as a domestic worker. The objective of this research is to show the functioning of domination, resistance and resilience that characterize the experience of domestic work in Colombia. In this way, it analyzes the practical functioning of these labor relations, which occur in private and particular spaces of upper middle class families. Where the employees have a physical proximity -in the private space of their homes- and an enormous social distance, linked both to the asymmetry of resources and opportunities and to the subordination links that characterize the bond between employers and employees. This life history was worked as a sequence of stages, in which Omaira has played different social roles, as daughter, employee, wife, mother and grandmother between the mid-twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This research addresses various issues such as: family hybridizations due to involuntary migrations; the construction of women from feminized work; the impact of the lack of sexual education and reproductive rights; the domination over the bodies and desires of women in domestic service; the lack of social protection that affects these women and the impact of the double presence of domestic work in labor and family, which implies a continuity of domestic work until old age. These diverse aspects allow for the complexity of the problem of domestic work to be shown from the particular life experience addressed in this research, which functions as a social reflection of the experience shared by many women in Colombia.