Disagree on the American Dream

Online classes while cleaning houses. She is part of a co-op that uses the LLC model. This model takes these women out of being employees, to making them owners. They do not get wages, but divide their profits among themselves. Hoping that there will be some immigration reform in the future, they pay taxes to show they are cooperating to make their application for US citizenship run smoothly. The final part of the documentary consisted of Eulali, who was a maid, and decided to create a play that illustrated the abuse and hardships women of color, especially the hardships maids undergo on a daily basis.

This play consisted of the employer hitting her, throwing hot coffee in Eulalia’s face because it was not heated correctly, and calling immigration claiming Eulalia had stolen from her. This is where we can see the mental, emotional, and physical abuse maid’s undergo and correlation between the treatment of slaves and people of color back in time. These women are abused but too afraid to say anything. They are afraid to speak up to the injustices they face because they fear losing their job, becoming unemployed in a foreign country, and being deported to go back to their reality they were trying to escape in the first place.

Women like Telma, Judith and Eva work so hard and exert so much physical and emotional labor yet are not eligible for citizenship, or other necessities such as health insurance. They cook meals they could never afford to eat, and clean houses they one day dream of living in. They sacrifice their lives to take care of children who are not even their own, while their own children are left at home crying without a mother’s shoulders to lean on all to pursue the American Dream. This can be seen in the “partial gender socialization” of women as they constantly continuing to exert other forms of labor besides their paid labor as if it is a societal norm.

This adds pressure onto these maids who are mothers, trying to balance their work and family life. This dream has many interpretations and results which differ for every person attempting to pursue it. As one of the maids stated “Am I going after the American Dream? No, I’m not. Because here we have to live in the reality of who we are”. Men and women should be compensated equally for work requiring comparable skills, responsibilities, and effort in the occupation they posses regardless of race, class, sexuality and ethnicity in order to diminish the segmented labor market.

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