Thread: Male Latino Workers Find Domestic Skills Are Survival Tools

Far From Home, in the Kitchen
Male Latino Workers Find Domestic Skills Are Survival Tools

By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 12, 2008; Page B01

Marco Antonio Rosales learned to cook the way many immigrant men do: from a cellphone. Soon after arriving in the Washington area five years ago, the young construction worker found himself on the horn to a mountain town in western Guatemala, burning up calling-card minutes in pursuit of domestic skills he never learned at home.

"I would ask my mother or my wife: 'How do you cook this soup? How do you prepare the beans?' " Rosales said.

The women were amused and delighted to impart some advice remotely, Rosales said, maybe all the more so because it shattered the norms of their machismo society. "In my country, a man would never go into the kitchen and a woman would never go into the field. Here, I was forced to learn."

For many of the single Latino men, or solteros, who come to the United States looking for work, the long trek across borders ends in the most foreign territory of all: the kitchen. For many, life in the Washington area is an all-male existence, from their construction and landscaping jobs in the day to the apartments crowded with fellow laborers at night, with no mother, wife or sister to handle the domestic chores.

"Most of the Latino men come from a culture where they're used to having their wives or companions do everything around the house," said Melba Calderon, site director of the Maryland Multicultural Youth Center in Langley Park. "For new arrivals, it's very difficult. The more assimilated you get to this culture, the more you do shopping and cooking and cleaning."

Now, as construction jobs grow scarce and a recent crackdown by Prince George's County has closed many of the truck-based food vendors that served Latino cooking, more men are having to learn kitchen basics any way they can. They place emergency stove-side calls to women back home, ask for tips from grocery store checkout clerks or simply turn to older hands.

Despite the cultural moat that once lay between Rosales and the frying pan (not to mention the mop and the washing machine), the 39-year-old is now domestically self-reliant. He cooks for himself most evenings, washes his clothes once a week at a nearby laundromat and rotates household cleaning duties with the three Latino workers who share his two-room apartment in Silver Spring.

"Now we all care about the apartment and what we eat," said Rosales, whose kitchen repertoire has expanded from basic frijoles and rice to beef and chicken soups, carne asada (marinated beef) and ceviche (raw seafood soaked in lime juice). "It makes it better to live here."

Rosales has even emerged as a culinary tutor.

"Mostly I learned from Marco Antonio," said Virgilio, a 19-year-old recent arrival from Guatemala who is one of Rosales's roommates. He declined to give his last name. "I work at McDonald's, but I want to eat something besides hamburgers all the time."

According to social workers and activists familiar with the immigrant community, Rosales's cooking-and-cleaning arrangement is not just good for the health, but also gives him and his housemates a better chance of avoiding the loneliness and heavy drinking that plague many of the single workers.

"It's like a little village of men," said Sister Carmen Sota, an outreach worker with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington. "They create their own support system. And when they realize that they can care for themselves to a certain extent, they do it gracefully."

The alternative, Sota said, is equally common: apartments crowded with men in which no one cleans, meals that come exclusively from convenience stores or pupusa trucks and a social life defined by little more than long hours working, or waiting for work, and alcohol.

"We see a very high rate of alcoholism," Sota said. "That has destroyed many of them. What we hear about a lot is the loneliness of having their wives and children back home. Every human person needs a human relationship. If no one is cleaning and no one is doing the cooking, it isn't like a household."

Beth McNairn of Takoma Park remembers a glimpse her family got into that often-barren male world when an intoxicated man rang her doorbell by mistake on a recent Christmas Eve. McNairn's husband escorted the man to the address he was looking for, a neighboring house where numerous Latino laborers lived. Inside was a living room devoid of furniture and filled with men sitting on the floor, talking into cellphones that were plugged into wall sockets.

"They were all calling home on Christmas Eve," McNairn said. "It was so sad."

Making these all-male homes homier can ease the stress of working alone in a strange country, some workers said. Francisco Santo, 47, and Linto Duarte, 32, had not met before arriving in the Washington area from Guatemala.

But the two, who were folding laundry on a recent evening at the Wishy Wash on University Boulevard in Silver Spring, have formed what they describe as a brotherly relationship. They clean their house together each Sunday, share shopping and cooking chores, and eat together most evenings.

"It's more social," Santo said, "more like family."

Jose Campos suffered in packed, chaotic apartments for several years after coming from El Salvador in 2004. The 57-year-old laborer rented a sliver of floor space among an ever-changing crowd of roommates who were, he said, more likely to steal his modest possessions than neaten up the kitchen or bathroom.

"It was very bad," he said. "When they were home, they were drunk."

Life has been much better, Campos said, since he found a tidy, three-bedroom basement apartment in Langley Park to share with two workers. A modest collection of dishes and pans is stacked in the cupboards, trash cans are neatly lined with garbage bags, and the bathroom smells of soap and scouring powder. A weekly schedule of cleaning duties hangs prominently on a cabinet door.

But domestic skills didn't come easily, Campos said. His early efforts at the stove set off the smoke detector several times before the owner of the house showed him how to use the exhaust fan. And his first two loads at the laundromat ended with ruined clothes.

"The woman told me I put too much Clorox in," said Campos, who grew up with six brothers in a poor household in central El Salvador. "All of this is so complicated. Everything here is different."

Now, Campos has a dorm refrigerator filled with eggs, chilies, tomatoes and other groceries that he buys in the small Latino shops that abound in Langley Park. He cooks every evening and lately has even gotten daywork as a house-and-office cleaner.

"I have learned all these things," Campos said. "When I go home, I will be like a foreigner."

Sota wonders whether the domestic responsibilities Latino workers face here might contribute to greater balance between the sexes when they go home.

"I hope they realize the work it takes to maintain a home," Sota said. "I hope this experience will get them to collaborate in the house."

But Rosales said he has no desire to do laundry when he returns to Guatemala, where most families still wash clothes by hand. And as for his newfound kitchen skills?

"When I get home, my wife will cook," he said. "Her food is better."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02148.html

We see a very high rate of alcoholism," Sota said. "That has destroyed many of them. What we hear about a lot is the loneliness of having their wives and children back home. Every human person needs a human relationship. If no one is cleaning and no one is doing the cooking, it isn't like a household."

How sad