They have strict uniforms and aprons as if it were the 1950s. Mexican Brenda Navarro takes out her mobile phone and googles an image of women from Colombia and Peru working as maids in her neighborhood in Madrid.
It's insulting, why does this even exist in the 2000s?, she exclaims, fully aware of her privileges.
I have access to the megaphone when I want. I understand my role as a Latin American writer in Spain. But if I can have this beautiful life, why can't the other Latin American women have it? It makes me angry.
Changing Diapers
The prematurely grown-up older sister in her novel "Ashes in the Mouth" has poorer employers than those who demand maid costumes. The older sister cleans tourist apartments and shares cramped rooms with old Spanish women, changes their diapers, and handles their bitterness towards self-absorbed middle-class children who don't care.
The lack of future prospects is monumental, and as a reader, you find yourself under the protagonist's skin.
She has to constantly fight against the circumstances, but a reader, a child of first-generation immigrants in Spain, told me something good: "The sister manages to turn her anger into words", so maybe this is a story of hope after all. But it was the readers who made me understand that.
Brenda Navarro has role models like Ágota Kristóf and Elfriede Jelinek and a master's degree in sociology and gender studies. But neither her studies nor her work in Mexican human rights organizations were enough to understand the world.
My first novel dealt with violence against women, I felt that in literature I could be creative, but it was also a safe place where I could say what I wanted, without being filtered through a political discourse.
Shrimp Cocktail
Growing up in a Mexican working-class family without cultural capital made her long believe that a writer's life was impossible for her. She came to Spain through marriage, a shrimp cocktail compared to the Latin American migrants she met in Barcelona when she investigated what legal rights her eldest daughter, who was not born in Spain, has.
Brenda Navarro has received the booksellers' prize for the novel of the year in Spain, but not even her publisher initially wanted to believe that a young Mexican migrant could have such a low salary.
There are statistics about this, but people don't want to see the problems.
Born: 1982.
Grew up: In Mexico City.
Lives: In Madrid.
Family: Married to a Spanish man, two daughters.
Current: With the award-winning novel "Ashes in the Mouth". Guesting at the Book Fair in Gothenburg.
