I was thinking this morning of when I first became class conscious.
For several weeks I volunteered to serve meals to people experiencing homelessness. Afterwards, I volunteered at a charity dinner soliciting donations from wealthy patrons where the level of opulence and disconnect was staggering to me.
The dinner was hosted at a private estate where they owned more than a dozen cars and 5 houses for a family of 7. This was fewer than 5 miles outside of a city with overflowing shelters and people freezing to death. Here was all the wealth needed to provide homes to every person presently surviving in a shelter, and it was squandered in the hands of people entirely detached and unaware of the scope of the problem. In their minds, through petty charity they could live with a clean conscious believing they’d done their part.
The egregiousness of the disparity, the obliviousness of our guests, and their astonishing reluctance to donate left me furious for days. My own hypocrisy left me feeling crushed and crumpled inside for much longer.
Growing up I attended a boys-only private catholic school in Mexico, and it is impossible not to notice the difference between classes. There are many people with luxury Yatchs and jetskis in their beach houses and also a lot of people who don’t know how to read because they have been working (for extremely mediocre pay) since they were children.
The upper-middle and higher classes usually hire “muchachas” and “mozos”, who are people from the surrounding villages who come to live to your house and cook, clean, take care of the kids, etc. They travel to their houses in the village on the weekends.
As a student in a catholic school, we would often go on mission trips to smaller villages. You don’t need to make a big effort to find people with advanced medical conditions that could have been treated very easily if they would have had the opportunity to go to a doctor.
My father came to Mexico and opened his own maquiladoras, so I have had a lot of opportunity to see how these work first-hand from the owner’s side.
I never heard the term so leaving a definition here for others. A maquiladora is a mode of manufacturing in Mexico that is established by a foreign company, involving the export of the manufactured goods to the company’s country of origin.