Waiting On Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation's Capital

1. Introduction

One Introduction Washington, D.C., is the seat of government, where laws are crafted to define which citizens of foreign countries are allowed to live and work in the United States. The city is also headquarters for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and other enforcement agencies that were established to keep all other people out of the country. Nevertheless, by 1990 Washington had become a safe haven and home to tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants. The city's largest and most visible immigrant community, numbering over 200,000 men, women, and children, originated in EI Salvador and several other Central American countries. Within a single generation, Washington could claim the second largest settlement (after Los Angeles ) of citizens from EI Salvador in the United States and the third largest community of Central Americans overall.1 The peculiarities of the Central American migration to Washington are numerous. Before the 1960s, the nation's capital had never attracted international migrants in great numbers, and no particular national-origin group had ever predominated in the city. Indeed, only 7 percent of Washington's population was foreign-born in 1900, when as many as 37 percent of New York City's residents originated overseas. Washington's proportion of foreign-born residents dropped to a low of 4.2 percent at the time of the 1960 census but began to climb dramatically in en- 2 Chapter One suing decades. By 1988, at least 12 percent of Washington's population was foreign-born. Foremost among the idiosyncracies of the Central American migration to Washington is the fact that women pioneered the migration in the 1960s and 1970s, when the city still lacked a substantial Latin American community and an international labor force. By comparison, cities in Texas and California drew a predominance of men among immigrants from Mexico, source of the largest number of legal as well as undocumented immigrants to the United States. Women constituted a slim majority among early Central and South American immigrants to Los Angeles and other cities in the United States; but among the initiators of the movement to Washington in the 1960s and 1970s, 70 percent of Central and South American immigrants were women.2 Ironically, it was employees of the U.S. government and of international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who helped to instigate the migration stream that eventually brought tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants into the capital city. The life histories related in this book confirm that Washington's diplomatic, international , and professional workforce deliberately recruited many of the original Central American immigrants when they invited Central American women to work for them as housekeepers and child-care providers. These life histories issue from a study of Central American immigrants that included in-depth interviews with fifty Central American women and men (contacted primarily through social service agencies), a larger randomized survey of one hundred Central American households, and interviews with thirty representatives of social service agencies as well as with seventy-five major employers of foreign-born workers in the Washington area.3 The story of Rosa Lopez's family illustrates the diverse forces that lured many Central Americans to the Washington area in recent decades.4 Rosa Lopez initiated a family migration that Introduction 3 would eventually draw thirty-five other family members to settle in the Washington area. Rosa was a Salvadoran woman who worked as a housekeeper for a family from the u.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) when they were stationed in San Salvador in the 1960s. When the family's tour of duty was finished, they invited Rosa to return with them to Washington and continue working as their housekeeper. Once there, the family sponsored Rosa so that she could become a permanent resident of the United States, and soon she was able to send money to bring her husband, Javier, to Washington as well. Javier arrived in 1968 and found a job as a tailor in one of Washington's exclusive men's stores. In 1971 Javier and Rosa invited his niece Teresa (who was working as a domestic servant in San Salvador) to join them. Another American family that was seeking household help asked Rosa if she knew of any candidates for the position , and in this way Rosa arranged a job for Teresa. After eight years working as a live-in housekeeper for various families in...