The Other Chile (Cecilia & Patricia)

Cecilia has been working in the same hotel in Santiago for seven years. "I like it a lot," she says. Patricia, whose job is to inspect Cecilia's work, is within earshot, so I wonder if she really means it. "When I started, I was nervous, because it's difficult to get a job like this one. With health benefits, twenty-one days of paid vacation, and they pay you on time. This kind of job you get if you know someone. You need to be trusted. And it starts you at 300,000 pesos, more than minimum wage. Now I make 380,000 a month. And that's good for Chile, especially now because foreigners come over and work for less, and they change jobs frequently just to get paid more." // "Foreigners?" I ask. // "You know, Haitians and Dominicans—so many of them! And we try to stay open-minded, but they don't come to Chile as professionals, they're not architects or engineers. They are workers like us, people of the pueblo, and they work, undocumented, for no money. Those of us from Chile were here when it was tough. We struggled for jobs with benefits, and now foreigners come to Chile to take advantage of what we worked hard for." Patricia joins in and adds, "I was a child during the dictatorship. But I was born into it. So it was normal, a way of life. It's true that at night we had to stay home, everyone inside. We couldn't speak about politics or listen to music—none of the music from the Left or even the poems of Neruda. But us workers, all we wanted was to be left alone. There was no delinquency, no drugs. It was a country of tranquility. The streets were quiet. We didn't know people were going missing because it wasn't in the news. We learned about it later. If we had been Communists, it would've been different, because they were persecuted. But my mother was a teacher, and we just worked, like we work now." // Patricia holds a clipboard, Cecelia holds on to the broom. They clearly agree. "Look," Patricia says, "if you don't know something bad is happening, you live in peace. Now people make it seem like it was all bad. But for us, it was life."