Breathe
By Frida Mendoza
Last Sunday, after having a little break from not fighting in networks, one of Sanjuana Martinez's many regrettable tweets arrived on my side of Twitter and outraged me like many, many other people.
Basically, the former director of the now defunct Notimex "demanded sorority and solidarity" from Luisa Cantú because she had the audacity to bring her babies to her office. Things did not stop and when comments suggested the need for a daycare center at Canal Once, Martinez said yes, but "only if the mothers paid for it because if the Mexican State did it there it was something else," forgetting the disappearance of daycare centers and full-time schools.
But it is not only Sanjuana, a person whose record as a public servant shows that she violated labor rights. To my mind came the memory of two annoyed bosses when a friend took his two-year-old son to the office for a few hours, muttering "and he can't leave him with his mom?!", or the looks at colleagues who had to leave before they left because they were called unexpectedly from their children's schools. No, you don't think so. Apparently all these people did not have a childhood, nor do they care about the current ones, even if they pretend they do.
As was to be expected in Luisa's case, the outrage came because beyond truly seeking a level playing field for working mothers (and I would add: for all caregivers), it became an attack that rather sought to prohibit and limit spaces for coexistence and care.
To say that there is concern for the general interest of children and that there are workplaces where children cannot be for safety reasons is a truism if we think of places like factories (and not all of them) or places where they can get hurt and where there is no daycare or constant supervision, not a newsroom where the mother sits at a desk, walks between different spaces and perhaps there are few hours of the day when she can watch them grow up.
Last week, before this discussion forced by the former official reached Twitter, I published a text in EMEEQUIS that was born out of concern for the "llegamos todas" and Claudia Sheinbaum's promise in her reading in the Zócalo to implement the National Care System.
For the text I spoke to working mothers who - fortunately, they told me - do home office and shared their feelings with me in interviews at midnight or at lunchtime when they could take a break between work and family life.
But what if we talk about mothers who are in the informal sector and do not have a single benefit? Or about those who do not have the chance to enter the labor market because caregiving absorbs their entire working day?
The problem is the thinking of many people like Sanjuana who ignore -on purpose or unintentionally- the need for a National Care System and assume that all care and expenses must be absorbed by mothers and refuse to create public policies to facilitate this enormous challenge, or propose it in a vacuum without considering how to finance it -cof, cof, fiscal reform, cof, cof-.
I write this out of genuine concern as a journalist, colleague, friend and woman in her thirties who is still debating whether she will be a mother because beyond whether I have a support network or a partner with whom to hold, raise and care for a child, outside there is a system that limits and judges working mothers who have their children with them or fathers present because "where is the mom?".
And this goes for all people who hold similar positions as Sanjuana: care is not free. In Mexico during 2022 more than 32 million people cared for a family member, according to Inegi.
In the same year, Inegi calculated that 7.2 billion pesos in economic value were generated by unpaid domestic and care work. This amount is equivalent to 24.3% of the national GDP that year.
Thinking about caregiving is to think that the Mexican State (and by this I mean the government but also the private/business sector) has to get involved and generate or promote working conditions, infrastructure, mobility, health and many more if it is genuinely interested so that "we all get there". Because if we want it to happen, the upbringing would have to be collective.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
Comments ()