commissions for parties and my profits increase. For now, I ' m barely going by." Marta graduated as locomotive technician and was assigned to the railways company. When I asked her why she chose such an unusual profession for women, she told me that there was not much to choose from when she finished high school. She didn’ t have good grades to attend the pre-university institute and could not afford to be studying for a long time, since her household rested on her father’ s disability retirement only. " Imagine, I was the only female locomotive mechanic. It was hard work, because of the heavy items I had to lift, but I felt good; the men helped me." The recession dubbed as special period came and with it, the end of Marta’ s career as technician. " The staff was reduced and I was sent to clean. I stayed at the company for a year, until I left officially unemployed." It forced her to do whatever available: from cleaning private houses to washing dishes in a cafeteria and so on, until she found a full time job as a cleaning aid in a school. She survives with her poor wage of 265 pesos( around 11 USD) a month by reselling medicines and other goods virtually unavailable in the official markets. " If I do not do this, I do not eat," was her compelling answer to my question about the risks. Dora is an extreme case. She comes from a dysfunctional family with serious alcohol problems. Being a teenager, she got pregnant and left high school to became a housewife. Then she separated from her husband and started to work. Since she had no qualifications, the only option was cleaning jobs. Her main alternative income source is collecting cans and bottles, as well as disposable plates and cups that she meticulously scrubbed to resell them to private business or to party organizers. Collecting such items is a despised work, due to the connotations of digging into garbage or lurking inside cafes or restaurants. Many people engaged in such a task are practically living in destitution and suffering evident mental illnesses, but Dora continues undeterred. " Life is very hard, and if you want to eat you have to find yourself an extra job. The food you can buy at the grocery is less and less every day." The employment options are limited by the depression in the labor market, but the cleaning positions abound and are stable. Most of the women doing these jobs are black, who paradoxically integrate the ethnic group with lowest demographic weight in Santiago. The three interviewees confessed that working for the state not only ensures retirement, but also serves as shield against possible police harassment. The police officers are determined to judge the criminal status, especially in case of Afro-Cubans, starting from the occupation, although there are no statistics about profession and job distribution by race. The Population and Housing Census( 2012), refers to general categories such as low qualification trades. They are not broken down. We intuit that cleaning aid is included and it’ s actually one of the most feminized state jobs, also loaded with racial stereotypes. When I asked my interviewees what skin color prevails among their co-workers, I got one and a single answer: black or mulatto. The social perception of this job is negative. Only poor and needy women, especially black women, are employed as cleaning aids. It is well known that the segmentation in the labor market contributes to regenerate and keep the racial prejudices and discrimination mechanisms. Such segmentation means that individuals coming from certain groups, such as women or indigenous or Afro-Latin Americans, are concentrated in low ranked and poor quality jobs.
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