When Diego secured a job cleaning apartments three years ago in Condesa, an upscale borough in Mexico City where international migrants with money to spare tend to live, it was an “incredible blessing.”*
He would not have to pay rent since the managers would need him to live in the building. The pay was low and social security nonexistent.
It was a midday job with work from 9 a.m to 2 p.m. The rest of the day, his bosses told him, he could work wherever he pleased. Maybe even find something that would give him health insurance. Diego started selling cigarettes and gum outside a club in Polanco, another posh neighborhood. It was good money then.
The former janitor at the same building, who was pushing 70, had recommended him for the job. He was going to another building and his vacant spot could go to this 40-year-old from Oaxaca.
That was before the pandemic.
Two weeks ago, the janitor who recommended Diego died from COVID-19. His sons had wanted him to stop cleaning for a living for fear of contracting the virus. He struggled for a week before finally succumbing.
Work has dried up. Very few are asking for janitors or maids right now. Clubs are closed. Diego has resorted to selling Jell-O on the street and running errands for the tenants in his building.
“I have many, many acquaintances and friends and relatives who have died,” Diego, who moved to the capital when he was 16, said. “The situation is very bad. Yesterday, my mother fell and fractured her leg. She’s 83 and lives in a small town in Oaxaca.”
Thankfully, he said, she’s signed up to obtain the vaccine even though he had to convince her mother that, no, the government was not trying to kill her or other indigenous people with the vaccine. Many in his hometown don’t speak Spanish but Mixtec, an indigenous language.
But now he has to think about the medical costs regarding her injury. It could be up to 10 to 40 thousand pesos. Diego is not sure on the exact price, it’s only hearsay. He hasn’t been to a hospital in a while.
“I won’t be able to go back to my town, it’s too complicated right now,” Diego said. “And I have to work.”
Without social security or health insurance, Diego sees a doctor from a nearby Farmacia Similar, the pharmacies with low cost products. He’s seen her for 20 years, nearly as long as he’s been in the City.
She’s usually right in diagnosing what’s wrong, he tells me. I had influenza last December and it was really, really tough. I had to take two COVID tests and thankfully they came out negative. It was only then that I was given medicine but for six days I was in bed, unable to do anything.
Many of the tenants in Diego’s building are foreigners. He knows all of them by now though some have left due to the current state of affairs. The tenants used to be all over the world. Diego recalls the Mexican who lived in the Netherlands and the English man who came back at the onset of the pandemic after visiting a number of countries in Europe.
“We were so afraid of cleaning their places and getting COVID,” Diego sighs. “We take as many precautions as we can. Some of us have seen many friends and relatives die due to COVID.”
A distant aunt also died from the virus last May. Her daughter, a dentist, had seen a patient with it. When she unwittingly brought it home, it struck everyone: her brothers, father, mother. The dentist, severely weakened, was unable to work for two months.
For now, Diego is planning on making lunch meals - tortas and gelatinas - for those in the area to buy. He’ll make sure they’re safe and cheap and so others can feel comfortable buying them.
Next week, he says. That’s when I’ll have to commit to this 100 percent, too. He wants to do something more “laborious” but options are very limited right now.
He’s already chosen the small plastic containers for the Jell-O. He also walks dogs and runs errands for tenants and neighbors. Whatever he can find to earn something. Right now, it’s not to pay rent.
Over half of Mexico’s labor force - 22.6 million people according to the Mexican government -works in the informal sector, or in jobs that do not provide social security, health insurance, or pensions. A day without work is a day without pay.
*pseudonym