Tanya Saracho’s world shifted in 2001 during an improv exercise with the members of Teatro Luna. “We were doing all these workshops about mothers for our second show, and I was working with Erika Martinez,” she says. “I would say, ‘My mother has the most beautiful hands–she has never worked.’ And Erika would say something like, ‘My mother has the roughest hands–she has worked every day of her life.’”
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The only jobs she could get were working in a sweatshop or cleaning houses. She did both–and she took her children with her. “I didn’t know it was a sweatshop then,” says Martinez. “But me and my brother would cut strings and put the plastic on the shirts. And we would go with my mother to clean houses and a foot doctor’s office.”
Saracho was born in Los Mochis, Mexico, but grew up in the border town of McAllen, Texas. “It took 18 hours to reach another American state from home, but only ten minutes to go to Mexico,” she says. Her father, a Mexican politician, was wealthy enough to buy her a house of her own for her 18th birthday. “Having a maid,” she says, “is the tradition, the culture.”
Saracho’s parents processed Ema’s papers and got her a passport, though not work papers. “Ema didn’t know how to read or write when she came to us,” she says. “I don’t know how she learned. Who told her about her period? Who bought her pads? How did she get clothes when she was a teenager? How did she meet her boyfriend? She never went out. A whole world opened in my head.”
Martinez says she identifies with Kita, especially when Kita’s trying to go to college and make a better life for herself, but she understands Fernanda too. Her mother’s family in the Dominican Republic had servants, and she remembers a weekend with her extended family at a beach house. They took one of the servants with them.
