brazil's untold stories
by Mary Alice Scott

To study domestic servants, Katy O'Leary went straight to the source.

n undergraduate thesis can be a daunting undertaking, especially when you're trying to write one that involves a couple of trips to Brazil and care for two young children. But with some help from her mother, Katy O'Leary took her son Nicholas and daughter Janice with her to São Carlos, São Paulo, to interview domestic servants in Brazil. Her kids played with the children of the domestic servants while O'Leary interviewed the women.

.: Katy O'Leary with her children, Nicholas and Janice. Photo by Jason Smith; click to enlarge. :.

O'Leary says her seven-year-old son was probably too young to understand what was going on, but her daughter's curiosity about her Brazilian playmates motivated O'Leary to pursue her research. She says of her daughter, who is 12 years old, "It was an astonishing observation from her that even though they were poor they were very much like her. That had a big impact on her. She was fascinated by how these people lived."

O'Leary took an interest in domestic servants just after high school when she visited Daniela, a Brazilian exchange student who had lived with her family in the United States. Daniela's family had a domestic servant. "I was amazed that there was this woman in the house that cleaned up after me at every turn. I was very curious about what that was all about," O'Leary says.

She always knew that she wanted to go back to Brazil, but it wasn't until she'd worked in real estate for several years, gone back to college, and faced an undergraduate thesis that she remembered domestic servants. At 31, she went back to find out what was going on. "I was intrigued by these women who basically cared for everybody in the middle class and above in Brazil," she says. "They do everything — washing, cooking, cleaning, caring for the kids. They run the household really."

ot many people had done the kind of research that O'Leary wanted to do. "There's been a lot of research done on the relationships between the patroa (patron or boss) and the maid," she says. "Researchers talk about how oppressed domestic servants are, how everybody thinks they are going to steal, how they're hungry and poor, and how the patroa is very oppressive and keeps them in that situation. It's pretty easy to see that dynamic."

.: A homemade cart pulled by horses is a common mode of transportation for residents of favellas in Brazil. Photo by Katy O'Leary; click to enlarge. :.

O'Leary wanted to do something different, something that focused more on the women and less on the boss. "I wanted to focus on what they think, what they want, what their views are," O'Leary says.