Ana Beatriz da Silva still remembers her first home: a tiny room behind the kitchen of a beachfront apartment in Rio de Janeiro, where her mother worked as a maid.
The room was barely bigger than a closet, hot and stifling, she said, with only a small window for air. Da Silva shared the cramped space with her mother and older brother until she was 6.
“We lived like that — stuffed in a cubicle,” said da Silva, 49, a geography teacher.
The experience convinced da Silva that she could never have a maid’s room in her own home. So when she rented an aging apartment in a middle-class area of Rio, she swiftly turned the servant’s quarters into an office.
“The maid’s room is our colonial heritage,” da Silva said. “It’s shameful.”
Many Brazilians increasingly feel the same way.
Maid’s rooms have been a fixture in Brazil’s homes for generations, a vestige of its long history of slavery and a tangible marker of inequality in a country where, after abolition, many affluent families relied on low paid, mostly Black domestic workers to clean, cook and care for children. Some worked around the clock for pennies; others toiled only in exchange for room and board.
But Brazil is undergoing a reckoning with its legacy of enslaving people and how this painful past has shaped everything from the economy to architecture.
The debate has spilled over to the maid’s room, which many say is a racist, classist relic with no place in modern homes.
“Architecture only reflects what society says is normal,” said Stephanie Ribeiro, an architect and designer who has been studying the maid’s room for over a decade. “And, for many people, the maid’s room doesn’t make sense anymore.”
Unlike their parents’ generation, younger people are calling out inequities in Brazil, which has a majority Black population.
The face of the country’s middle class is changing, too, as Black and mixed-race Brazilians make economic strides but reject some markers of affluence, such as maids.
A raft of labor laws — a guaranteed 44-hour workweek, a standardized minimum wage and sick pay — have made live-in maids more costly, pushing what was once a symbol of financial success out of many Brazilians’ reach. As a result, fewer domestic workers live in their employers’ homes.
Some people say having a dedicated space is useful for maids to store belongings or take a lunch break. Others argue that the rooms provide essential housing for domestic workers who move to urban centers from distant rural areas, or those living on the poorer fringes of the city, hours away from their employers’ homes.
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But many disagree.
“There’s no need for this worker to spend the night,” said Luiza Batista, coordinator of the National Federation of Domestic Workers, a union representing about 14,000 maids. “This person works all day. She needs a decent place to rest. She needs to be able to clock out.”
Batista, 68, said she started working as a live-in maid when she was 9 and spent decades cleaning, cooking and caring for wealthy families. In one home, Batista and another worker shared a room filled with cleaning supplies, construction material and a gas canister.
“You spent the night,” Batista recalled, “breathing in cleaning products.”
Maid’s rooms still often double as storage closets, crammed with everything from broken appliances to spare tools, she said. “This space is never just a place for the worker to rest.”
Maid’s rooms, of course, are not unique to Brazil; they are often built into the homes of wealthy families across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
In Latin America, they have gradually disappeared from countries such as Chile and Argentina, where worker protections have made live-in maids less affordable. But they persist elsewhere, including Colombia, Bolivia and Mexico, despite pushback from labor activists.
Now, as Brazilians sour on maid’s rooms, they are turning them into libraries, lounges and walk-in closets.
Rising real estate prices in Brazil’s major cities mean more developers are building smaller apartments without maids’ rooms, and homebuyers are choosier about how to use their shrinking square footage.
“Brazilian architecture is seeking a new identity,” said Wesley Lemos, an architect who has designed luxury homes across Brazil. “So the maid’s room is disappearing from blueprints.”
The idea of a servant’s room always made Diogo Acosta uncomfortable. The maid who worked for his family would sometimes spend the night in a cramped room behind the laundry room of their spacious home, in Rio’s wealthy Leblon neighborhood.
“It was so small, the room basically only fit her mattress,” said Acosta, 34, a professional saxophone player. “Even as a child, I thought it was so strange.”
Once he moved out, Acosta lived in a string of rentals where he turned the maid’s rooms into something else. In one apartment, it was a study. In another, a brightly painted guest bedroom.
And when he moved into a new apartment two years ago, the designated maid’s room measured just 37 square feet and lacked a window, which both horrified him and made the room perfect for a soundproof music studio.
“It’s sad to think that, before this, someone slept here,” he said.
The renovation was more than just practical. For Acosta, who hires a worker to clean his home once a month, reimagining the maid’s room also carried a symbolic meaning. “When we give it other uses, we are not just changing an apartment,’’ he said, “we are changing social relations, too.”
Historians trace the maid’s room back to slave quarters, known as senzalas in Portuguese, attached to the slave owner’s house. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, later than any other country in the Western Hemisphere.
But many freed people — lacking financial means — remained on these same properties, serving families that once enslaved them in exchange for room, board and a small salary.
When industrialization fed a wave of migration to cities, wealthy families translated the idea of servants quarters for an urban setting: In Rio, sprawling oceanfront apartments were built in the 1930s and ’40s with tiny, windowless rooms for maids.
“Maid’s rooms are the modern-day slave quarters,” said Joyce Fernandes, a historian, rapper and writer who shot to fame after sharing her own experiences as a third-generation maid.
In Brazil, where the gap between rich and poor is wider than anywhere else in South America, the rooms went unquestioned for decades.
When the country’s capital, Brasília, was built from scratch in the late 1950s, renowned architects such as Oscar Niemeyer designed buildings with servant quarters, maid’s bathrooms and service elevators, cementing historic inequalities into a modernist landscape.
In the 1980s and ’90s, popular television soap operas featured wealthy, white families being served by mostly Black maids who lived in rooms tucked away inside luxurious mansions. In the early 2000s, Brazil’s most popular children’s shows featured maids who never left the kitchen.
“Even the poor, who often worked in these jobs, dreamed of one day becoming rich and having someone serving them,” said Joice Berth, an urbanist and architect.
Still, some people, even domestic workers, believe there remains a place for a servant’s room.
Rosângela de Morais, 48, a domestic worker in the Brazilian city of Salvador, started working as a live-in maid when she was just 10.
De Morais no longer lives in the homes where she works. But, as maid’s quarters disappear, she says domestic workers are left with no place to change into uniforms, store belongings or take a lunch break.
While she considers maid’s rooms in their traditional form inhumane, she doesn’t think removing them altogether is the answer. “It would be better to keep this space, so we have a corner of our own,” she said. “A clean, airy room with a window, where you can rest with dignity.”
Letícia Carvalho, 34, a lawyer from the city of Aracaju, employs four domestic workers, one of whom lives in her home.
“She can’t go back and forth every day,” Carvalho said.
Still, Carvalho wanted a different kind of maid’s room. She made it bigger than usual, with a large window, air conditioning and a hot shower. “We wanted to bring a bit more comfort to the people working for us,” she said.
Even as Brazil shifts away from maid’s rooms, social divisions persist in other ways. Most homes still have service bathrooms reserved for workers. And most buildings have separate entrances and elevators for maids, nannies, dog walkers and food delivery workers, though some are also moving to remove those divisions.
Still, da Silva, the teacher, sees the vanishing maid’s room as evidence that Brazil is grappling with its painful past.
When da Silva made a down payment on her first home this year, she was happy to discover that it didn’t have a maid’s room.
“It’s freeing, not to have this heavy history,” she said. “Instead, I’ll have a really big kitchen.”
This article originally appeared in. © 2024 The New York Times
