“We Move the World”: Domestic Workers, Anti-Racism and Collective Power in Colombia

March 30 — International Domestic Workers’ Day in Latin America — highlights a stark reality: between 11 and 18 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean are engaged in paid domestic work, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the International Labour Organization (ILO). In Colombia alone, between 680,000 and nearly 1 million people work in the sector, more than 95% of them women. Yet for years, over 80% have been denied access to basic labor rights, including social security, while only a small minority hold formal contracts.

For years, domestic workers and feminist movements have denounced a reality that has been systematically rendered invisible — one that is now entering public debate through a Netflix series that reaches mass audiences.

“María La Caprichosa” has become a ratings phenomenon, reaching the Top 10 most-watched series in several Latin American countries and breaking with decades of dominant narratives in regional television. Instead of a white, urban, middle-class protagonist, the series centers a Black woman, a domestic worker and union leader, whose story is not aspirational fiction but a real trajectory of organizing and struggle.

At ESCR-Net, we spoke with Claribed Palacios, president of Unión de Trabajadoras Afrocolombianas del Servicio Doméstico (UTRASD), and María Roa, founder of the union and the woman whose life inspired the series, about the impact of this visibility and ongoing struggles for labor rights, racial justice, and the recognition of care work in Colombia.

For María Roa, the union’s first president, this narrative shift carries a clear political meaning: “The stories of domestic workers are not told … and today many women come up to me and say: I want to speak, too.”

Beyond individual recognition, what is at stake is the possibility that the experiences of domestic workers — historically confined to the private sphere — become visible and understandable to broad sectors of society.

The series has opened a crack in a deeply rooted regime of silence. For decades, many women have faced violence, discrimination and exploitation without spaces to name those experiences.

María’s story is the story of many women

While the series is inspired by María Roa’s life, both she and Claribed Palacios insist it cannot be understood as an isolated individual trajectory. Her story is inseparable from the organizing process that made it possible.

“In María, the struggle of hundreds of women comes together … the women who could not speak,” Claribed said.

UTRASD was founded in 2013 by 28 Afro-Colombian women following earlier processes of gathering, reflection, and research. Since then, the union has grown, expanded territorially, and built a political voice capable of influencing national debates on labor rights, care, and public policy. By 2020, membership had surpassed 650 women, including more than 150 who joined during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For these leaders, what matters is not only that the story of an Afro-Colombian domestic worker has reached a global platform, but that this recognition helps make visible the organization, sustained struggle, and support networks behind it.

When people speak about the “care economy,” there is a risk it becomes an abstract category disconnected from the daily realities of those who sustain life. The reflections of María Roa and Claribed Palacios bring this concept back to its concrete dimension: body, time, and labor.

Cooking, cleaning, caring for children, supporting people who are ill, and sustaining daily life in other households are tasks that enable millions of people to participate in the labor market. Yet this work remains systematically invisible and undervalued.

“We work for everyone, but in the end we work for no one,” Claribed said.

This statement captures a persistent inequality. Domestic workers sustain collective well-being but face precarious conditions, low wages and lack of recognition.

In response, ESCR-Net advances a political framework based on the 6 Rs of care: recognition, redistribution, reduction, rights, representation, and reformulate the economy as a care economy. María and Claribed’s testimonies highlight the need to recognize care as a right and to ensure it is provided under dignified conditions.

In Colombia, as around the world, care work falls disproportionately on women — many of them racialized and in vulnerable situations — rather than being collectively assumed by the state, the private sector, and households. Both María and Claribed stress the urgency of ensuring decent working conditions, fair wages and effective access to rights, as well as the importance of domestic workers participating in public policy decision-making.

At the same time, domestic work in Colombia is deeply shaped by structural racism. Both women describe a recurring experience: Black women are pre-assigned a place in domestic service. When they arrive in cities, many are not asked about their education or aspirations. It is assumed that this is their destiny. This association between Blackness, poverty and servitude is not just historical — it continues to operate today as a concrete social order.

This racism is expressed in everyday treatment, in language and in the persistent devaluation of domestic work. What these leaders denounce is a form of dehumanization rooted in colonial histories that continues to be reproduced within households.

Naming this reality makes it clear that the problem goes beyond informality or labor violations and reflects a deeper structure of inequality that determines who provides care, under what conditions and with what level of recognition.

Beyond Colombia: toward just care systems

The visibility generated by the series in Latin America is not just a media phenomenon — it is a political opportunity to center the agendas that domestic workers’ unions and organizations have been building for years in Colombia and across the global South.

In Colombia, one of the central challenges has been ensuring that labor rights are enforced in spaces historically considered private. UTRASD has pushed for legislation requiring labor inspections in households. Without such mechanisms, violations, long hours, nonpayment, and lack of social security continue behind closed doors.

After years of advocacy, care has begun to gain visibility in Colombia’s public agenda, leading to advances such as the development of a National Care System and policies to redistribute care responsibilities. However, as María Roa noted, “Paper can hold everything … but in practice, we have to see how it is implemented.”

She also offers a powerful reflection: imagining what would happen if all domestic workers stopped working for a day. This idea resonates with initiatives promoted by women’s movements and spaces like ESCR-Net, which have advanced the concept of a care strike as a way to make visible the central role of this work in sustaining life.

“Rights don’t come without action.”

In a sector marked by isolation and fragmentation, Claribed Palacios and María Roa stress the importance of strengthening collective organizing — not only locally, but across the region. They highlight that domestic workers across Latin America continue to face similar conditions: precariousness, discrimination, and lack of recognition. In this shared reality, organizing becomes a key tool for building power beyond borders.

María frames it as an invitation to recognize oneself and overcome fear: “Domestic work is work … with love and with pride.” Her call is for more women to raise their voices, identify themselves as workers with rights, and connect with unions and organizing processes in their communities.

Claribed emphasizes that rights are neither automatic nor individual — they are the result of collective action. “Rights won’t come to you at home … you have to go out and fight for them with others.”

In a sector that has long been invisible and undervalued, organizing is no longer optional — it is essential for change. As María puts it: “If we don’t go to work, the world stops.”