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‘I Was Invisible’: The Maid-Turned-Star Who’s Taking On Racism in Brazil
Joyce Fernandes was a third-generation maid — until an employer caught
her reading a book. Now a rapper, author and TV host, she is spurring
“uncomfortable” conversations on race.
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“Making people feel uncomfortable is the only way things change,” said
Joyce Fernandes, who uses the stage name Preta Rara.
“Making people feel uncomfortable is the only way things change,” said
Joyce Fernandes, who uses the stage name Preta Rara.Credit...Victor
Moriyama for The New York Times
ByErnesto Londoño <https://www.nytimes.com/by/ernesto-londono>
* NYT, Feb. 19, 2021Updated10:30 a.m. ET
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — It was a cherished ritual that Joyce Fernandes saved
for the end of the shift of a job she despised.
After finishing tidying up every other room in one of the São Paulo
apartments she cleaned, Ms. Fernandes took her sweet time dusting a
bookshelf in the living room, where she inevitably got lost in a book.
She feared she would get a stern talking to when the apartment’s owner
walked in one day in 2008 as she was devouring “Olga: Revolutionary and
Martyr,” a biography of a German communist militant who spent years in
Brazil before being executed by Nazi Germany.
Instead of a reprimand, the moment spurred a remarkable career
transition for Ms. Fernandes, who is now among the highest-profile Black
Brazilians, driving candid conversations about racism and inequality.
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The employer, after hearing Ms. Fernandes talk about her passion for
history, encouraged her to enroll in college. She did. She earned a
degree in history in 2012, and has since developed a large following as
an Instagram personality and a rapper, written a book about the lives of
Brazilian maids and become a television host.
Her multifaceted career and rising profile sometimes feel like a mirage,
she says, when she recalls how most of her early employers dismissed her
aspirations.
“They always said there was no point in getting an education,” said Ms.
Fernandes, whose stage name is Preta Rara, which means unique Black
woman. “They said I was predestined to serve, just like my mother and my
grandmother, and that I should be happy with what was already predestined.”
Preordained her future was not.
Ms. Fernandes, 35, remembers a cloistered childhood in Santos, a coastal
city in the state of São Paulo. Her mother, also a maid, and her father,
a mailman, mostly kept their four children inside, fearing they could
get drawn into the criminal activity that was pervasive in their
neighborhood.
“I tend to say that I was raised by Brazilian television,” Ms. Fernandes
said. “It was the only form of entertainment we had living in a
marginalized area.”
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Spending countless hours watching soap operas and variety shows gave Ms.
Fernandes her first window into Brazil’s rampant racism, which became
the dominant theme of her work as an author and an artist.
“You didn’t see Black people being well represented,” she said. “I would
only see people like me in the role of slaves or maids — people in the
margins.”
After graduating from high school, Ms. Fernandes saw racism through a
different lens when she set out to find work in sales or as a
receptionist. She started receiving calls for interviews only when she
reluctantly followed a piece of advice offered by a Black career coach:
Never send out résumés with a photo.
“I sent out my résumé without a photo, and the next week I was flooded
with calls to come in for interviews,” she said. “That’s when I realized
just how cruel Brazil can be for Black people.”
None of the interviews led to offers. After a few months, feeling
dejected, Ms. Fernandes followed in the footsteps of her grandmother and
mother and began picking up shifts cleaning homes.
“When I got home and told my mother that I had found work cleaning for a
family, she was very sad,” Ms. Fernandes said. “She knew I would soon
experience the things she went through.”
At several of the homes where she worked, Ms. Fernandes said, she was
not allowed to eat the food she prepared, entitled only to leftovers.
She was barred from using certain bathrooms and had to use the elevator
marked for “service” and steer clear of the one for “social” visits. She
was given stained and tattered clothes as hand-me-downs.
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“Employers think of you as their private property, like you’re an object
that belongs to them,” she said.
The indignities of those years haunted Ms. Fernandes long after she
stopped cleaning houses and found work as a high school history teacher.
The memories were weighing on her one day in June 2016 when she posted a
couple of anecdotes on Facebook. The post was meant to share a few
painful memories with friends, but it soon prompted a cascade of responses.
ImageA Facebook post that Ms. Fernandes wrote in 2016 was a move to
share some painful memories with friends. It prompted a cascade of
responses.
A Facebook post that Ms. Fernandes wrote in 2016 was a move to share
some painful memories with friends. It prompted a cascade of
responses.Credit...Victor Moriyama for The New York Times
Thousands of former and current maids created posts of their own using
the hashtag #I’mAMaid. Several disclosed being sexually harassed on the
job. The volume and rawness of the responses compelled Ms. Fernandes to
record first-person accounts in a book published in 2019.
It begins with the story of her grandmother, Noêmia Caetano Fernandes,
who began working as a maid at 14 and remembered being fed only after
everyone in the family had finished eating.
The second account, by Ms. Fernandes’s mother, Maria Helena da Silva
Fernandes, is among the most harrowing in the book. The elder Ms.
Fernandes was effectively abducted as a child by a family that promised
to pay for her education and meals but instead forced her into servitude.
“I was forced to sleep in a little wooden box next to the dog kennel,”
the mother says in the book. She was rescued the day she menstruated for
the first time. She was home alone and screamed at the sight of blood,
which prompted neighbors to call the authorities.
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Ms. Fernandes, the mother, began working as a maid at 17. She remembers
one boss who treated her warmly, becoming a motherly figure, and others
who humiliated her. “The only trauma that remains is not having learned
how to read and write,” she told her daughter.
The book generated plenty of news media coverage and invitations to
appear on television shows and podcasts. Ms. Fernandes’s goal was to
remind Brazilians of power structures that many choose not to reflect on
but are intimately familiar with.
She said she intended the book to be a difficult read.
“I believe that by making people feel uncomfortable is the only way
things change,” she said.
According to a2019 government report
<https://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=35807#:~:text=As%20trabalhadoras%20dom%C3%A9sticas%20representam%20atualmente,%2C6%25%20das%20negras>,
the overwhelming majority of Brazil’s estimated six million domestic
workers are Black women with few years of formal education. Maids work
50 hours per week on average, and their median salary was 92 percent
below the minimum wage.
Benedita da Silva <https://www.instagram.com/instadabene/?hl=en>, one of
Brazil’s few Black female lawmakers, also worked as a maid early in her
career. She credited Ms. Fernandes with blending art and activism
brilliantly to raise awareness about labor abuses and racism.
“As an artist she reaches a slice of the population, the middle class,
where public opinion is shaped,” Ms. da Silva said in an interview. The
book, Ms. da Silva said, struck a raw chord. “Often, only after people
read the book do they realize they are perpetuating these situations.”
After the book was published, Ms. Fernandes’s followingon Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/pretararaoficial/?hl=en>, her preferred
social media platform, exploded. To her more than 166,000 followers, she
comes across as raw and unscripted in videos and posts that she devotes
hours to curating.
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She talks about serious issues like police brutality and sexual abuse.
She speaks with pride about coming to love and celebrate her body, which
doesn’t fit the Brazilian bombshell stereotype.
The traction she gets on social media helped Ms. Fernandesland a
television gig <https://globoplay.globo.com/v/9119845/programa/>last
year hosting a talk show on Globo, the country’s largest cable network.
Yet that mainstream platform hasn’t led her to change her style or
modulate her message.
“I was invisible in this society for too long,” Ms. Fernandes said,
before flashing a smile. “So now everybody has to soak up my delightful
figure wherever I happen to be.”
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