Maid in Manhattan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXkSBXrdDxs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhtAyshwDFk

When I lived in Orange County California as a kid, I formed a single story about Hispanic women because of my limited experience with them. We had a "cleaning lady" that would come to our house once a week. She was Latina, in my mothers wording "very poor," and she didn't speak any english. This was only confirmed by television shows and movies like,  Maid in Manhattan and Spanglish with underprivileged, Hispanic women working as some form of "the help" falling in love with the white men they work for, single or married. When I moved to Utah, I was shocked that white women cleaned houses. As I've grown older I've met many more Hispanic women that have added countless stories to my single story. But, I still feel that this single story of the role of Hispanic women is perpetuated in the media - maids laboring in wealthy white homes while their husbands landscape outside. 

There is a TV show on Lifetime now called Devious Maids, and every single character in it is Latina. As exemplified by the "graph" from the New York film festival and the newspaper article "Trying to Get Beyond the Role of the Maid," the one media role that seems to be in abundance for Hispanic women is the Maid. Whether it's Consuela from Family Guy or Jennifer Lopez playing the Hispanic Cinderella of New York City, the role seems to be portrayed similarly. This maid role can be seen as the sexy, husband-stealing immigrant who speaks very little english (as in Spanglish) - or simply the very poor woman trying to support her children by cleaning the homes of the ungrateful wealthy white. The newspaper ads I found added to this idea, especially the Versace and Olay adds. The Olay ad featured a lounging white woman with a Hispanic housekeeper cleaning in the back, and a Latina maid cleaning up after white children in the Versace ad. Although the ad featuring the babies speaks against prejudice, it only furthers the stereotype by calling attention to the fact that Hispanic women are labelled as the housekeepers of white America.  The magazine ad for the cleaning trolley is only a further insult with a little Hispanic girl playing with the housekeeping supplies, or should we say practicing? 

This single story of the Hispanic woman is harmful and still now perpetuated in the media. I now know that many different races clean houses, in fact I worked as a private home cleaner myself, but as a child this was a single story that I believed and understood as fact. With movies and television shows featuring promiscuous Hispanic maids, they help write a harmful single story about a group of Americans. The hashtag #hispanicgirlsunited is making it's mark in Twitter history against the cruel stereotyping of Donald Trump, helping Americans see how harmful these single stories of Hispanics citizens of the United States of America are.