[Pictured: Judith Arellano Lozada by Marlyn Sanchez Nol]
Tired, scared, lonely…those were the three words that 33-year-old Claudia Maria Solorzano used to describe the past year and a half of her life as she proceeded to scrub a dirty restroom sink. Solorzano is a hospitality worker at the Marina Sanctuary Resort, where she’s worked for two and a half years.
“If I could have chosen a different occupation to endure a pandemic I definitely would have. There was not a single day last year where I didn’t fear if I’d have a job to come back to and food to provide for my daughter,” Solorazano said. At the time Solorzano’s partner — a construction general laborer — had been laid off and Solorzano’s income was keeping the family of three afloat.
Solorzano found the vacant position at the start of 2020 while searching craigslist for housekeeping related jobs. For Solorzano, originally from Jalisco, Mexico, housekeeping seemed like something “within her limited reach of jobs,” she explained. Solorzano did not believe her limited educational level coupled with her inability to speak English worked in her favor when job hunting.
Likewise, she couldn’t understand why walking into work every single day was a gamble. “I’d bite all of my nails off imagining how my boss was going to tell me there wasn’t space for me anymore because the pandemic seemed never ending. But at the same time I was conflicted on how I would manage to keep myself and my daughter safe from the virus,” Solorzano said.
Then what Solorzano feared the most happened, she was let go of her job. She still had a car payment, rent, the hospital bills from her daughter’s recent medical stay and, what seemed like, an endless list of other payments she would no longer be able to afford. Without realizing it, Solorzano became just one of the many Latina women working in the service industry who would lose their jobs during the pandemic.
The Problem
Latina and Hispanic women in the United States have been disproportionately impacted by unemployment during the pandemic, despite being the largest group of women workers in the U.S., second to non-Hispanic whites, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
In April 2020, Hispanic or Latina women exhibited the highest unemployment rate of any group at 20.1 percent, according to a report by American Progress. This is especially unfortunate considering the already existing inequities that Latinas face. For example, today on average Latinas earn $0.55 for every dollar earned by white men, a pay gap that surpasses women in all other racial groups, according to a report conducted by LeanIn.
Judith Arellano Lozada, is a 28-year-old single mother of two and the sole bread-winner in her home. In 2018, Latina mothers accounted for 41.4 percent of those who were the primary or sole breadwinners for their families.
Lozada, who only speaks Spanish, was let go unexpectedly from her housekeeping job at La Playa, a hotel in Carmel, after its sudden closure during the height of the pandemic. In 2020, the year Lozada lost her job, there were nearly a million job losses in California hotels, according to the American Hotel and Lodging Association. These losses were all a direct result of COVID-19.
“If this continues and I stop receiving my unemployment check what will happen,” Lozada said. “What will I do, where will I work if they say the virus is everywhere?… I felt anxiety…I felt stress…I could not sleep.”
Lozada arrived in Seaside, California seven years ago from a small town in Jalisco, Mexico, called Villa Guerrero. She escaped a “physically and emotionally abusive relationship” with her previous partner and father of her two children, she said.
“The relationship got to a point where I could no longer allow my children to grow up in such a hostile environment. I did not want my sons to grow up and believe it was correct to treat women the way I was being treated,” Lozada said. Upon her arrival in California, Lozada worked for a friend’s cleaning business, where she cleaned homes around the area.
A few months later, she was told about hotel housekeeping, where she was promised higher pay.
For Lozada, anything that could provide better income meant that she could bring her children from Mexico sooner. “This was an opportunity I could simply not pass up considering my situation,” Lozada said.
She remembers “like it was just yesterday” the moment she was informed that the hotel, La Playa — where she had worked for the past three years — was closing down.
The National Women’s Law Center indicates that between February and April 2020, the leisure and hospitality sector was left without about half its workforce, or more than 8.3 million jobs. Women accounted for 54 percent of those overall job losses.
After the closure of the hotel, Lozada remained unemployed until March 3, 2021, when she began work at the Marina Sanctuary Resort — one of Lozada’s three current jobs.
Lozada works close to 60 hours per week, between managing an online clothing boutique, cleaning homes for a friend’s housekeeping business and the resort.
“I probably cried the first month because I was not accustomed to that type of work because it’s so heavy,” Lozada said. Daily, she climbs multiple flights of stairs, reaching the rooms that need to be cleaned. On average, Lozada said that she is assigned 15 rooms to clean by the end of her workday.
But despite having work, fear always lingered. Her biggest fear was getting sick and not having a way to provide for her two children. “Guests just didn’t care. They wouldn’t wear their masks and that paralyzing fear of getting sick was another point of anxiety for me,” she said.
Lozada’s fear was warranted.
As of April 19, 2022, Latinos made up 24.9 percent of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., according to a report in Salud America.
Despite this uncertainty around her job and health, Lozada has begun school to obtain her GED. Her dream of one day opening her own cleaning business will remain “unattainable” until she gets an education that can bring her some security, she said.
Lozada’s desire for education represents a broader phenomenon for Latinas, who hold only 7.4 percent of the degrees earned by women despite being 16 percent of the female population, according to a 2012 report by American Progress.
“This is not where it ends for me and I have complete control of that,” Lozada said. “I will not be a replaceable item off a shelf that is chosen when needed.”
While women like Lozada and Solorzano find themselves in an industry that was severely impacted by the pandemic, there are women in different industries that were not as financially affected, but found themselves facing many of the same fears and insecurities.
The above story is by SF State journalism student Marlyn Sanchez Nol, who in Spring 2022 completed her capstone project in the JOUR 695 Senior Seminar class. The project looks inside the lives of Latinas working in the service industry during the pandemic, and has been split into parts. The next installment of this series will be published on June 16. All quotes have been translated from Spanish to English by the author.