900,000 Amelia Bedelias

The bittersweet consolation of outgrowing your favorite children’s books is the chance to revisit them as adults with keener eyes. One of my own pet series of grade-school readers featured Amelia Bedelia, a bonneted and primly smocked English maid with a shaky grasp of her own native language. Much to the chagrin of her employers, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, Amelia comically (and sometimes catastrophically) misinterprets their housekeeping instructions, thanks to her literalist approach to language.

The books, in first grade, provided a pleasant initiation into idiomatic English. Who knew, for example, that “drawing the curtains” didn’t involve a pencil and a sketchbook? Or that dressing the turkey—unlike dressing the dog—didn’t call for a sweater and a pair of argyle socks? Read in college, on the other hand, Amelia Bedelia looks less like an amusing language lesson than a perfect modern parable for the restrictive role that language plays in socioeconomic class mobility, particularly among immigrant populations.

Amelia Bedelia’s charming conceit—the ridiculous assumption that a born-and-bred Englishwoman would fail to understand common expressions in her own tongue—is a hard, ironic truth for immigrants in the real world. Central Americans who leave their home countries to find work in South America are confronted with vast linguistic differences between their respective regional versions of Spanish and those practiced in South America. This communication challenge, as I had the chance to observe firsthand last semester in Argentina, doesn’t do them any favors while they attempt to assimilate into their new communities and put food on the table.

My household in Argentina employed two immigrant domestic workers: one to cook and one to clean, a common phenomenon in Buenos Aires, where labor is cheap, especially foreign labor. My host mother happened to mention one day that she discouraged Julia, the cook, from working as many hours as Lourdes, the cleaner. Julia, a Nicaraguan who never completed high school and has difficulties understanding the thick Argentine accent, cannot read written directions and is easily confused by regional differences in Central and South American vocabulary. One night, for instance, she was sent out to the grocery store to buy palta (avocado, called aguacate in Central America) and came back, confused, with cucumbers. Lourdes, on the other hand, reads a to-do list like a Harvard student and executes accordingly. My host mother’s clear preference for the fluent help translates into a clear difference in their salaries. Julia’s employment options are sharply limited (she’s fortunate, in fact, to have a job in Argentina’s tight labor market), and she earns less than 400 (US $133) pesos a month. Lourdes, on the other hand, works about twice the amount Julia does and commands a salary about three times higher.

Argentina’s recent push for legislation benefiting the nation’s domestic workers acknowledges the stickiness of the employment situation, but in rather curious way: It aims to regulate the industry by mandating labor contracts for the 800,000 to 900,000 domestic workers in the country. (A whopping 95 percent work in the black, meaning that they ply their trade without the benefit of a labor contract, health insurance, or retirement.) By increasing benefits and salaries, providing a measure of job security and protection, the government hopes to give a boost to workers stuck in an industry with little to no opportunity for advancement.

Setting aside the fact that illegal immigrants are completely left out of this picture—the ones whose disadvantage with language leave them most in need of social services—the new law works from a basic assumption that the root of the problem is an economic one, when the difficulty at hand is emphatically a practical and cultural one. Employers need employees who can understand what’s required of them on the job. Newcomers and non-citizens don’t necessarily have the luxury of being conversant, or even literate, but they need the very jobs that require them to be so.

George Bernard Shaw understood that principle perfectly when he penned his 1916 play Pygmalion: His street-urchin heroine Eliza Doolittle is unable to better her economic and social situation because her heavy cockney accent prevents her from being hired in a genteel flower shop. She’s doomed to remain a “draggle-tailed guttersnipe” until a phoneticist sweeps in, fairy-godmother-like, to teach her a proper English accent.

But Eliza Doolittle is the stuff of fiction. Similarly, the Christ-like patience exhibited by Mr. and Mrs. Rogers in the face of Amelia Bedelia’s repeated blunders is pure fictive fantasy: No real-life employer would stand to have their house “dusted” with extra helpings of powder over every available surface. Amelia Bedelia keeps her job by virtue of a valuable non-verbal skill: world-champion baking prowess, which she shrewdly parlays into Mr. and Mrs. Rogers’s favorite dessert, lemon meringue pie. When she’s in trouble, she knows on her own exactly what to do— pop a pastry into the oven—but this is sadly not always the case in real life.


Grace Tiao ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history of science and English and American literature and languages concentrator in Currier House.