Hermanas are doing it for themselves

This story in the New York Times today is fascinating. I hope that these enterprising women can get an organization together. Apparently, houses of single immigrant men in the Northeast are hiring immigrant women to come cook for them. I got sucked into the story by the picture of the soup. Yum.

Inside the overcrowded immigrant homes that speckle New York's suburbs, Hispanic women like Ms. Gress-Escamilla have begun to forge their livelihoods. The women call themselves cocineras, or cooks, a disparate door-to-door army that brings a taste of home to men living far from their wives and mothers. These women make dinner, overhear secrets, console those who cannot find work and quickly get used to grown men calling them madre, or mother.

"They're people from my hometown," Ms. Gress-Escamilla said in Spanish, through a translator. "You get to know them and have a sense of family with them. They need to eat."

So after the men leave for their long days of work, the women arrive and head toward the kitchen. They make soup, a main course, rice and beans and maybe a dessert or empanadas if someone is celebrating a birthday. They set the dishes on the stove to be warmed later, slip out the front door and move on to the next house.

The homes are flung far across the suburbs, and the women sometimes work for weeks without pay. But the payments are in cash, the women do not have to speak English, and they can grasp at their dreams of independence from bosses and night shifts at fast-food restaurants. "I am my own boss," said one cocinera, Josefa Barrera-Rios.

(my emphasis)
The New York Times > New York Region > Far From Mother, a Mother's Touch