Immigrant Group Puts a New Spin On Cleaning Niche

Tidy Business

Immigrant Group Puts a New Spin On Cleaning Niche

In Boston Area, Brazilians Build, Trade Maid 'Routes'As a Means to Advance

By JOEL MILLMAN
February 16, 2006; Page A1
The Wall Street Journal


FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- When families look to have their homes cleaned in the Boston suburbs, many turn to Brazilian immigrants, part of an exploding population of recent emigres who have been arriving here since the 1980s.

But the maid service is different than most. It isn't an ad-hoc group of workers scouring for weekly gigs; nor is it a corporate-driven franchise operation of the sort which has sprouted in other bedroom communities across the nation.

The transplanted Brazilians have promoted an unusual system for buying and selling domestic services. Central to the model are specific "routes" comprised of individual houses and cleaners that are grown and tightly managed -- often by a single family. In recent years, as the demand for housecleaning work has soared, these routes or "schedules" have become particularly valuable, and are commonly traded like commodities.


Maria da Graça De Sales helped fuel the trend. Sipping coffee in a tidy duplex she bought for $140,000 six years ago, she apologizes for her messy kitchen. "With so many homes to clean, I sometimes don't have time for mine," she says. Her business grosses more than $100,000 annually, servicing the homes of 70 clients. Some she scrubs herself, but mostly she pays other Brazilian immigrants -- many of them, like her, well-educated English speakers -- to do the work. Starting off as cleaners, the most industrious save enough to purchase their own, ready-made routes from entrepreneurs like Ms. De Sales.

Brazilian cleaning networks, also on the rise in cities such as Atlanta and Jacksonville, Fla., demonstrate a subtle shift in immigrant work patterns. Through the 1990s, U.S.-bound immigration was split between the poor fleeing hunger or oppression and wealthy elites seeking high-paying jobs. Now, more middle-class, middle-skilled emigrants are heading to the U.S.

Other examples of so-called middle-skillers targeting specific niches include Filipinos, who dominate civil-service jobs in West Coast locations such as San Francisco and Seattle; and Jamaicans, who have cornered similar niches in such Eastern cities as New York and Miami. Immigrants from Nigeria have found security-guard work in Houston.

Brazilians enjoy advantages over some other groups. About 90% of Brazilian immigrants finished high school, and nearly 40% have some college training, estimates sociologist Franklin Goza of Ohio's Bowling Green State University. By contrast, a majority of Mexican and Central Americans lack high-school diplomas.

"When Brazilians talk about social mobility and new opportunities, emigration to the U.S. is high on the menu," says Eduardo Siqueira, a Brazilian professor on the Public Health faculty at the University of Massachusetts' Lowell campus.

The cost and complexity of emigrating from Brazil -- often involving a flight to Mexico for a chance to sneak into the U.S. -- means that only the relatively prosperous can afford such a journey. That helps to explain why former dentists, school teachers and journalists are among those coming here to pursue better, albeit sometimes humbling, income opportunities.

Ms. De Sales's experience is typical. A former public-school teacher, in 1984 she concluded that even after landing a dream job -- working for Brazil's treasury department in the city of Governador Valadares -- she would never save enough to put her three children through college.

Entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico, she spent two years working in Florida's orange groves. In 1986, she pooled savings with her brother Gerardo and contrived to get her teenage children out of Brazil.

After securing transit visas that let them pass through Florida, Robson, Rosangela and Rogério met their mother and drove the 1,500 miles to Framingham, where they were joined by their Uncle Gerardo. While the adults took daytime restaurant jobs, the children enrolled in Framingham's vocational high school. From 4:00 p.m. to midnight, all five worked at a local Sheraton hotel as housekeepers.

Scanning the want ads, Rosangela noticed the demand for domestic services. "Hotels paid $5 an hour, but people who wanted homes cleaned were paying $8," she recalls. She and her mother built a loyal following of clients, eventually growing a business large enough to sustain a separate client route for Rosangela. Today, Rosangela has more than 100 regular customers of her own.

Without the cleaning business, says Maria, her family never would have succeeded. "Here, it's hard," she says. "There, it's impossible." Proceeds from her family's extended cleaning business helped put her son through medical school at Temple University, in Philadelphia. After qualifying for amnesty -- and receiving tutoring help from one of her clients -- she passed her U.S. citizenship exam in 2000.

Anthropologist Soraya Resende Fleischer of Brazil's Federal University studied Brazilian housecleaners near Boston for her 2002 book, "Coming to America to Clean." Many of the immigrants, she discovered, left home with $10,000 in savings: half for smugglers taking them into the U.S., the rest seed capital to start cleaning businesses. The newcomers often were tradesmen or professionals who would leverage the skills of their fellow immigrants.

Brazilians who dominate the field rarely clean themselves but enlist as many as a dozen workers and fill out their client lists as word of their reliability spreads. When they book too much business to handle efficiently, they can carve out "starter" routes to pass on to family members newly arrived from Brazil. Or, as is the trend now, they can sell the routes via a highly-developed underground market.

In classified advertisements in Portuguese-language newspapers such as Tá Na Mão, (slang for "you got it!"), and on Internet postings, Brazilians use the English word "schedule" for cleaning routes. Notices declaring, "I want schedule" or "I'm selling schedule," flutter from walls wherever Brazilians shop or eat. Buyers easily outnumber sellers.


Selling routes dates to at least the early 1990s, when newcomer Hermes Reis paid $7,500 for cleaning rights to 14 homes in Framingham and nearby Wayland. "It was 10 times [weekly] revenues," Mr. Reis recalls, using a formula familiar to Wall Street types. The price has risen since then. In January, Rogério Araújo, a 35-year-old former schoolteacher, sold a coveted 31-home route after receiving more than 65 inquiries from an ad in Tá Na Mão. Mr. Araújo, who holds a green card, says he plans to report the $18,000 sale to the Internal Revenue Service.

The winning bidder was another immigrant living in a nearby Boston suburb. Significantly, the route included a Web site designed by Mr. Araújo's wife, Adriana, who worked for Microsoft Corp. before leaving Brazil.

Such sites enable clients to post instructions for cleaners. Missives such as "Skip the office, my husband doesn't want his papers disturbed," or "Just bathrooms today" are typical. Web sites also function as a marketing tool: By posting ads on sites such as Craigslist Inc., owners can attract plenty of referrals and carve out more schedules to sell later.

Selling routes -- essentially, the right to clean clients' homes -- can cause friction with customers. Michelle Fredette, a human-resources consultant in Framingham, was miffed when her longtime cleaner returned to Brazil and a stranger called announcing she was assuming the schedule. "It was, like, who is this telling me, 'I'm taking over'?" Ms. Fredette recalls. She didn't give the new operator access to her home.

Avoiding Problems

To avoid such a problem, Mr. Araújo emailed his clients about the impending change. Rather than disclose details of the sale, however, he told them a partner was buying him out. A few customers, he says, returned emails agreeing to switch; most didn't bother to reply. "I figured if they didn't respond they didn't mind," he says.

Today, Ms. De Sales, 58 years old, oversees four women who she pays a flat fee of $20 a house, keeping as much as $50 in profit for an average job. Divided into two-person teams, they clean a four-bedroom house in two hours. Unlike some operators, she treats them as subcontractors, which means they are responsible for paying taxes on the $100 or so they can earn in a day. (Though she requires her workers to produce Social Security numbers, Ms. De Sales isn't bound by law to check that they are valid.)


On a recent blustery morning, Ms. De Sales's first stop was Newton, an affluent Boston suburb of brick mansions and clapboard houses. There she met Erika Cristina Silva and Simone de Dias, two of her charges, cleaning a brick colonial on Greenlawn Street. Both women were smuggled in from Mexico in 2003. Ms. Silva says she paid $10,000 to come over the Rio Grande with 10 Brazilian men at night on an inflatable raft.

Ms. Silva, 27, is Ms. De Sales's crew chief, responsible for driving cleaners to sites on time, dividing the workload and making sure everything is cleaned properly.

Back in Vitória, capital of Brazil's Espírito Santo state, Ms. Silva graduated from college with a degree in public health and worked as a dental assistant. She hoped one day to have her own practice but decided to emigrate, reckoning opportunities were greater abroad. In Brazil, it would take years to save enough for dentist's training, she says. Credit is scarce in Brazil, and student loans aren't readily available.

"Here, I make $400 a week," Ms. Silva says. "There, I made $600 a month." Sharing an apartment with a cousin on Framingham's South Side, she says she was able to pay off her debt to the smugglers in less than six months. Today she drives her own car and already has begun researching dental programs.

Off the Radar

Brazilians began arriving here in large numbers in the 1980s, following in the footsteps of a small Portuguese colony. With low rents and quick access to major highways, the location suits entrepreneurs seeking work in richer towns like Newton, Sudbury and Weston. Another plus: Suburbs are off the radar screen of immigration authorities, who search for illegal immigrants at busy worksites where dozens might be discovered in a single sweep. Individual homes aren't a priority for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Boston, which now combines antiterrorist surveillance with more mundane tasks. "We target nuclear power plants, commercial airports and defense facilities," says Paula Grenier, an ICE spokeswoman.

In the past decade, according to Framingham officials, the Brazilian population has roughly doubled to one in four of the town's 67,000 residents. South Side storefronts sport Brazil's signature green and gold colors, while the aroma of puffy, warm pão de queijo wafts from Brazilian bakeries and cafes. Second-story offices once leased to accountants and lawyers now house sellers of imported foods and Brazilian soap opera DVDs.

The growing Brazilian presence fuels resentment in some quarters. Critics complain that educating immigrants costs the town $10,000 per student a year, while many parents work for cash and don't pay taxes.

"They've made Framingham an outlaw town," says Joseph Rizoli, 53, a school-bus driver who founded an anti-illegal immigration group called Concerned Citizens and Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement.

Some mornings, he and his twin brother, Jim, lead protests outside a busy Brazilian bakery, a gathering point for day laborers looking for construction or cleaning jobs. They tote signs, some in Portuguese, declaring: "It's illegal to hire illegals," and "Illegals Out!"

Among the suburbanites who hire Brazilian cleaners, those sentiments are typically not shared.

Ethnicity and immigration status "are not relevant," concludes Joanne Aliber, a longtime customer of Ms. De Sales. At both her and her husband's high-technology workplaces, they consider immigrants as colleagues, not competitors. Housekeeping is just another aspect of the global economy. "My company employs people all over the world; in India, in Brazil," says Jeffrey Aliber. "As far as I'm concerned, it's the same principle here. You buy the best service."

Ms. De Sales views the market from a slightly different perspective. "American women don't know how to clean," she says with a shrug as she prepares to drive to another home.

Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com1

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