Where one sees challenges, Rosa sees opportunities.
We met Rosa, a 30 to 35-year-old Venezuelan woman, with her son and partner in their restaurant in La Florida, a Quito neighborhood with a high population of Venezuelan migrants. The walls of her restaurant are covered with murals painted by a friend from the neighborhood. Paintings of smiling hot dogs, arepas, and French fries adorn the walls and convey optimism and whimsy to customers. Rosa’s son, a boy of ten to twelve years of age, sits at a table in the corner next to the fryer and plays games on his phone. The restaurant has three tables and an exposed industrial kitchen with fryers and a large, chrome stove.
Rosa’s story is unique, but not uncommon among the Venezuelan migrants we met in Quito. She navigated complicated and exploitative systems of work, financial planning, and labor exploitation in order to survive in Quito. And at every point she found legal barriers, abuse, and harassment. While her community and social networks helped her settle in Ecuador, the same community made it nearly impossible for her to escape a cycle of unfair treatment and physical danger. Only when Rosa decided to become her own boss was she able to work toward creating something new – a workplace that reflected her values, her love for her home country, and her own empowerment as “the boss.”
When we sat down to interview Rosa, she exuded a confidence and certainty that she lacked just a few months earlier. She had landed on her feet after a long struggle and in the process learned of her own resilience and determination. As we sat in her cozy and successful restaurant, Rosa told us about her experience as a young migrant mother in Quito. Her experience was defined by loss and physical violence, community support and friendship, internal migration within Ecuador, family reunion and separation. But ultimately, her story was about learning to manage her own money and rely on herself to achieve a life free from fear in a city where formal credit, formal documentation, and safe work are nearly impossible to come by for the thousands of Venezuelans who live there.
Rosa was more fortunate than most Venezuelans during her journey to Ecuador. She had been able to obtain a passport and official papers that helped her cross the border, a luxury few others could afford. Not only had she been able to obtain these documents (and bypass the backlogged Venezuelan bureaucracy that has blocked countless like her), she was lucky enough to not have her documents lost or stolen during her journey. Rosa arrived in Quito on September 7, 2018, after traveling for seven days on a bus with her son and nephew (who she was bringing to her sister-in-law in Guayaquil, Ecuador). Upon arriving at the Ecuadorian border, the authorities asked Rosa to pay $50 per passport. The total should have come to $150, but out of necessity and urgency, Rosa bought falsified passports for her nephew and son—who, unfortunately, did not have an official passport like she did. Suddenly, the relatively simple border crossing became much more complicated. Hungry for a bribe, the authorities asked Rosa to pay $100 for each falsified passport — an astronomical sum that Rosa could not afford. But she was lucky, as her brother is a doctor and was already well-established in Ecuador. Stuck at the border, Rosa contacted her brother so he could wire her the money through Western Union. He completed her request and gave her just enough to pay the bribe. After paying border guards, Rosa had hardly any money. Fortunately for them, humanitarian organizations were at the border to assist her and they were met by multiple volunteers after crossing. She was not sure where help was coming from, but she was grateful for the assistance. Someone (who Rosa believes was from the Ecuadorian Red Cross) gave her a silver blanket and ACNUR [UNHCR] gave the children some food and a small hygiene kit with soap and a toothbrush. Despite having overcome several barriers in getting to Ecuador, Rosa knew the hardest part of her journey was yet to come.
Rosa had two main goals after crossing into Ecuador: to reunite her nephew with his mother and to begin her new life in Ecuador with her son. The next step was to travel to Quito. The group took a taxi to Tulcán (which cost about $5) and then boarded a bus to Quito for $7 total. The fares for the bus and taxi were not overwhelmingly expensive for Rosa. This was a relief, especially after having had to pay more than expected to cross the border. After a long journey, the bus dropped Rosa and the children at Carcelen on the outskirts of Quito. They had finally arrived.
The immediate days and weeks after crossing the border were a rush of activity for Rosa. She contacted her sister-in-law to tell her that she had arrived with the children and her sister-in-law promptly packed up her belongings and moved to Quito from Guayaquil, where she had been working in a beauty salon. The moment that Rosa’s sister-in-law and nephew finally reunited was a joyous moment of normalcy and peace for them all, but it was the beginning of many changes for Rosa. Having already lived in Ecuador for some time, Rosa’s sister-in-law was fairly well-connected. Rosa found work in Quito after only two days thanks to these connections. Furthermore, the beauty salon her sister worked at in Guayaquil had a second location in Quito, and due to her positive references, Rosa’s sister-in-law easily transferred to the Quito location. This allowed the extended family to remain together again.
In the beauty salon, Rosa’s sister-in-law could ask about openings at other nearby salons. In practically no time at all, her sister-in-law found a promising lead at a nearby beauty shop and secured an interview for Rosa. Soon, the shop hired Rosa at the going rate of $5 per month to braid hair, with a minimal commission for each head of hair that she braided. Though Rosa hardly earned enough money to buy food (much less pay rent), her new community helped her get settled into her neighborhood and begin integrating into the bustling city life of Quito. Her landlady helped orient Rosa to the city, shared resources, new job information, and tips about her neighborhood. The people she worked with at the salon were also helpful and shared advice and meals. Her boss’s husband even bought lunch for the salon staff every Saturday, which Rosa said was indispensable for helping her get by. With the power of her new community behind her, Rosa was able to find a place to live, put her son in school, and work to find some semblance of normalcy in her life. But soon, her world turned upside down.
The community kindness that Rosa received upon arriving in Quito would ultimately result in new friendships that put her in danger of exploitation and abuse. Rosa befriended her boss’s husband as he continued to visit the salon on Saturdays to buy lunch for the staff. At the same time, she was experiencing problems trying to send what little money she could back to Venezuela via Western Union. It seemed reasonable to Rosa to ask her boss’s husband for help. He agreed and accompanied Rosa to the Western Union to help her make the transfer. As Rosa says, “This was the start of a very bad situation for me.”
The kindness that Rosa had received since arriving in Quito also inspired jealousy. Upon learning that her husband had accompanied Rosa to Western Union, Rosa’s boss grew livid. She thought that their outing had been more than platonic and fired Rosa. “But my boss’s husband felt guilty, or perhaps he was just compassionate,” Rosa said. He told her that his mother owned a nearby restaurant. Even though their friendship had created marital problems for him, he helped Rosa find another working in his mother’s restaurant.
Rosa’s experience of exploitation and abuse continued at the restaurant. The owner was unreasonable and took advantage of Rosa “all of the time”. She treated Rosa as a personal assistant rather than a waitress and would call her at all hours of the day to come to her home and give her massages, medical injections, and do household chores. She called Rosa in to work at random hours and would sometimes ask her to wake up at 4:30 am or earlier to commute to the restaurant. On these days, Rosa would wake before dawn and make a school lunch for her son, lay out his clothes, and get him ready for the long commute to his school. He made this commute every morning and afternoon, alone. Meanwhile, Rosa worked from 6:00 am past 5:00 pm, meaning she would get home after 8:00 pm as she lived far away from the restaurant. As Rosa said, “this made it impossible for me to care for my son, be a mother, help him with schoolwork, make sure he was safe coming home from school. I was always worried, but I had to work so we could eat and pay rent.”
Rosa continued to work at the restaurant despite the abuse and affronts to her dignity that she suffered there. The owner of the restaurant asked much of her but did not trust her. Because Rosa had a set of keys to the restaurant, the owner accused Rosa of multiple small thefts. She asked Rosa to work all day without a break. She was asked to clean, wait tables, shop, give massages —“everything,” Rosa said with an exasperated sigh. The owner’s two sons would visit the restaurant often. While it was always a pleasure to see her old friend (the husband from the hair salon), the owner had another son who was cruel to Rosa. When he would come to the restaurant when the owner was away, he would abuse Rosa as she worked. “It was a nightmare,” Rosa said. But she depended on the job to keep her son in school and she felt that there was nothing she could do to get help or report these events to the police. She tried to be brave, but the abuse became unbearable.
So, Rosa made the difficult choice to leave Quito and look for work elsewhere. She took her son with her even though she feared that moving would disrupt his education. Just months after arriving in Quito, Rosa was gone.
Rosa’s brother (who had wired money when she crossed the border) is a middle-class anesthesiologist in Loja, a town near Quito. He had some money, though not much, and took Rosa and her son in. Rosa hoped that her job search would be as fast in Loja as it had been in Quito. But jobs were hard to come by and her brother could only support her and her son for so long. Meanwhile, the restaurant owner who had exploited Rosa would not leave her alone. Multiple times a week the owner would text Rosa and beg her to come back, offering a pay raise. When they finally offered her more than $200 per month (still under the minimum wage in Ecuador, but much more than she had earned previously), she felt that she had no choice but to return to the restaurant job. She begrudgingly returned, knowing that even though she risked further exploitation, it was her only means to survive. She also made the heart-wrenching decision to leave her son behind in Loja until she could earn enough money to send for him. She wanted to have enough money to give him a good life and felt that she had to get back on her feet before she could be the caretaker her son needed and deserved.
Soon enough, Rosa was back in Quito and working at the restaurant she despised. Yet she soon discovered that the promises the owner had made her (better hours, higher pay) rang hollow. By the end of the first pay period after her return, the restaurant did not pay her more than $200 as they pledged to do. In fact, they did not pay Rosa at all. Instead, they charged her money for electricity and water, which they accused her of leaving on carelessly after her shifts ended. She saw her already meager paycheck shrink even further and wondered if she would ever be able to reunite with her son.
But Rosa had little time to react to her shrunken paycheck before her situation became even more precarious. Just as she returned to the restaurant, her first job at the beauty salon returned to haunt her. One night, while Rosa was alone at home after a long day at work, her former boss from the beauty salon came to Rosa’s house. As Rosa told us, “She made good on her threats and beat me, so hard, so much.” Rosa woke up the next morning in terrible pain. She had a huge bruise under her eye and a fractured arm covered in cuts and scrapes on it. “My friend was appalled at what his wife had done,” Rosa said. He urged Rosa to file a police report on his wife and also on his brother for the abuse she had suffered. Yet, Rosa felt apprehensive about approaching the police. She was a migrant and hadn’t had success with the police when abused in the past. Empowered by her friend’s support, she decided to try. Her efforts were fruitless. As Rosa filed the police report, the police asked: “What nationality are you?” When she told them that she was Venezuelan, they immediately lost interest and wouldn’t hear her complaint. Even when her friend accompanied her to denounce his own wife and brother, the police refused to listen. “There was nowhere for me to go,” Rosa said. The situation had not improved, and Rosa was running out of options. She decided she would have to try again but wouldn’t do it without her son. She sent for him and put enrolled him, yet again, in a school in Quito.
Her son rejoining her in Quito briefly lifted Rosa’s spirits, but it did little to solve her problems. Rosa lived far from the restaurant and took the bus each day, where she continued to face discrimination for her nationality. Once, two drunken men approached her and shouted sexual and nationalist slurs at her. Another time, she feared sexual assault while waiting at a bus station. Rosa was almost at her breaking point and wondered if she could continue to handle the painful twists and turns of her life in Ecuador. Her breaking point finally came when her son “disappeared” while coming home from school. Hours after the school day ended, Rosa still hadn’t received his call telling her he was home. She was nervous, but was still at work. She begged her boss to let her leave and search for her son, but she was told that if she left her shift “there would be trouble”. Rosa felt that no one cared about her at the restaurant, and even after the beating and being lied to about pay, no one would come to her aid. Her circle of friends, whom she had relied on to start her life in Quito, had left her. Rosa could only rely on herself. She decided in that moment to overcome her exploitation and abuse, no matter the cost. She walked out the door.
It turned out that Rosa’s son had stayed after school with a teacher and had forgotten to tell his mother. He was safe, but “it was too late for me,” said Rosa. With no restaurant job, Rosa began the job search again. She had no references and couldn’t return to her abusive former employer for a recommendation. In fact, the restaurant owner went out of her way to make Rosa’s life miserable. She slandered Rosa to local business owners and told people she was an untrustworthy thief. This made it difficult for Rosa to get work again. She continued to receive threats from her former boss at the hair salon, who had not only renewed her threats against Rosa but had begun to make new threats against Rosa’s young son. For four months, despite tireless searching, Rosa could not find work and started to sell goods on the street in front of her son’s school. She only made $25 to $30 on a good week. It was far from enough, and being on the street put Rosa in danger of sexual assault. Yet Rosa was committed to finding a way out of her predicament on her own and refused to be exploited by an employer again. The only way to reclaim her life was to make her own rules and to be her own boss.
Rosa told her brother that she had been blacklisted by her community, neighborhood, and friends but that she would overcome this. She asked her brother to invest in her future with a small loan, and he agreed. Rosa started looking for a space where she could open a restaurant with her new boyfriend. The couple found a rental space in the heavily Venezuelan La Florida neighborhood of Quito. Rosa’s brother offered a $5,000 lump-sum loan through a one-time Banco Pichincha bank transfer to help her open up shop.
One of Rosa’s Venezuelan friends had a bank account, residency permit, and cedula (identity card), which Rosa used to collect the transfer since she did not yet have a cedula to access the bank herself. She hired a local artist, a friend of hers from the coast of Ecuador, to help her paint the murals on her walls. In addition to the bright and cheery pictures of food, the murals have words in both English and Spanish because Rosa “[likes] both languages”. Rosa transformed the store from bare to gleaming, with a shining chrome industrial grill and just enough space in the front for a few small round tables. Here, customers can escape the heat for a well-priced lunch that reminds them of home. The checkout counter is just low enough that Rosa can lean over and cheerily chat with customers, taking their orders and preparing their meals a gusto (“to order”).
With the loan from her brother, Rosa could buy ingredients to make a menu (at the cost of $20 per day), pay for the rental space ($380 per month), and pay for her apartment’s rent (approximately $170 per month) so that she and her son could finally move closer to his school. In fact, her apartment was around the corner from the restaurant. This brought her commute down from two hours down to two minutes. The loan allowed her to hire a small staff – “el Gordito” and “el Flaquito” (the fat one and the skinny one). She could even afford to let them have decent vacation time and take time off when they had family emergencies, something that she could understand given her own experience. Things were still challenging: she only made enough at the restaurant to keep the lights on and pay for basic necessities like rent. Without a bank account, Rosa had to keep her money in a safe, which made her feel uncomfortable. She told us that she was more stressed than ever because she had more responsibilities and people who depended on her while also paying the rent, balancing the books, applying for a cedula, helping her son with school, paying her brother back through monthly wire transfers, (though, she noted, she was in the process of opening her own bank account through Banco JEP, which does not require having a cedula) and being a mother. But these were challenges she could control and challenges that she welcomed.
Even with all of these new responsibilities, Rosa sees her difficulties less as challenges and more as opportunities to create something new and follow her dreams. “The restaurant is my space,” Rosa emphasized. “It is stressful to be the owner, but I am the jefa (boss), and I try to do the exact opposite of the terrible things that happened to me as an employee.” At the restaurant, Rosa has cultivated a loyal following of locals and Venezuelans alike. She takes requests each day from her regulars on WhatsApp and then goes to the store to buy what they want, making their food to order with skill and pride. “I know them,” Rosa said, “and the people always keep coming back.” Rosa has created a new network of friends, neighbors, and a community that now congregates at her restaurant to get a taste of home and to share stories.
“My main goal,” Rosa said, “is to novarme — to innovate and make this restaurant something new and different. It is difficult to do this while being a mother, helping with homework, and the rest. Sometimes I feel horrible because I can’t be an entrepreneur and a mother. It is hard to do both, and [I feel] like I am never doing both adequately. I am hard on myself.” Yet Rosa keeps thinking about the future after having lived so long in “survival mode.” She wants her son to go to secondary school somewhere far from La Florida, where she fears there are too many drugs. She wants him to go to college, though leaving him again would “break her heart.” She wants to expand her clients, expand her menu, try new things, grow her staff, buy her apartment from her landlord, pay off her loan to her brother, and open more bank accounts. She is, for the first time in a long time, thinking about what is next.
But in the short-term, Rosa said, she was content to enjoy La Florida — her “Little Venezuela.” She now knows her neighbors, has friends, has fixed clients that know her and trust her and love her food. She smiled knowingly, a laugh on the top of her tongue. Migrating was especially difficult for her, she told us, as many other migrants were middle class in Venezuela and she had been poor. It was hard for her to navigate the many challenges she faced upon arriving in Ecuador. “So, I am proud,” she finally admitted, humbly but not without owning her success. “Proud to have made it here and to finally be the boss.”