Altars of Hope: Venezuelan Domestic Workers and the Material Culture of the Divine

Abstract:Traditionally, and until recently, Venezuelan domestic workers lived in small bedrooms at the back of their employers' house, close to the kitchen and the laundry area. The room's location and austere material composition sought to divide the home into service and living areas and to limit the interaction between families and workers, leaving workers with deep feelings of isolation. For some domestic workers, praying for their families and for a better future helps mitigate feelings of loneliness. Thus, inside their assigned bedrooms, most workers set up sacred altars to channel and represent their faith and personalize their surroundings. Far from ornamentation or artistic pretension, each item in the altar is part of a meaningful composition meant to express the domestic worker's religious identity. Shrines act as a spiritual bridge connecting workers with their families and their gods, and ultimately easing their feelings of isolation.Once domestic workers move from the back of their employer's house into a home of their own, among their first actions is to erect one or more altars. Such material expression of religious belief assumes a predominant, unconstrained position in their new dwellings. This essay presents a comparative analysis that includes the altars in the workers' service bedrooms and later in their newly acquired homes. It seeks to understand how the material culture of the altars intersects with the built environment to dynamically represent the workers' yearnings, spiritual requests, goals, struggles, and dreams for the future.