Women of Color in 9 to 5 America

A few years ago I discovered a collection of vintage photos of my mother as a “white-collar” office worker in New York City in the late 1960s. I looked at the images and pored over every detail of this bygone era, wondering what it might be like if the movie 9 to 5 were remade with women of color?

Originally from Panama, my mother migrated to New York City to pursue her dream of a new, American life. For her, life in New York City as a Central American immigrant was feasible, promising and mostly exciting. At that time New York still resembled the glittery “big town” she’d seen in movies.

After working in a perfume factory, where she sometimes bruised herself during mishaps on the assembly line, my mother gladly accepted a sales position in the offices of the Rugol Trading Corporation, a hardware wholesale company. Rugol’s offices were located on North Moore Street (in what’s now Tribeca) on a block of dirty warehouses that functioned as factories, artists’ studios and discotheques.

Emigrating to a foreign country by herself and eventually having to raise a child alone while working full-time was a necessity for my mother. Being a “working girl” was a source of pride for her and a crucial part of her identity. I remember admiring her typing skills as a child, watching in awe at the speed with which her fingers ticked away on those IBM typewriters.

The following photo essay draws on two series inspired by my mother’s life at work. “The Reinforcements” (2023-ongoing) is my latest series of photomontages and mixed-media collages that visualize women of color’s experience in America’s corporate workplaces. @WorkingWOC: Towards a History of Women of Color in the Workplace is an independent multimedia archive that visualizes the labor history of Black and immigrant women of color in America’s workplace.

That collection of vintage photos and in-office portraits of my mother’s co-workers–mostly African American and Latino, from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic–were taken by a co-worker named Nat, who wasn’t a professional photographer but “always had a camera in his hand.” I use these photos as inspiration for my own work. In each photo, I am taken by my mother’s keen sense of style, elegance and sophistication. As a child, I observed and admired these aspects of beauty in the Black women around me, on the streets and subways on their way to work.