The Dishwasher Mystery: Why Mexico Washes by Hand

This week I came across a Substack attempting to explain why Mexicans “hate using dishwashers.” What I found wasn’t analysis but a caricature: an essay full of clichés, condescension, and half-baked anthropology. It’s a textbook case of “parachute journalism”—the kind of writing that tries to explain Mexico to the world without ever pausing to understand it. And it’s exactly the reason I created Mexico Decoded.

So today, I’m doing something I rarely do: use a piece of Mexico Decoded to lay out why that Substack does not make any sense and the real reasons why Mexicans don’t use dishwashers. The author’s thesis can be boiled down to this: Mexicans don’t use dishwashers because they enjoy washing dishes.

To prove the point, the writer cites a TikTok of an indigenous woman smiling while scrubbing plates without running water. What goes unnoticed is the most obvious fact: she has no running water. The absence of infrastructure isn’t treated as the explanation but erased altogether, replaced with a fantasy that Mexicans derive cultural pleasure from domestic chores.

The reality is far less exotic. Mexicans don’t use dishwashers because they are too expensive and because water service in much of the country is unreliable. The cheapest dishwasher at Coppel —one of the country’s largest appliance retailers— costs $790 USD cash or $1,140 USD on credit. The average Mexican earns $4,834 USD a year. For a single-income household, that means spending roughly a quarter of their annual earnings on a single appliance. It’s simply out of reach, especially when 35% of Mexican workers earn too little to cover basic food costs and 82% of the population lacks access to at least one essential service such as education, healthcare, or housing.

Then there is water. My research in México Seco found that among the 137 most important municipalities in the country, only a third provide daily water service. For everyone else, water must be stored in buckets or hauled in. That’s why so many families wash dishes from a barrel of stored water —not because they “enjoy” it, but because that’s the only way to make life function when the tap is dry.

Then there’s the idea that Mexicans “like” to wash dishes in community. This is simply false. Dishes in Mexico are not washed in community. They are washed, overwhelmingly, by women working inside the home, unpaid. According to Mexico’s National Time Use Survey, women perform three times more unpaid domestic labor than men, averaging 28 hours per week. Among Indigenous women, the burden is four times higher. The idea that women clean dishes to “socialize” is fantasy. They do it because they have no choice. As I showed in my book, *No es Normal*, when women begin earning wages above the national average, they also cut down the time they spend on household chores. If washing dishes were truly a social activity, we’d see CEOs doing it in their free time. That is simply not the case.

This brings us to the author’s second argument: why even wealthy families sometimes don’t own dishwashers. The Substack claims it’s out of respect for domestic workers: “it would be cheapening her labor or even insulting her skill level if you gave her a machine to do her work instead.” The argument collapse under scrutiny. The truth is simpler. Only 6% of Mexican households employ domestic workers, and for those families it is cheaper to pay a person than buy a machine. A live-in worker earning the official daily wage of $16 USD might spend a fraction of her time washing dishes, which costs the employer around $300 USD a year. A dishwasher costs more, and adds the expense of electricity, which is unsubsidized for wealthier households and can double the annual cost of using a dishwasher.

And then comes the most offensive claim of all, that in Mexico: “There is a nearly Zenlike mindful presence to chores like dishwashing, so much so that many Mexican families will advise depressed relatives to ponte a trabajar (get to work) instead of seeking, you know, therapy.” This is not just wrong. It is cruel. The truth is that most Mexicans don’t go to therapy because of cost—and because of the stigma that still surrounds mental health. Mental illness in Mexico is a massive, neglected crisis. Sixteen percent of Mexicans over 20 years old —about 19 million people— suffer from depressive disorders. Yet Mexico’s social security system provides fewer than 4 million mental health consultations a year. To frame the absence of treatment as cultural wisdom —that Mexicans “cure” depression by working harder— is to mistake systemic neglect for spiritual resilience.

What this episode reveals is not something about Mexicans and dishwashers, but about how Mexico is written about abroad. When the material realities of poverty, inequality, and weak infrastructure are erased, what’s left is a story that flatters prejudice: that Mexicans prefer things this way. That they don’t need better wages, reliable water, or access to mental healthcare. That Mexicans just like to do more chores. That they don’t need better sanitation, or better infrastructure. It’s not only untrue. It’s an insult.

Fuente: https://www.mexicodecoded.com/p/the-dishwasher-mystery-why-mexico

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