Breathing in and out: Domestic workers high exposure to air pollution in Bogota’s public transportation system

Abstract

More than 150,000 low-income women perform domestic work in Bogotá, Colombia. They are captive public transit commuters, traveling from low-income to high and middle-income residential sites for work. However, the transport system between these neighborhoods suffers from missing links. Hence, domestic workers spend more time commuting to work relative to any other urban worker in Bogotá. Moreover, the system affects domestic workers’ overall health conditions, where they inhale high doses of air contaminants. In the face of laws and policies in place perpetuating patriarchy, violence, and segregation, these poor and often-racialized women face a conundrum: they must ensure their livelihood facing pervasive health hazards. This paper analyzes the lived realities of domestic workers in terms of their commutes and the environmental hazards they face, depicting grounded legal geography. Fundamentally, it examines how legally constituted housing markets and related transportation infrastructure contribute to highly gendered and class-based geographical divides, placing domestic workers into the spatial and policy periphery and making their bodies disposable, but obliging them to negotiate these divides using inadequate and death-delivering transportation infrastructure. Finally, it reflects on the city’s planning methods that often ignore important gender, social, and economic considerations. Based on a mixed-methods approach, the paper brings material that is not often placed together, including a study of exposure to particulate matter, transportation, and legal analysis, decentering current ontologies by connecting law, environment, public health, gender, and class divides, and grounding legal geography on the daily commuting experiences of domestic workers.