The maid's quarters are "with their days numbered", although they still find a place in the new luxury apartments. The information is from a report published in Folha de S. Paulo in March of this year, which says that in 2018 less than 1% of domestic workers, mostly black women, lived on the premises of their employers - a low number when compared to the 12% of 1995. With the decrease in the number of professionals residing in the employers' homes, the "maid's room" would gradually be no longer part of the architectural plans of Brazilian housing buildings.
Historically, the social organization based on servitude and slavery adapted domestic spaces according to their hierarchy. If the old sugarcane farms had large houses with all their scale and grandeur, it is because in the basements and slave quarters lived enslaved people who forcibly worked keeping this structure in operation. After the abolition of slavery, these people, now free but without any support to incorporate into society, continued working in the same functions, now out of the need to survive and under similar conditions. In this way, the logic of servitude in Brazilian society is perpetuated, incorporated to this day in the figure of domestic servants.
