Since 2009 working in civil construction in the United States, Junior Pena, 37, from Minas Gerais, was “tired of opening Instagram and seeing influencers here in the region posting the house, the car, the yellow school bus”, he says. “So I decided to show the reality.”
And the reality it shows is that of immigrants who are injured in heavy manual labor, who have spent weeks in a detention center after entering the country by crossing the desert on the border with Mexico, who have prospered and love the United States or who are counting the days to return to Brazil.
With a series of short interviews with the Brazilian community in the country, Junior, who works as a hardwood floor sander in Long Branch, New Jersey, has amassed over 500k followers on TikTok, more than 40k on Instagram and has just launched a podcast, broadcast on YouTube — all accounts on these platforms bear his name, Junior Pena.
It is part of an increasingly common phenomenon on the social networks of Brazilian expatriates: real-life influencers, who show what the routine of those who immigrated to the United States to work as a cleaner, nanny or in construction, among other functions, is like. .
It’s all done in an amateur way, just a cell phone in hand and little or no editing. Junior says he can already make some money from the hobby, about US$500 a week (R$2,600), less than what he earns working with floors, but still a good addition to his income.
“Construction is what pays my bills, but the work on the internet is moving forward, I’m on the way. Sometimes people take a picture with me on the street, it’s even funny,” he says.
Luziane Crispim, 43, decided to open her Instagram account when she needed to go back to cleaning just a month after her daughter was born. She, who became pregnant after a single encounter with a boy she met as soon as she arrived in the country, found herself alone when her father did not want to assume the child, born in the USA.
“I had never told anyone that I worked as a cleaning lady. So I decided to use my profile to show what my life was like, the routine at work and as a single mother”, says the owner of the profile @luh.maedaalice.
The turning point was when a follower commented on a post saying “I’ve never seen so much joy in going to another country to clean toilets”. Luziane recorded a video in response showing a wad of $100 bills (R$525) that she earns with the service and justifying that this way she can raise her daughter honestly.
The video went viral and in just one day, she says, she gained 40,000 followers. It didn’t stop there, and today, on Instagram alone, it has 187 thousand followers, showing the cleaning products it uses in the country, what it’s like to wash a bathroom without a drain on the floor, how the daughter and nephew are adapting and the comfortable life. that you can take with you to work.
Not that it’s easy, she makes sure to make it clear. First, there are the problems of work itself and life as an immigrant, not knowing how to speak English. “I was lucky that I got a job quickly. But I had never worked as a cleaning lady, at first everything hurt, my body was numb, I couldn’t feel my hands. I left the house at 7 am and came back at 9 pm”
Another problem was Alice’s life as a single mother, now 3 years old – she says that she worked until nine months of pregnancy without telling any employer that she was pregnant, for fear of not finding work anymore.
And today, after having already prospered and supported, in addition to his daughter, his sister (who is dealing with cancer) and his nephew, he still has to deal with the judgment of others. This is because Luziane studied environmental engineering in Brazil, but worked as a safety technician at work and moved to the US in 2017 to save money and pay off the debt of the apartment she had in Vila Velha (ES), where she lived.
“To this day people say ‘he did engineering and is cleaning toilets’, ‘he thinks he’s cleaning American toilets’. Every day there are people trying to humiliate me in the comments of my videos”, he says. “The worst thing here is working at a Brazilian’s house. They’re sure it’s an inferior job, they treat it badly. I avoid it as much as possible because Brazilians don’t respect the cleaning service”, she says. The initial plan was to stay only three years in the US, but now he says he has no plans to return to Brazil. “Only after I get famous and they call me to Big Brother”, he jokes.
With 110,000 followers on Instagram, Jaqueline Costa (@jaquelinecostausa) has already made some partnerships with companies, but says that the income she earns on the internet is still barely 5% of what she earns working with cleaning in the United States.
“My profile was closed, but I received a lot of questions from people wanting to know what it was like to live here and asking for help to come”, says she, who left Brazil with her husband and children after the restaurant they had in Belo Horizonte went bankrupt.
Today she already runs her own business, hiring cleaning women in the country, and on the social network she shows curiosities such as how much she charged to clean the dirtiest house she has ever seen (US$600, or R$3,140, ​​for four hours of work, divided into three people ), how much is a pizza at Domino’s ($41 for four pizzas), and what is the cost of living for a family of four in New Jersey ($3,500).
Chad-98Weaver, a distinguished author at NewsBulletin247, excels in the craft of article writing. With a keen eye for detail and a penchant for storytelling, Chad delivers informative and engaging content that resonates with readers across various subjects. His contributions are a testament to his dedication and expertise in the field of journalism.
