Why Do Mexicans Hate This Kitchen Appliance?
When it comes to washing dishes, by hand is best in Mexico, even for the rich.
As many of you know, I’m moving to Mexico. I was originally going to leave on Sept. 1, but there is some final paperwork that is going to take a few extra days so we’re scheduled to leave sometime in the next two weeks. Hoping it’ll be sooner rather than later.
Anyway.
I have a short-term furnished apartment rented in my new home city of Santiago de Querétaro. Everything in the US that I wanted to keep is already in storage. So it’s this anxious holding pattern for me for now.
To pass the time, I’m house-hunting online, trying to upgrade from the very nice temporary rental into something I can actually call my own this fall. As I look at the listings, one thing stands out: Very few homes have dishwashers, as in the appliance. It doesn’t matter what price point the house is in, there’s usually not a dishwasher.
Being a curious soul who was raised by a sociologist professor and a poet, I naturally wanted to know why. So I’ve spent the past couple of days researching it.
As someone who grew up in the United States of American in the 1970s and 1980s, I vividly remember the first dishwasher we got as a family. My dad, perhaps a victim of advertising campaigns at the time, bought it “for my mom” for her birthday in 1980. She was in graduate school then, working on her degree in architecture and design, and I remember the rage on her face as he presented the “gift” to her. She left him a year later. I’m not saying these two things are related, but given that she was going through her Helen Reddy feminist awakening and my dad was, well, a machista guy raised in Havana, I’ll allow you to draw your own conclusions.
Again, anyway.
It was a yellow monster on wheels — that special sickly yellow that was only present in the world from 1975 to 1981 — and you had to connect the hose to your kitchen faucet. It made a lot of noise. So much noise it drowned out the TV while we were all trying watch Bonanza. But we felt… rich.
I remember that dishwasher was seen by friends and extended family as something similar to the beige Chevy Malibu my dad bought brand new that year, too: A sign that we’d solidly entered the American middle class. Along with my ballet lessons, piano lessons and baton-twirling lessons. What I didn’t know then, and didn’t even consider until literally this week, was that the machines of convenience that are meant to denote a rise in social status in the USA are often seen quite differently in other countries.
Mexico, for instance. Not matter what your socioeconomic class, the dishwasher is often (but not always) viewed with disdain, for different reasons.
Among the working class in Mexico, dishwashing by hand isn’t just practical; it’s cultural, something people do together and take as an opportunity to socialize while improving life for one another, and often there is no choice. Frequently, in certain parts of the country, there’s not even running water.
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And yet, you’d be hard-pressed to find cleaner dishes or homes than the ones run by poor Mexican families who have learned to make the most of scarce water. And the traditional care has carried over, even with greater upward mobility.
Done carefully — the Mexican way, where you put hot water and soap (and, often, a dab of bleach) in a small bowl next to the sink or larger tub, and dip the sponge in, scrub all the dishes from this supply and rinse them (from a tub of clean water) only when you’re done washing them all — it’s actually more sanitary than some dishwasher cycles, and it uses less water. Here’s an example of the rinse phase:
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But beyond efficiency, there’s pride in the work itself, rooted, perhaps subconsciously, in a mesoamerican Indigenous view of hard work being the thing to bring one closer to God. Think Calvinists or the Amish, but Mayan or Aztec.
In many segments of Mexican society, working hard without complaint is a deeply admirable character trait, a point of pride with subtle, almost spiritual attention paid to the task, whatever that task may be. 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.
In precolombian Aztec and Mayan cosmology, labor was sacred. Planting, cooking, sweeping — even small chores — were ways to LITERALLY maintain cosmic balance. Handwashing dishes today can be a faint echo of that philosophy: the mundane transformed into meaningful. Work as communal care and prayer. The kitchen isn’t just functional; it’s alive, and every plate scrubbed contributes to that rhythm.
This attitude is often inexactly described in the United States as “humility.” It’s more that there’s a different pole for self worth, one that isn’t found in ostentatious wealth that allows for laziness, but one that is found in never believing yourself so important that you don’t have to wipe your own ass.
Among the more Americanized/colonized aspirational middle class and upper class in Mexico, meanwhile, dish-washing is sometimes seen as an undesirable task, but rather than outsource it to machines, there is far greater social status to be found in hiring a “señora” to do it for you.
Domestic labor is often obscenely underpaid, and in Mexico, as in much of the rest of Latin America, the idea of having your own “lady” to clean not just your dishes but your everything, and maybe even cook for you, is a sign that you’ve arrived in the conquering class. You might even justify your lack of a dishwasher with altruism, saying it would be cheapening her labor or even insulting her skill level if you gave her a machine to do her work instead.
Beyond this, there is also a widespread belief, backed up by science, by the way, that hand-washing dishes (if you do it well) is far more effective at cleaning and disinfecting dishes than is throwing them in a machine that basically hurls water and chemicals at them and hopes for the best while old rice collects in the drain. In this video, a US woman with Mexican parents wrote a caption saying her family would still think her dishes were dirty because they don’t trust dishwashers:
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In the United States, we’ve been conditioned to trust machines more than we trust ourselves or each other (hello, AI!), but in Mexico, people still seem to prefer…people. For this reason, most residence laundry rooms in Mexico are still located outside, and most still have a washboard sink called a lavadero and a clothesline, even if there’s a washing machine and clothes dryer.
This preference for humans over machines isn’t just limited to dishwashers and washing machines in Mexico, either. It extends to every aspect of society. Americans are often frustrated by the fluid relationship Mexicans have with time, whereas Mexicans are less interested in you arriving when the clock says it’s time to arrive than they are in your arriving when it works best for you in your ever-changing fluid life. People still stroll to the plaza or centro in the evenings to sit on benches talking to each other rather than camping out in front of the telvision; children still play outside with one another instead of staring numbly at screens; and the idea of driving somewhere that is walking distance is, frankly, embarrassing and absurd.
Life in Mexico is slower by design, because Mexican society seems to truly understand something Americans either never know or have forgotten: If you’re not fully present and doing everything with care an intention, what’s the point of your life? In Mexico, luxury and meaning aren’t found only in what you own; the good life is found instead in how you live, how you work, and how caring, human and present you are for it all.
Here’s a video of a high-end luxury home that doesn’t have a dishwasher. This is typical. Also note how plain and humble the house is from the outside versus how luxurious it is on the inside; that, too is metaphor.
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I hope you found this post interesting! I look forward to sharing more impressions of Mexico with you as I make my way there. I’ll also be covering all the exciting things Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is doing to bring greater fairness and prosperity to her country. This move is only possible thanks to my paid supporters, and I’m only halfway to the 500 paid subscribers I need to be able to support myself without any other source of income. If you haven’t subscribed, please do! If you’ve subscribed for free, please consider a paid upgrade.
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>>that special sickly yellow<<
I think you mean harvest gold. Hahaha.
Enjoy your new homes. They sound like life is much less stressful. Best wishes!