A close friend of mine lived in Mexico for many years. I would visit him occasionally and spend the odd week or two with him. I got to know his home help. He b

A close friend of mine lived in Mexico for many years. I would visit him occasionally and spend the odd week or two with him. I got to know his home help. He being an American of generally liberal persuasion tried, as your family did, to treat the cook and gardener as 'equals'. Over time that changed though. One day the maid sat him down and politely explained that it was sort of insulting to be treated too familiar in this context. She was speaking of the gardener and said, "What you are doing makes him feel very uncomfortable". She explained, "the old man there is kneeling in your garden pulling weeds 8 hours a day, and you come home...breeze in in your 50K auto and ask him if he wants to share a beer with you..." He realized she was right. These people were not "passionate about their career", in fact there was no career, nor even the semblance of it. They were just doing whatever possible work they could do to earn enough money to keep food on their families table. Treating them too familiar, or even implying they shared lots of things in common, was sort of demeaning. In the end, he wound up treating them very formally. "Sr Veracruz" "Sra Sanchez" etc...always keeping a sort of respectful distance between them. Posting work schedules, etc and generally treating them like employees. I'm not at all against what you said, nor implying you guys didn't do what was right, simply showing there are more than one interpretation of such situations.