37 Square Feet That Show Brazil’s Racist Past

In Brazil, rooms for maids, a vestige of the country’s history of slavery, are disappearing or being
transformed as the country confronts deeply ingrained inequities.

Video

Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, where many of the older buildings have windowless maid’s rooms.
By Ana Ionova |Photographs and Video by María Magdalena Arréllaga

Reporting from Rio de Janeiro—Aug. 15, 2024

Ana Beatriz da Silva still remembers her first home: a tiny room behind the kitchen of a beachfront
apartment in Rio de Janeiro, where her mother worked as a maid.

The room was barely bigger than a closet, hot and stifling, she said, with only a small window for air.
Ms. Silva shared the cramped space with her mother and older brother until she was 6.

“We lived like that — stuffed in a cubicle,” said Ms. Silva, 49, a geography teacher.

The experience convinced Ms. Silva that she could never have a maid’s room in her own home. So
when she rented an aging apartment in a middle-class area of Rio, she swiftly turned the servant’s
quarters into an office.

“The maid’s room is our colonial heritage,” Ms. Silva said. “It’s shameful.”

Many Brazilians increasingly feel the same way.

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 Ana Beatriz da Silva turned the
maid’s room in her home into
an office. “The maid’s
room is our colonial heritage,’’
she said.

Maid’s rooms have been a

fixture in Brazil’s homes for
generations, a vestige of its
long history of slavery and
a tangible marker of
inequality in a country
where, after abolition,
many affluent families
relied on low paid, mostly
Black domestic workers to
clean, cook and care for
children. Some worked
around the clock for
pennies; others toiled only in exchange for room and board.

But Brazil is undergoing a reckoning with its legacy of enslaving people and how this painful past has
shaped everything from the economy to architecture.

The debate has spilled over to the maid’s room, which many say is a racist, classist relic with no place
in modern homes.

“Architecture only reflects what society says is normal,” said Stephanie Ribeiro, an architect and
designer who has been studying the maid’s room for over a decade. “And, for many people, the maid’s
room doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Unlike their parents’ generation, younger people are calling out inequities in Brazil, which has a
majority Black population.

The face of the country’s middle class is changing, too, as Black and mixed-race Brazilians make
economic strides but reject some markers of affluence, like maids.

A raft of labor laws — a guaranteed 44-hour workweek, a standardized minimum wage and sick pay —
have made live-in maids more costly, pushing what was once a symbol of financial success out of
many Brazilians’ reach. As a result, fewer domestic workers live in their employers’ homes.

Some people say having a dedicated space is useful for maids to store belongings or take a lunch
break. Others argue that the rooms provide essential housing for domestic workers who move to
urban centers from distant rural areas, or those living on the poorer fringes of the city, hours away
from their employer’s homes.

But many disagree.

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 Changing labor laws in Brazil
have led to a decrease in
domestic workers living in
their employers’
homes.“There’s no need for
this worker to spend the
night,” said Luiza Batista,
coordinator of the National
Federation of Domestic
Workers, a union
representing about 14,000
maids. “This person works
all day. She needs a decent
place to rest. She needs to be
able to clock out.”

Ms. Batista, 68, said she

started working as a live-in
maid when she was 9 and
spent decades cleaning, cooking and caring for wealthy families. In one home, Ms. Batista and
another worker shared a room filled with cleaning supplies, construction material and a gas canister.

“You spent the night,” Ms. Batista recalled, “breathing in cleaning products.”

Maid’s rooms still often double as storage closets, crammed with everything from broken appliances
to spare tools, she said. “This space is never just a place for the worker to rest.”

Maid’s rooms, of course, are not unique to Brazil; they are often built into the homes of wealthy
families across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

In Latin America, they have gradually disappeared from countries like Chile and Argentina, where
worker protections have made live-in maids less affordable. But they persist elsewhere, including
Colombia, Bolivia and Mexico, despite pushback from labor activists.

Now, as Brazilians sour on maid’s rooms, they are turning them into libraries, lounges and walk-in
closets.

Rising real estate prices in Brazil’s major cities mean more developers are building smaller
apartments without maids’ rooms, and home buyers are choosier about how to use their shrinking
square footage.

“Brazilian architecture is seeking a new identity,” said Wesley Lemos, an architect who has designed
luxury homes across Brazil. “So the maid’s room is disappearing from blueprints.”

The idea of a servant’s room always made Diogo Acosta uncomfortable. The maid who worked for his
family would sometimes spend the night in a cramped room behind the laundry room of their
spacious home, in Rio’s wealthy Leblon neighborhood.

“It was so small, the room basically only fit her mattress,” said Mr. Acosta, 34, a professional
saxophone player. “Even as a child, I thought it was so strange.”

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Once he moved out, Mr. Acosta lived in a string of rentals where he turned the maid’s rooms into
something else. In one apartment, it was a study. In another, a brightly painted guest bedroom.

And when he moved into a new apartment two years ago, the designated maid’s room measured just
37 square feet and lacked a window, which both horrified him and made the room perfect for a
soundproof music studio.

Diogo Acosta, a saxophone player,

turned the maid’s room in his
apartment
into a soundproof music studio.

“It’s sad to think that, before this,

someone slept here,” he said.

The renovation was more than just

practical. For Mr. Acosta, who
hires a worker to clean his home
once a month, reimagining the
maid’s room also carried a
symbolic meaning. “When we give
it other uses, we are not just
changing an apartment,” he said,
“we are changing social relations,
too.”

Historians trace the maid’s room back to slave quarters, known as senzalas in Portuguese, attached to
the slave owner’s house. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, later than any other country in the Western
Hemisphere.

But many freed people — lacking financial means — remained on these same properties, serving
families that once enslaved them in exchange for room, board and a small salary.

When industrialization fed a wave of migration to cities, wealthy families translated the idea of
servants quarters for an urban setting: In Rio, sprawling oceanfront apartments were built in the
1930s and ’40s with tiny, windowless rooms for maids.

“Maid’s rooms are the modern-day slave quarters,” said Joyce Fernandes, a historian, rapper and
writer who shot to fame after sharing her own experiences as a third-generation maid.

In Brazil, where the gap between rich and poor is wider than anywhere else in South America, the
rooms went unquestioned for decades.

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 Most older buildings in Rio de
Janeiro’s Copacabana
neighborhood have small
servants’ rooms and separate
entrances for domestic
workers.

When the country’s

capital, Brasília, was built
from scratch in the late
1950s, renowned
architects like Oscar
Niemeyer designed
buildings with servant
quarters, maid’s
bathrooms and service
elevators, cementing
historic inequalities into a
modernist landscape.

In the 1980s and ’90s, popular television soap operas featured wealthy, white families being served by
mostly Black maids who lived in rooms tucked away inside luxurious mansions. In the early 2000s,
Brazil’s most popular children’s shows featured maids who never left the kitchen.

“Even the poor, who often worked in these jobs, dreamed of one day becoming rich and having
someone serving them,” said Joice Berth, an urbanist and architect.

Still, some people, even domestic workers, believe there remains a place for a servant’s room.

Rosângela de Morais, 48, a domestic worker in the Brazilian city of Salvador, started working as a
live-in maid when she was just 10.

Ms. Morais no longer lives in the homes where she works. But, as maid’s quarters disappear, she says
domestic workers are left with no place to change into uniforms, store belongings or take a lunch
break.

While she considers maid’s rooms in their traditional form inhumane, she doesn’t think removing
them altogether is the answer. “It would be better to keep this space, so we have a corner of our own,”
she said. “A clean, airy room with a window, where you can rest with dignity.”

Letícia Carvalho, 34, a lawyer from the city of Aracaju, employs four domestic workers, one of whom
lives in her home.

“She can’t go back and forth every day,” Ms. Carvalho said.

Still, Ms. Carvalho wanted a different kind of maid’s room. She made it bigger than usual, with a large
window, air-conditioning and a hot shower. “We wanted to bring a bit more comfort to the people
working for us,” she said.

Even as Brazil shifts away from maid’s rooms, social divisions persist in other ways. Most homes still
have service bathrooms reserved for workers. And most buildings have separate entrances and
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elevators for maids, nannies, dog walkers and food delivery workers, though some are also moving to
remove those divisions.

A small sign reading “service

entrance in the back” at the
entrance of an old
building in the neighborhood of
Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro.

Still, Ms. Silva, the teacher,

sees the vanishing maid’s room
as evidence that Brazil is
grappling with its painful past.

When Ms. Silva made a down

payment on her first home this
year, she was happy to discover
that it didn’t have a maid’s
room.

“It’s freeing, not to have this

heavy history,” she said.
“Instead, I’ll have a really big kitchen.”

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 16, 2024, Section A, Page 4 of the New York
edition with the headline: Rooms for Maids, a Relic of Brazil’s Racist Past, Are Disappearing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/world/americas/brazil-maid-rooms-racist-past.html

424 Comments—PLEASE READ A FEW OF THESE…More if you like!

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/world/americas/brazil-maid-rooms-racist-past.html#commentsContainer

prairie gal-canada11h ago

I spent time with a family in Portugal in the early 2000s who lived in a huge apartment. They had a day
maid who came in the morning, helped prepare the almoso (lunch), food shopped and did light cleanjng.
She ate in the kitchen but I insisted she sit at the table wjth us, not understanding she'd be
uncomfortable. I found it so odd.
4 Recommend

Diogo commented 12 hours ago: Diogo-WA12h ago

Growing up in a southern state in Brazil, the maids were white women from rural areas, frequently 3rd
generation descendants of Eastern European immigrants. Some of them were distant relatives of my
parents, who also migrated to the city from poor rural areas. The racial makeup of maids follows the
regional demographic patterns, but all are poor women. At the same time, domestic work is deemed a
reliable source of income for hard working women and an opportunity for upward mobility towards
lower middle class. There are about 6 million domestic workers in Brazil nowadays, most of them don’t
live-in, and many get paid by the day, which limits their eligibility to employment benefits.
10 Recommend

Ana Gomes commented 12 hours ago: Ana Gomes-Brazil12h ago

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I strongly recommend a Brazilian movie: The Second Mother “Unspoken class barriers that exist within a
home come crashing down when the live-in housekeeper's daughter suddenly appears”.
3 Recommend

Henrique commented 12 hours ago: Henrique-Brazil12h ago

Truthful text. During my childhood and adolescence, our house and apartment had maid's rooms. Some of
them had 2 units. This is rare in Brazil today. It is surely an improvement.
1 Recommend

Tony from Truro commented 12 hours ago: Tony from Truro-Truro12h ago
Brazil was one of the last areas to do away with enslaved help. Long after The United States. Africa was
forefront of the horrible "marketplace' for slaves that were, ironically, sold by warring Black tribes to The
Americas.
3 Recommend

Willie L commented August 15: Willie L-Bend, OR Aug. 15

I lived most of my adult life in Brazil and had maids most of the time. The job offered to them guaranteed
social mobility, and all of them, without exception, appreciated the modest accommodations provided. It
eliminated the need for exhaustive public transportation trips. The article should have told the vital story
of the change in law promoted by Lula and his left-leaning government. Full-time employment now
requires home servants/maids to have the same rights as regular workers. This is a tremendous and
obvious move to provide equality. Still, it has an adverse effect—maintaining a full-time employee with
all the associated expenses is prohibitive to most families. Today, very few homes can afford full-time
maids and prefer to have maids for one day a week. I think, for now, the small rooms you accused of the
racist practice will be empty.
4 Recommend

Tuxedo Cat commented August 15: Tuxedo Cat-New York Aug. 15

As others have noted, it is not unusual for the top floor of older apartment buildings in Paris to have
"chambres de bonnes" or "maids' rooms." I lived in one for a year (some time ago) and it was indeed tiny
(single bed, a desk, a kooky tiny 'salle de bain'), but it had full glass, beautiful, real 'French doors' which
opened up to a tiny, sweet terrace, just big enough for a small chair, but with a great, expansive view of
the city over the rooftops. Cétait charmant.
5 Recommend

Lao Tzu commented August 15:Lao Tzu-Pittsburgh Aug. 15

Watch the film "The Second Mother" (in Portuguese, "Que Horas Ela Volta?"—What Time Is She Coming
Back?"), a fantastic 2015 film about a Brazilian maid (brilliantly played by Regina Casé) who has lived
with a family in an upscale São Paulo neighborhood for 20+ years, not only cooking/cleaning/shopping
but also raising their son. The maid/"second mother" lives in a cramped basement room and sends her
paychecks to Bahia to the woman who has been taking care of her daughter since her daughter was a
baby. When the daughter comes to São Paulo to take a university entrance exam, all the class-line
fractures show up.
6 Recommend

RB commented August 15: RB-Paris Aug. 15

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I agree that racism has no place and must be condemned, however attacking maids rooms is throwing the
baby with the water. What should not be overlooked with the story of Ana Beatriz is that while she lived
in a tiny room with her mother and brother, this arrangement provided employment to her mother and
allowed her to achieve upward social mobility that most people in Brazil will never achieve (in addition
to providing them free housing). While these are far from ideal life conditions, banning them will not do
anything to solve the actual problem of poverty but will prevent others from achieving the success story
of Ana Beatriz. Live-in maids living in tiny rooms are a very imperfect solution, but are nevertheless part
of the solution, they are not the problem. Moreover, they allow very different social classes to live in
proximity to each other, and it is not uncommon for the families employing these maids to give them
generous in-kind benefits. Just basic exposure to their lifestyle and the way they raise their children can
already do wonders to pave a successful future for the family of the maid. A better development would be
to require these rooms to be larger, or when not possible to allow the maid's family to use additional
parts of the home on a mutually agreed schedule. Leave-in maids should be treated as family members in
my view (while maintaining respect and an employer-employee relationship).
7 Recommend

Helena Cabral commented August 15: Helena Cabral-Portugal (Europe)Aug. 15

Maid's room have nothing to do with slavery. In Europe 100 years ago, even less (I am 80 and I still
remember the maid's room in my grandmother house, and that was in Portugal, with by then no black
people living there; and all the maids I knew were white. The same was true in France, for instance,
where many maids were poor Portuguese (!), white again. It has everything to do with rich and poor and
it only ended, when social conditions became better and house workers stopped staying in during the
night subjected to work also at those hours if needed by the bosses.
8 Recommend

Maria commented August 15: Maria-Portugal Aug. 15

sentences in this article: “ a vestige of its long history of slavery” “ the maids room is our colonial heritage
“. Brasil independence from Portugal was in 1822. Slavery was abolished in Portugal in 1869 and in the
independent Brasil in 1888. I suppose Brasilian people must be responsible for their past and their way
of living and not in 2024 blame slavery or the colonial past for maid rooms. This is an old global story that
is about masters and servants. There are very nice British series about this, one of the best rightly named
Upstairs Downstairs. I think that the world now is more equal and we must speak for better pay and lots
of consideration for domestic helpers and for women in general that do most homework
4 Recommend

La Annabanana commented August 15: La Annabanana-Colorado Aug. 15

These maids’ rooms exist in many other Latin American countries that did not have a history of slavery
like Brazil but did have entrenched inequality usually along racial lines. In El Salvador and in Peru you
can find these maid rooms in many upper middle class and wealthy homes. Like the article described they
are often cramped and wouldn't pass code for a living space in the US.
3 Recommend

Ajax commented August 15: Ajax-Santa Fe, NM Aug. 15

I grew up in Buenos Aires. In the 1950's, every middle-class home had "dependencias de servicio"-
usually a small room with its own bathroom that was accessed by crossing the kitchen. I don't remember
ever seeing one without windows, the view may not have been the best of the house, but they always had
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access to natural light and air. They slowly went out of fashion in the 60's, and by the 1970's they had all
but disappeared. When I left in the mid 80's many had been converted to home offices, hobby workshops,
children's playrooms, family rooms, etc. Most of the women who did domestic work and lived in these
"dependencias" came from small towns in Northern Argentina, where mixing of Native Americans with
Spanish settlers went back centuries. Many were also immigrants from neighboring countries, chiefly
Paraguay and Bolivia. A few were poor European immigrants, mostly Spanish and Italians. There were
very few if any who claimed Black ancestry. Argentina abolished slavery in 1813, and after that the
relatively few former slaves were more or less quickly integrated into Argentine society, and over the
next century or so intermarried with Native Americans and European immigrants, giving rise to the
quintessential Argentinian. I am a first-generation Argentinian (Hispano-French), but my wife has deep
Argentinian roots. According to 23&Me, 40% German and Scandinavian, 30 % Spanish, 20 % Native
American, and the balance African and Ashkenazi Jew. A true melting pot.
8 Recommend

flossy commented August 15: Flossy-Los Angeles Aug. 15

My parents lived in Brasil for 2.5 years, around 1974. We had a live-in maid, cook, and any other roles she
filled. The standard was two weekends off a month. My parents gave her two days a week. The Brasilians
in our building didn't like the precedent. Celia named her child after me, she owned a house, highly
unusual for someone in her situation.
10 Recommended

Jazzy-JO commented August 15: Jazzy-JO-Massachusetts Aug. 15

Maids quarters are shocking or a source of guilt? Young girls with no education and little opportunity?
Seems neither the writer nor the Anglo commenters have heard of nor seen Downton Abbey or Upstairs
Downstairs. Both TV series reflect an era when domestic servants were commonplace, education was
restricted, few jobs offered social mobility, and women had few rights.
17 Recommend

PedroF commented August 15:PedroF-Lisbon, Portugal Aug. 15

My parents (now my mother) live in a middle upper-class apartment in Lisbon and in the 60’s and 70’s it
was still common families to have internal maids. Rosa, came from a seven-brother family, 100 kms away
from Lisbon, when she was 14 or 15 and just after my parents’ marriage. In those years there were also
many young girls, with 6 or 7 years old, with the same destiny. This was a way for poor and large member
families to survive in a poor country. Rosa, now 84, is a second mother to me and my sister and although
she has left, when she got married (I was 16), she is considered as part of our close family. The apartment
where I live in the center of Lisbon, is from the 50’s and have a maid’s room with toilet (is now a storage
room). There are still many apartments with this room in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, London, and many cities
in the world. What I mean is, like before, still today in many countries the main factor is social class,
poverty, the difficult access to a higher degree of education and now the migrations for a understandable
better future. Then comes, in some cases, racism and colonial background.
10 Recommend

Keith commented August 15: Keith-Brisbane Aug. 15

It's worth mentioning that in the era when live-ins were more common, domestic work involved more
hours of manual labour than now. With modern appliances for cleaning, cooking and dishwashing, a
homeowner can more easily accomplish this work directly, or hire someone for a few hours a week to do
a serious cleaning. The industrial revolution spurred the rise of the middle class which created an
economy for domestic devices that reduced the labour required. A hundred years later we see these

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spaces as reflecting social values, but we've forgotten that they once reflected the large amount of labour
required to run a household, as well as the lower wage labour pool then available.
17 Recommended

Bluedaffodil commented August 15: Bluedaffodil-here Aug. 15

In the States these are very common in larger apartments across the country. Usually the servants rooms
were filled with the newly arriving immigrant or the ethnic group that had restricted mobility. In the NYC
census, one can see the age and country of origin for the live-in servants. Just pre-WWI it was usually
Irish or German young women. These groups had mobility opportunities, although certainly harder for
the Irish who faced real prejudice. The problem is when there are groups without mobility opportunities
for themselves or especially their children, when their ethnicity holds them down from having access to
the opportunities of their society.
7 Recommend

Jim commented August 15: Jim-Boston Aug. 15

@Grand Army You are very in your comment regarding maids' quarters in the USA. I live just outside
Boston in a 3rd floor apt with a separate staircase leading down to the first-floor kitchen. (My apt is now
assemble by an outdoor stairway.) My apt was expanded with a bathroom and a kitchen some years
before I moved in. Before that the 3rd floor was obviously for servants' quarters. BTW the house was
built in 1913.
3 Recommend

Carol Warren commented August 15-Carol Warren-Coronado California Aug. 15

When we moved into the Coronado Cays in 2003, there were maids’ rooms in some houses—a few still in
use. They were carved out of part of the garage, or the attic. They were not legal. There was a scandal
about this (I cannot remember what year, maybe 2006) and an edict went out that they had to be
removed from attics and garages. Not sure if all of them were.
4 Recommend

Anscombe commented August 15-Anscombe-NYCAug. 15

Many are saying that the maids' rooms are not legacies of slavery, but just a reflection of the "economics"
of the times, which are subject to evolution. I guess... But, perhaps we should consider the economics of
slavery anew. In the realms of freedom, how could there be such an abundant base of servants from
which to choose, that every apartment, every home, is architected with this function in mind?
9 Recommend

pdrothstein commented August 15: pdrothstein-Huntingdon, PA Aug. 15

Not just Brazil. I live in rural Pennsylvania, and in my neighborhood - which at one point was “fancy” - the
houses built in the 1930s (including mine) have a room that is usually tucked into an attic area, with
much more basic finishes (Masonite with wood strips over panel joints, not plastered) that is somewhat
separate from the rest of the house. The restrictive covenants from that era specifically mention (as is the
“norm” with covenants - there’s a history in the U.S.) that nonwhite people cannot live in the houses,
unless they are “domestics.”
8 Recommend

Raquel commented August 15: Raquel-Mount Vernon, NY Aug. 15

Maids rooms are similar to the servants rooms, stairs, hallways, etc. found in the USA. The family room in
the attic, the unusually small bedroom near the back door, was probably servants rooms and entrance.

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The kitchen cut off from the entire house, not a problem, since you did not need to see the person cooking
your food.
6 Recommend

Al Brosseau commented August 15: Al Brosseau-Wellington, ON Aug. 15

I lived in Sao Paulo in the late'70s and I experimented with 'fachineras" (live in maids). First these young
girls are uneducated. They have to be shown how to do everything and they must be supervised 24/7.
Second, I discovered that, in order to live with living in maids, one has to be brought up from a young age
with living in maids especially if you want to treat them as human beings. Third, one evening, from my
balcony I could see some flickering lights coming from the living room window of a neighbor whom I
know was away. I called security, they checked and found the maid in the middle of a Macumba ceremony
with a lighted candles spread all over the floor.(At that point, I had already decided living in maids we not
for me) We're not doing anybody, including ourselves, a favor by taking these young ladies as living in
maids.
5 Recommend-1 REPLY

GB commented 12 hours ago: GB-Philadelphia, PA12h ago

@Al Brosseau Faxineiras. But you're right in that the "x" sounds like the "ch" in "champagne".
2 Recommend

K Walker commented August 15: K Walker-Hampton Roads, VA Aug. 15

The attitudes and economics that made "maid’s rooms" possible have changed. Extending Civil rights to
people of color made education and economic progress possible for millions... and without a guaranteed
racial underclass as a source of cheap labour...the economics became unworkable.
3 Recommend - John commented August 15

John- Arlington Va Aug. 15

Good article and accurate based on my years of living in Brazil. Brazil more than the US has even more
concentrated wealth and income and rich families there all had domestic servants. Many of them were
informal employees without legal rights to a minimum wage or a retirement. Brazil struggles to eliminate
its racism. To his credit President Lula a decade or more ago established quotas for Black and poor
students to get into the elite public universities previously all White. Lula and the Workers Party have
made efforts to reduce racism but it endures in many parts of the country. Several years ago the Black
son-in-law of famous singer Chico Buarque de Holanda was told to use the back servants entrance to the
expensive apartment building in Sao Paulo even though this son in law was himself a famous singer in
Brazil.
10 Recommend Dave k commented August 15

Dave k-Florida Aug. 15

I would have liked to see more written about Portugal's slave trade that was behind Brazil's start in
having a slave population. Portugal was the largest slave trading nation at one time, with many coming to
the USA.
5 Recommend - 1 REPLY Antonio commented 12 hours ago

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