Domestic Service in Latin American History: Recent Topics and Findings

Historical research on domestic service in Latin America has produced studies that either center domestic workers or consider them within broader lines of inquiry about labor markets, workers’ movements, state regulation, and women’s movements. However, historiographical interventions to assess this scholarship, and sketch the contours of major historical transformations in domestic service work and mobilization, has been intermittent (Kusnesoff, 1988; Tinsman, 1992; Olcott, 2011). This paper will assess recent historiographical trends in the study of domestic workers, assessing studies that have revealed the diversity of practices and meanings of “domestic service” in different times and places across Latin America, and emphasizing the importance of these findings for understanding state formation, labor markets, and the emergence of domestic workers’ organizations over the last two centuries. The authors will examine how a wide variety of studies have analyzed shifting labor markets, revealing their evolution in the context of developing state institutions and emerging labor regulations that deeply impacted household workers, first through exclusion from state laws and then through their halting, but limited, inclusion. These studies have also emphasized the persistence of non-contractual and dependent relations in domestic service – notwithstanding key historical and geographic differences – which has been generally performed in the gray zone between public and private. Finally, the paper will examine scholarship on household workers’ organizations dating back to the early 20^th century, which has revealed their labor demands and organizational struggles, as well as their political participation in critical historical transformations in 20^th-century Latin America. These breakthroughs in the study of Latin American domestic service demonstrate the substantial growth in this area of inquiry, suggesting important questions and theoretical insights for the study of other labor sectors, gender history, and contemporary household workers’ movements.