Cleaning the Revolutionary Household: Domestic Servants and Public Welfare in Mexico City, 1900-1935

Abstract

Historians of Mexican labor have long considered domestic service analytically elusive owing to its informal nature and the fact that it took place in private homes. Located at key junctures of legal and social reform during Mexico's early revolutionary period, domestic service comes into focus through examination of public welfare institutions where domestics appeared in multiple roles. Family law reform legalizing adoption provided protection against adoption of state wards as domestic servants. Federal maternal-child health programs, the outcome of discursive valuation of maternity and domesticity, raised the qualifications for certain kinds of domestic labor in institutional settings. Federal labor law included domestic service, establishing legal recourse against abuse but also codifying the low social status of domestic service. These early developments illuminate ways that revolutionary reforms intended to modernize Mexican family forms to support national economic goals simultaneously constructed a gendered informal labor sector.