The Making of a “Simple Domestic:” Domestic Workers, the Supreme Court, and the Law in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the legal construction of domestic labor as an unskilled and undervalued occupation in postrevolutionary Mexico, a milieu that was otherwise renowned for an extraordinary expansion of workers’ rights. Based on the writing of legal scholars and legal disputes between domestic workers and their employers that reached Mexico's Supreme Court, the article discusses how a discourse that framed domestic labor as an occupation confined within the protective bounds of the household became an enduring legal formula to justify and reinforce the exclusion of domestics from labor protections recognized for other workers. In so doing, it shows how Supreme Court jurisprudence ultimately redefined the criteria for delimiting this large occupational category based on what was understood as its particular spatialization (the indoor household space) and its distinctive temporalization (guided by family needs instead of production demands). Designating workers who fit these criteria as “simple domestics,” the Court erased any professional specialization among them, marginalizing this overwhelmingly female workforce from other service workers, such as doormen and private drivers, who had previously been considered “domestic.”