Questioning the 'Margins' of Labor: The Precarity of Domestic Labor in Modern Latin America and the Caribbean

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Recent scholarly work on modern Latin America and the Caribbean has exposed the gendered and racialized aspects of the concept of work, exploring how the identities of people who performed certain kinds of work shaped notions of “respectable” labor. This panel expands this scholarship by focusing on domestic servants in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Cuba, Panama and Brazil. The papers investigate how the intersection of race, class and gender informs domestic labor’s often marginal status in labor studies and labor activism, and how domestic servants have understood their work in juxtaposition with labor that has been recognized as “real” work.

Sub Track

• Gender and Feminist Studies

Session Organizer

• Joan Flores-Villalobos, New York University

Chair

• Jaira J Harrington, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Domestic Servants and Downtime: The Controversy over Cuban Law No. 1754 - Anasa S Hicks, New York University

• Profiles of Political Leadership: Domestic Worker’s Unions in Brazil - Jaira J Harrington, University of Chicago

• “Laboring Women or Prostitutes?”: Caribbean Domestic Workers in the Panama Canal Zone - Joan Flores-Villalobos, New York University

Discussant

• Paula A De la Cruz Fernandez, Florida International University