In Workers Like All the Rest of Them, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison captures the persistence and adaptability of Chile’s domestic workers, whose century-long demand to be recognized, legally and socially, as workers like any others has sustained their struggle across shifting political regimes and organizing frameworks. These workers actively engaged with the politics of the century—from Social Catholicism to Popular Front politics, from national and women’s liberation to Cold War politics, from resisting the dictatorship to navigating the return to democracy. Through their union (SINTRACAP) and association (ANECAP), they participated in these pivotal moments, shaping them and being shaped by them. Yet they were persistently rendered invisible in the historical record.Hutchison’s study sits at the intersection of Chilean labor history, gender history, and social history from below. In Chile, labor has rarely been a narrowly bounded category; it has been integral to broader histories of social struggle in which class, gender, and race remain analytically inseparable, even if academic trends in recent decades have sidelined lo social in favor of other paradigms. Workers Like All the Rest of Them pushes against that drift. While nationalist narratives cast domestic service as a relic of Chile tradicional and a colonial legacy, locating inequality as timeless and ahistorical, Hutchison insists on its contingent reproduction through modern labor law, political economy, and the gendered and racialized logics of the twentieth-century Chilean state. In doing so, she engages with Latin American and transnational literature on domestic work that ranges from feminist critiques about the conflation of domestic service and familial labor to the legitimizing function of and challenges to tradition regarding domestic labor to recent theorization of global care work.The book is historically bound by the fight of household workers to dictate how their labor is described and, by extension, how it should be categorized legally and socially. Over the twentieth century, activists sought to shed the “traditional” nomenclature that commonly referred to them as criadas (servant), replacing it with respectable terms that aligned with their occupation. The transformation from las sirvientas (servants) to empleadas domésticas (domestic employees) to trabajadoras de casa particular (workers in private homes) carried political weight. For instance, empleados domésticos invoked the respectability associated with public and private sector empleados. Even the current legal term coexists with the colloquial empleada (maid) and nana (nanny), revealing how deeply entrenched hierarchies persist in popular discourse. As Fathers Hugo Verdugo and Fernando Tapia noted in a 1968 article, it was “not just about changing the occupation’s name,” for at the core of their struggle is changing the “labor system” (107).Domestic workers and their allies participated in Chile’s revolutionary period from the late 1960s until the 1973 coup that overthrew the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende. This was the high tide of socialist and liberationist discourse, when movements across Chile sought to build a new social order of work, family, and community life. Tanya Harmer’s Beatriz Allende (2023) has recently shown how ideas like medicina integral, advanced by University of Concepción medical students in the mid-1960s, linked the health of the people to the health of the nation (43–44). Drawing on the same language of integrality, ANECAP’s Concepción-based directorate issued its 1969 “Proyecto Pastoral,” calling for “integral development” between God and society that would remove the obstacles, cohesively named as “slavery-servility-capitalism-underdevelopment-misery-interests-oligarchy-structures-individualism, etc.” (111), that stunted humanity’s growth.Hutchison’s depiction of the Social Church builds on recent historiography such as Pablo Bradbury’s Liberationist Christianity in Argentina (2023) and Raúl Zegarra’s A Revolutionary Faith (2023). Under the leadership of Father Bernardino Piñera and Father Verdugo, ANECAP found allies to organize domestic workers, educate members, and spread union activity to cities across Chile. Hutchison detailed the impact of Father Cardjin’s JOC (Young Christian Workers) on the Chilean Church, showing why priests from elite families embraced organizing domestic workers, among other workers. While Church writings from the 1950s and prior emphasized a marianismo discourse, tying the improvement of their labor conditions with female sacrifice, post-1959 Cuban Revolution Latin America shifted perception. Verdugo and Tapia tied domestic workers’ liberation to the self-determination of peoples, rejecting the “servility and dependency” mentality as belonging to “a different time” (107). They argued that transformation required the creation of a new estilo de trabajo (work process) that replaced the vertical worker-boss relationship with a horizontal, humanistic, and Christian one. By merging Catholic social teaching with socialist visions of transformation, domestic workers and their allies recast domestic service as essential to the collective reproduction of society.The invisibility domestic workers endured under democracy was compounded—and paradoxically transformed—by a patriarchal dictatorship that, unintentionally and ironically, gave them space to organize. Reminiscent of the political space afforded to mothers and family members of the disappeared in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala, the regime’s paternalistic logic regarded women’s organizations, particularly those outside male-dominated trade unions or political parties, as less threatening, making them, in Hutchison’s words, “strategically illegible” (129). That strategic invisibility allowed domestic workers, alongside other women’s groups, to stage the first mass public gathering of the dictatorship in 1976 for International Women’s Day (135). The Church provided material protection, such as the archdiocese holding the title to the building where ANECAP organized, and the cover of pastoral activity that blurred the line between religious work and political mobilization. These protections were crucial in the dictatorship’s early years, when disappearances, torture, and exile became commonplace and labor unions, along with socialist and communist parties, were outlawed.Finally, as Hutchison shows, domestic workers and feminists had crossed paths in the past, but their encuentro (encounter or coming together) during the dictatorship became tangible in a shared project. This is especially salient if one considers Julieta Kirkwood’s words in Tejiendo rebeldias (Knitting Rebellions, 1987): “When we ask for democracy in the country and the home, we simply mean that socialism can begin in the home” (46). Hutchison documents how feminists began to reconsider rights alongside the social reproduction of the home through discussions in the Women’s Study Circle that brought together middle-class feminists and domestic workers. The circle conducted a range of activities from economic studies about the reliance of professional women on hiring empleadas to questioning how women’s liberation could be achieved when social inequalities persist. Reflecting to a 1981 encuentro, the economist Thema Gálvez described the harshness of “facing the reality of other women who had been near us our whole lives, but whom we had not seen as women” (151). Ultimately, Hutchison shows that domestic workers had actively fought to be considered as part of the feminist vision and not just their cause.In Workers Like All the Rest of Them, Hutchison powerfully illustrates how domestic workers, through sustained organizing, contested their portrayal as unskilled, informal, and unworthy of full labor rights. Yet the book leaves open a crucial question: Why, across the century, did political elites consistently refuse to grant them full legal recognition as workers, let alone professionalization of their labor? A 1971 pastoral letter signed by Archbishop Raúl Silva Henriquez helps answer this question. In response to legislation to set their workday at eight hours (or twelve hours with overtime pay), when previously workers had demanded twelve- to fourteen-hour workdays, the letter stated the need “to imagine and create a new regime for family life . . . that’s necessary to make possible the liberty of thousands of women” (123). In sum, the letter unveils why the Chilean elite uses the myth of tradition to suppress the specter of domestic workers’ organizing, for they know that improving their working conditions would place “a new regime for family life” on the table.Hutchison’s book details not just the history of a labor sector but the endurance of a collective political memory. In tracing a century of organizing—from mutual aid societies to unions, from petitions to legislative lobbying—she demonstrates how domestic workers have refused erasure. Hutchison shows that domestic workers’ century-long organizing will relentlessly continue until they are treated like “workers like all the rest of them.”
Romina A. Green Rioja (2026) studied this question.