‘Get Used to How You Are’: Service and Colonial Domesticity in Household Work

Household workers’ struggles for labor rights draw attention to the private sphere of the home as an unregulated site of gendered and racialized labor, especially in highly unequal regions such as Latin America. I argue that the difficulties in organizing household work arise from the historical organization of labor of the home itself, which is fundamentally gendered and racialized. Through 10 months of ethnography in Lima, Peru, 62 in-depth interviews with household workers, and an analysis of the Peruvian household workers’ law, I find that the law shapes a labor regime of ‘colonial domesticity’ inside Lima’s contemporary homes. Using a tripartite framing of space, time, and body, I emphasize the colonial ordering of the home and its lingering effects, revealing continuities from the colonial era. The Peruvian case reveals important gendered and racialized distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality embedded in the home as a workplace.