“The Dirt Came Up”: Domestic Service and Women's Agency in Oaxaca City, Mexico

Abstract More than two million Mexican women, including over 60,000 in the southeastern state of Oaxaca (population 3.8 million), generate income through paid domestic labour. Within the local political economy, this low‐paid, low‐status job commodifies the unpaid household chores that local gender role norms ascribe to women. Although the potential economic, social, and physical exploitation of uneducated, poor women domestic workers in a “dead end job” is well documented across the globe (see Hoerder, 2015), less is known about the goals and experiences of women who work in service as a way to “get ahead” through and after schooling. Through ethnographic analysis of the lives of Oaxacan domestics who possess high education levels, this paper explores ways that local socioeconomic and geographic conditions and patterns coincide and contrast with broader debates regarding the gendering of urbanization and employment in underdeveloped regions. This issue is especially compelling in an impoverished state that is notorious for low schooling levels, high rates of international migration, and the nation's highest percentage (80 percent) of workers in the informal sector (CONEVAL 2013). This study contributes to our understanding of the importance of informal sector employment for urban women—both with and without advanced schooling—whose agency has led them to work in domestic service while negotiating precarious economic circumstances.