Alessandra May Rosen

This project examines struggles over the values of work and belonging in south-central Mexico through an ethnographic study of the informal care economy and its governance. In recent years, Mexico’s progressive government has sought to address rural gender inequality by replacing formerly patron-client domestic service arrangements with contractual labor relations. These reforms join growing efforts in transnational feminist and gender development to account for womens’ paid and unpaid domestic work. While state officials and activists cast the laws as an unqualified win, many domestic workers are critical of what will be jeopardized with labor recognition. In a state that has aligned the mobility of the rural poor with economic formalization, how and when might alternative forms of value and relation take precedence over market-based labor value? With fifteen months of ethnographic research between Morelos and Mexico City, my project investigates the vernacular practices through which domestic workers navigate enduring patron ties, and how these arrangements are re-evaluated by state officials and activists in a liberal-democratic state. By centering the practices that make patron arrangements economically and socially viable, it ethnographically probes the possibilities and limits of formal labor as means and end to rural womens’ civic inclusion and welfare politics.