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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

‘Don’t get used to nice clothes or expensive things. Get used to how you are.

You are from the countryside’, my employer said.

‘You know how people live there, so get used to that’.

—Juana, 23, household worker from Huancayo, Peru

‘Like a mirage enveloped in drizzle (garúa) and smog,

the oligarchy’s colonial fantasies disguise the disorder of the modern city (Lima)’.

—Silvia Spitta (2007: 298)

Along Lima, Peru’s malecón, the long and winding boardwalk that stretches along the Pacific Ocean’s coast in the upscale district of Miraflores, women dressed from head to toe in dark royal blue, pristine white, or baby blue scrub-like smocks, aprons, jackets, and fitted dresses dot the horizon. Some walk dogs and push strollers, while others chase after their young toddling charges and still others line the park benches of wealthy districts, blue and white notes amidst the green, well-manicured gardens. Their uniforms signal that after their stroll in the park, they will return to someone else’s home where they cook, clean, care, or some combination of those tasks for pay. Yet uniforms also prevent these women from entering upscale establishments and private beaches due to their status as empleadas. ¹ The uniform, similar to the national labor law for household workers, simultaneously signifies and prohibits. It creates a visual distinction of embodied race, class, and gender inequalities, while also setting limits on the kind of rights these women have as workers, both ubiquitous and overlooked within Limeño society. Workers are expected to understand those limits and are reminded by their employers to ‘get used to how you are’, as was Juana.

Like most former colonial societies, Peru has a long tradition of household labor concentrated in its capital, Lima. Yet only since 2003 has the state legally recognized Peruvian household workers with a specific set of rights, protections, and benefits through the passing of a national law, Ley No. 27986: The Peruvian Household Workers’ Law (El Peruano, 2003). ² This law was an important benchmark for domestic workers in that it legally recognizes household workers as workers with the right to wages, overtime, social security, holidays, vacation, and retirement. However, the law remains mired in colonial logics, as household workers are regarded differently and less equally than most other Peruvian workers. Many of their labor rights are reduced to half of those accorded to other workers or, in the case of a standardized minimum wage, completely absent. Just as in many countries throughout Latin America and in other parts of the world that have recently passed household worker legislation, the Peruvian state thus officially recognizes household work and yet also maintains its exceptional and unequal status (Blofield, 2012; Blofield and Jokela, 2018). ³

More recently and after my fieldwork was conducted, Ley No. 31047 was passed in Lima in 2020 after worker associations, unions, and social movement organizations organized collectively (Schalkowski, 2025). The new law includes significant improvements to the previous legislation, such as a written contract, inclusion in the minimum wage, overtime pay, the abolishment of child labor, longer holidays, maternity rights, the right to join a union, and the recognition of 30th March as an official holiday celebrating household workers. This law mirrors International Labour Organization Convention 189, Decent Work for Domestic Workers, which was ratified by Peru in 2021 and brings domestic workers into full protections and coverage—at least on paper. Early research examining efficacy of the new law, however, shows that much like my findings here, there is poor enforcement of the legislation and widespread employer non-compliance (Pérez and Gandolfi, 2024). In addition, very few household workers are aware of the new law 4 years after it has been passed, as a survey conducted in 2024 found that less than 15% of the household workers interviewed knew about the new law, and similarly, another 2024 study found that only 6% of household workers actually had a written contract (Pérez and Gandolfi, 2024; Proyecto Anita, 2024). These new regulations serve to sustain longstanding colonial structures rather than transform them, and this is not just an administrative failure on the part of the state—it is deeply rooted in Peru’s structural political economy and broader class-divided social and cultural expectations.

Also of significance is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on household workers in Lima and throughout Latin America more broadly, which highlights the existent precarity and vulnerability of this sector (Bastidas Aliagas and Iáñez-Domínguez, 2024). The pandemic, a ‘complex gendered crisis of work, unravelling across multiple domains and realms’ took a severe toll on household workers in Lima who provide the social reproductive labor for Limeño families (Mezzadri et al., 2022). Between the end of 2019 through mid-year 2020, 72% of Peruvian household workers had lost their jobs, the highest percentage of household workers to suffer job loss from the pandemic across Latin America (ILO, 2021a; Pereyra Colchado, 2020). Since then, the overall number of household workers has decreased since the pandemic, though official numbers are difficult to obtain (Pereyra Colchado, 2020). Furthermore, at a time when they needed it most, 82% of household workers had no other income during the pandemic, and 85% of them did not receive the state-granted stipend during the country’s lockdown, ‘Yo me quedo en casa’ (I’m staying at home) (Pereyra Colchado, 2020). Workers in informal employment conditions are often hardest hit during times of broader economic crisis, as they tend to have no safety nets or enforceable labor protections to lend stability and security.

Yet as scholars of informal and precarious work in the Global South have shown, work has most often occurred under ‘unstable conditions, with little legal regulation and little expectation of long-term continuity’ (Mosoetsa et al., 2016: 6). This is not a new phenomenon and is very much reflected in the contemporary neoliberal Peruvian economy with its increase in flexibility and subcontracting, lack of salaried workers, high levels of temporary workers, high levels of underemployment for the economic active population (43.6% in 2018) and its dependence upon cheap, widely available domestic and care work (Lust, 2020). Most household workers in Lima are women, mestiza or Indigenous, employed via informal working conditions, often internal migrants from other parts of the country such as the highlands or the jungle, and earn wages that are significantly less than the national minimum wage (MTPE, 2024). And while other forms of precarious labor in Lima share parallels with household labor, such as street vendors and waste pickers, household workers—predominantly women—were born out of ‘slavery and then servitude’ and this industry of inequality continues to endure within Peru over centuries (Pérez and Gandolfi, 2024; Rosaldo, 2021).

Recent research with employers of household workers in Lima shows that employers are choosing to ignore the law because employers benefit from keeping household labor informal throughout the country and because there are no legal consequences for noncompliant employers (Pérez and Gandolfi, 2024). As Lust (2020) notes, labor precariousness is a political decision, and it is one that has plagued Limeño society for years (p. 326) This is why household work is such a central part of the Peruvian and Limeño economy, and fully formalizing this industry would render it impossible for most families to access inexpensive and widely available care services for their households. Thus, while much of my data was collected during a period when the rights guaranteed to household workers were somewhat different from today, similar issues persist in enforcement, employer compliance, and the struggles for legal equality across Peru.

While the sociological literature on paid domestic work has acknowledged the difficulties of organizing workers and, to a lesser degree, of regulating an industry based in the home, here I argue that the difficulties arise from the historical organization of labor—that is, the colonial ordering, which is fundamentally an ordering of racial subordination—of the home itself. As Romero (2011: 195) notes, gender, race, class, and citizenship influence working conditions in all labor relations, and yet the profound inequality of household labor’s employment relations take on a particular cultural character depending upon its embedded historical context (Agarwala and Saha, 2018; Ray and Qayum, 2009). Just as Juana’s employer told her, ‘Don’t get used to nice clothes or expensive things; get used to how you are’, due to her status as being an indigenous, non-Limeña migrant household worker, the racialized, gendered relations of labor subordination are lived out in the contemporary Peruvian home, recently regulated under labor law. I follow Blackett’s (2019) critical legal studies approach to the household as a site of labor law here, who urges a deeper analysis of how the assumptions and values around the domestic work relationship reveal a continuity with contemporary forms of precarious work. I argue that the formal inequality embodied in this new legislation is a result of this historical colonial legacy around household work, manifested inside Lima’s contemporary homes, as the law doesn’t recognize the multiple oppressions and intersectionality of this sector, and remains mired in colonial logics that created those very oppressions. This article thus presents a historical understanding of social inclusion legislation in a modernizing state with a persistent, dominant colonial character.

On Invoking ‘Colonial’

I theorize colonialism as the historical process which began racial formation across Latin America, that is characterized by changing relations of power and domination and associated with specific logics of labor exploitation, slavery, sexual violence, and genocide, among others, which continue to hold relevance today (Lugones, 2008; Mahoney, 2010; Quijano, 2000; Stoler, 2002). Contemporary Peru reveals vestiges of coloniality which reinforce intersecting categories of hierarchy and preserve a culturally, racially, and economically dominant elite (Cotler, 1978; Ewig, 2010). This research positions the household as a microcosm of that broader set of colonial patterns and practices which continue today.

Here I invoke coloniality purposefully based on that understanding. Colonial historicizes and contextualizes the origin of the particular configuration of Peruvian household work. While the Peruvian economy is organized in a capitalist fashion, domestic service has been historically unregulated, contained within the private sphere, and originates from the colonial era through the use of enslaved people and indentured servants under Spanish rule. Like O’Toole (2012) notes in her study of the making of race in colonial Peru, African and Andean servants and workers occupied specific legal locations within the colonial context, via shifting exclusions and categorical hierarchies, though as ‘colonial subjects’ they also changed the meanings of those legal colonial categories which had been created to contain them (O’Toole, 2012: 12). Importantly, emphasizing the term colonial also highlights the racial difference involved in that specific configuration—a European or European-descendant employer with an indigenous or mestiza migrant worker. Using colonial rather than feudal, then, highlights and makes evident a pattern which still exists in Peru.

I therefore build upon the concept of colonial domesticity in this specific context to analyze how lingering colonial thought continues to prescribe practices which govern the contemporary Peruvian home and its social relations (Bernardino-Costa, 2011; Orlove, 1993). Other scholars have worked with this concept, developing a rich literature that spans the globe both historically and in our contemporary moment. For example, as Indian women engaged in offering their bodies for international surrogacy services or seek employment as domestic workers in various countries worldwide, Banerjee (2010) explores how the concept of domesticity transcends mere cultural boundaries and takes on broader transnational and global significance, encompassing issues related to space, labor, gender, and migration. Fakih’s (2023) work around colonial domesticity looks at the production of urban colonial imaginaries ‘that were modern and predicated on a fetish of white, European urban spaces’, (p. 645) not unlike the colonial dynamics happening in cosmopolitan Lima as opposed to other Andean regions such as the Peruvian jungle, coast, and desert. He notes how Bandung was dependent upon Indonesia’s indigenous population for labor and services, though that population was kept apart and invisible, again somewhat similar to the role that household workers play in Lima as they work for elite and upper middle-class families (Fakih, 2023). As the expanding body of literature delves into the intrinsic connection between the national bourgeoisie and colonial powers concerning the modern household and female subjectivity, Haskins’ (2019) research sheds light on the role of the upper-class female employers and the domesticating process they imposed upon their Indigenous women servants as a means of control and subjugation (Lucero, 2015; Rafael, 2000).

I specifically use colonial domesticity as focused in the Peruvian context, as a labor regime, and within the institutional regulation of domestic work. Colonial domesticity as a labor regime thus shapes certain limits to democratic labor rights for indigenous Peruvians while also revealing the pervasive logic of colonialism in modern labor relations. A contribution to the growing area of research on domestic service is my tripartite framing of space, time, and body to analyze the governance practices through which colonial domesticity is enacted, reproduced, and embodied. Emphasizing the colonial ordering of the home and its lingering effects upon democratic labor legislation for this distinctive kind of devalued labor reveals both the continuity from the colonial era as well as a new analytical lens through which to understand the law’s lack of purchase. I show that the Peruvian case provides an opportunity from which to theorize coloniality as deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important gendered and racialized distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.

On Regulating the Home

My analysis builds upon a large interdisciplinary body of scholarship which has long assessed the household as a space rife with tensions around rights and privacy. These struggles take on number of different forms, including contestation over patriarchal governance, reproductive responsibilities, economic provisions, and the racialized and gendered division of paid and unpaid labor (Glenn, 1992; Hartmann, 1981; Rollins, 1985). In the last several decades, the focus has turned to studies of the internal dynamics of labor exploitation faced by workers paid to clean, cook, and care inside another’s home, who were long glossed over as ‘unorganizable’ (Das Gupta, 2008; Ford, 2004; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Riegos, 1997; Romero, 2011) though the historic accounts from Nadasen (2015) and May (2011) demonstrate that Black domestic workers in the United States, among others, had been organizing successfully for decades.

In this important shift in the scholarship on paid domestic work, several others (Ally, 2009; Boris and Nadasen, 2008; Maich, 2020; Middaugh, 2012; Moore, 2018; Swider, 2006) have showcased the rich history of household worker organizing in the U.S. and have also looked comparatively to current organizing in other regions, including Latin America, Asia, and Europe (Blofield, 2012; Ettarfi, 2024; Fish, 2020; Glenn, 2002; Jiang and Korcynski, 2016; Nadasen, 2015; Ray and Qayum, 2009). These accounts importantly draw attention to the real obstacles due to this specific—or, more problematically, ‘exceptional’—type of labor, including the isolation and individualization intrinsic to the home as a site of labor, the gendered and racialized nature of the work, its ‘invisible’ nature, and the ideologies of family and care that appropriate and mask a highly unequal class relationship (Glenn, 2002; Jiang and Korcynski, 2016; Nadasen, 2015; Ray and Qayum, 2009; Romero, 2011).

While much of this research recognizes that some of the underlying assumptions about why it is difficult to organize household workers are reflected in why it is difficult to regulate their work by law, as well, these accounts do not fully theorize the importance of the structural organization of the home itself. More work is needed to thoroughly unpack all that is bound up within the construct of home, with all its competing and complex meanings, as a workplace. In this paper, I show the specificity of the colonial home’s organization for Peruvian household workers under recent household worker legislation, suggesting the importance of historicizing the organization of labor in the home itself and all it contains, including the continuity of structures of deference, maternalism, and exploitation (Rollins, 1985; Tronto, 2002).

Historicizing Household Work and the Home in Peru

Whether performed by servants, enslaved people, children, or wives, household work has a storied history in many parts of the world and especially in highly unequal Latin America, the region with the world’s most inequitable income distribution (Kuznesof, 1989; Lautier, 2003; Skop and Peters, 2007). Household work remains a majority female occupation especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 91% of household workers are women and 17.8% of female employees in the region are employed as household workers (ILO, 2021b). With an estimated 18 million women employed in domestic work across the continent and many more unaccounted for in those official numbers, it is one of the largest single sources of employment for women in Latin America (Bonnet et al., 2022; Loza, 2022). In Peru, the practice of hiring household workers is nearly ubiquitous among the middle- and upper-classes, which serves as a key example of the staying power of classed and racialized inequality throughout the region since colonial relations (Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo (CIDE), 2007; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2013).

Throughout Latin America, the colonial city was understood as a site of concentrated authority and power; a ‘planned monument to a particular vision of civilized life’, (Restall and Lane, 2011: 201), and Colonial Lima, la Ciudad de los Reyes (the City of Kings), was no exception. As the center of consolidated power in the country and its major commercial and administrative center for the past several centuries, Lima has long been a city of divisions, hybridity, and migration. The wealthy Peruvian colonial home of the sixteenth and seventeenth century was maintained and reproduced by the labor of indigenous servants and enslaved people serving Spanish and Spanish descendants, and these workers also reinforced the family’s social status. Socolow (2000) shows how elite colonial women’s female servants linked the household with the urban center, while also maintaining the intimate space of the home:

In urban settings enslaved women were overwhelmingly used as domestics. Their labor was considered so essential to the running of a household that one or two female slaves were frequently included in dowries given to wealthy new brides. Enslaved women were also used to run errands, to carry packages, and to deliver messages. In a very real sense, enslaved women were used as a point of contact between protected elite women and the public space (p. 132).

In this sense, domestic servants were liminal as they moved between the boundary separating the two spheres of the public and private, linking the household with the urban center while also maintaining the intimate space of the home. Historically, they fell somewhere in the gray area between servant and worker, part of the family, subject to its exploitative whims, or duty-bound to a master. This ‘mix of tension and intimacy’ (Restall and Lane, 2011: 164) pervaded most urban elite households, and domestic work is similarly ubiquitous in the contemporary Peruvian context—nearly all middle-class, upper-class and even those lower middle and lower class families employ at least one worker who either lives in her employer’s home (cama adentro) or who sleeps away, in her own living space (cama afuera). ⁴

Geography (stigma toward those from the outward provinces migrating to internal centralized Lima), gender and race (indigenous women migrants working for the European-descent core) and colonial legacies (as a normalized, holdover practice of racialized labor subordination) interweave to structure how the industry of household labor works in contemporary Peru. Socolow (2000: 119) describes the process of forced and voluntary migration during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading to a large number of young, single, indigenous women coming from the provinces to the capital with three-fourths of that group channeled into domestic service. Yet Peru embodies what Vargas (1991) calls a ‘simultaneous mixture of historical periods’, as household labor is still performed primarily by indigenous women from the provinces with little education and few resources who migrate to the capital in search of employment (Boesten, 2010; Bunster and Chaney, 1985; La Republica, 2015; Mick, 2011). As I found in my interviews and as Pérez and Llanos (2017) similarly find, household workers in Peru are ‘mostly migrant, poorly educated, separated or single women and adolescents’.

These intersectional axes of discrimination define the social positioning of Peruvian household workers through their place of origin, first language, physical features, gender identity, migrant status, and devalued employment, even under legal coverage (Blondet, 1987[1972]; Radcliffe, 2015; Vasquez del Aguila, 2014). The law includes language around employment contracts and benefits, while other articles position workers as obligated to uphold paternalistic, duty-bound tenets of the law. In this way, the law grants certain rights to household workers, but those rights have corresponding limits as when they are lived out inside of the home, they are met with resistance. Despite struggles and successes to regulate the household with labor law, colonial legacies limit and shape access to labor rights.

Methods

This paper draws from 10 months of ethnography and 62 in-depth interviews with household workers conducted between 2012 and 2015 in Lima, Peru, with follow-up conversations through 2025. Over the course of the dedicated research, I volunteered at a household workers’ center in Lima, an NGO that provides a place of community, shelter, and job training for new household workers in the city. It is also connected to an employment agency that assists household workers to find secure, trustworthy placements with a guaranteed signed contract for each job after a three-day trial period.

At the workers’ center, I participated in and later taught a weekly 3-hour household workers’ law workshop, joined a weekly cooking class with household workers, and taught reproductive rights classes to teenage students, many of them domestic workers, at five junior high night schools throughout the city. I interviewed workers actively looking for employment through the worker center as well as others I met outside of it, by either speaking with them in public parks, establishing contact at the Peruvian Ministry of Labor and Employment Promotion (Ministerio de Trabajo y Promoción del Empleo, or MTPE) conferences, or via snowball sampling to reach workers through personal networks in Lima. Interviews lasted from 30 minutes to over 2 hours, and all were recorded, transcribed, and translated from Spanish into English. Additionally, I wrote frequent memos based upon ethnographic field notes and interview summaries in order to analyze larger patterns arising in my data.

Household workers I spoke with ranged in age from 18 to 75, with the majority between their late twenties to late forties. Nearly all were born outside of the capital, and many spoke Quechua or Aymara as their first language. To supplement my research, I also examined publications from the worker center, local media coverage and newspaper articles, and the 2013–2014 informational database of more than 1200 women who accessed the worker center. Since my fieldwork, I have traveled back to Lima several times to maintain contact with several trusted household worker advocates and former household workers, and we have frequently checked in about the situation of household workers in the city.

When establishing contact with domestic workers, I positioned myself as a researcher and sociologist ‘interested in studying domestic workers’ experiences’. I purposefully offered a slightly vague motivation so as to begin an open dialogue, as many workers were surprised to encounter someone intrigued by the lives of household workers, and many were altogether unaware of the 2003 legislation. My educational capital, social class, and racial privilege situated me in Lima as a highly educated, upper-middle class (since I rented my own studio in an affluent central district of the city), white, non-native Spanish-speaking woman from a U.S. university. I exercised reflexivity by employing my outsider status thoughtfully by using a semi-structured interview agenda with space for workers’ responses and questions, when selecting neutral, secure locations for our conversations, and by valuing the exchange of their time with a cup of coffee, juice or smoothie, piece of fresh fruit or a small box of tea (Anzaldua, 2000; Naples, 2003).

Findings

‘Limeños not only have the dream to own a house (“sueño de la casa propia”),

but they also have the dream to own their own chola (“sueño de la chola propia.”)’ ⁵

—Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila (2014: 30), Peruvian anthropologist

In 2003, the first democratically elected indigenous president of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, signed national household worker legislation into effect, signifying an important grassroots victory and historical precedent after years of organizing under repression. However, the law grants few rights, fails to codify a minimum wage, and legalizes discrimination against household workers, complicating an employment relationship already shaped by layers of inequality. This thematic manner of conveying the lingering impact of colonial legacies provides specific, empirical examples of how they govern the space of the contemporary Peruvian home. These categories are enacted simultaneously, and yet analyzing the components singularly gives us a clearer understanding of the importance of the colonial ordering of the home.

Embodied

Throughout Peru, household workers are understood as racially other—indigenous—and therefore as less than, as culturally-constructed, racialized hierarchies map on to geographical location throughout Peru (Orlove, 1993; Paredes, 2018; Stoler, 2002). Coastal dwellers are Limeños, coded as ‘white’, while serranos, or those from the highlands, are marked as ‘cholos’ (De la Cadena, 1998: 144). This distinction is magnified for household workers, who are situated at a multitude of intersecting oppressions, and they are often subjected to being called cholas by their employers (Pérez and Llanos, 2017; Vargas, 2013). Soledad, who is 51 and from Huánuco, notes both the racialized discourse of her employers as well as their allocation of substandard items that were previously discarded by the family but deemed suitable for her use:

So, we are feìtos, cholitos, ⁶ everything. Because you’re a housekeeper you get the torn sheet, the broken plate, the broken cup, the twisted spoon. . . You know, one should also have service, of course, not on their level or the best brand like the employers, but in good condition. But no, we get the crooked spoon, a broken plate, chipped cup and bowl; that’s what they give you! ⁷

Soledad’s frustration at the struggle to maintain her own self-worth and dignity while rejecting this outright substandard treatment is clear. Indigeneity marks workers as ‘unclean’ in employers’ eyes, yet simultaneously preferred to do the cleaning. ⁸ Those who must ‘do the dirty work’ of restoring impeccable order again to the home are themselves considered ‘dirty’, and ‘lesser’. Here, even when protesting her employer’s insults, Soledad is deferential and has internalized that she is somehow less deserving (‘their level’ vs. ‘we get’) than her employer’s family. Being given damaged silverware, and being regarded as befitting to use a bent spoon or a chipped cup and bowl is a fundamental assertion of inferiority and subservience.

Long involved in advocating for household workers’ rights, Peruvian feminist lawyer Marlena discussed her sense of how the widespread practice of uniforms is another embodied marker of discrimination and inequality and thus a central point of protest and organizing:

. . . So, what do we disagree with? We [advocates] have discussed this with them: their rights are cut back. Openly cut back and, in reality, Peruvian society approves of that. They actually think that they [household workers] should have fewer rights. So we have had campaigns, led by different organizations, who have denounced discrimination. For example, household workers go to the beach and can only use their uniform, they aren’t allowed in the pool area, some can’t even go onto the beach. ⁹

Marlena then went on to tell me about the now infamous public protest event, ‘Operativo Empleadas Audaz’ (Operation Brave/Daring Domestic Worker) in Asia, the wealthy beach resort sixty miles south of Lima that consists of more than twenty private beach clubs and apartments (Vasquez del Aguila, 2014; Weitzman, 2012). In Asia and other luxury private beach resorts, live-in household workers are expected to travel to Asia to work at their employers’ vacation homes and sleep there, and yet between the daylight hours of 6 am–7 pm, maids cannot enter the water or enjoy the beach. The demonstration Operativo Empleadas Audaz took place in the warm summer of January 2007 when over one hundred human rights activists and artists donned maids’ uniforms, rushed the beach, and entered the ocean together as a collective protest against the restrictive private regulation of these beaches (Vasquez del Aguila, 2014).

However, restrictive signs—some depicting a woman in a maid’s uniform with broom in hand—continue to dot beachfront and other elite social clubs throughout the city. Others categorize household workers as unfit to ‘mix’ with wealthy clients, such as the Lima Cricket and Football Club reserving bathroom privileges only for guests, not nannies (‘Uso Exclusvio para Socios, no Amas’) and another in the country club Villa Club Chosica which relegates a separate service bathroom as appropriate for household workers (‘SSHH de Amas’) (La Mula, 2011). Club de Regatas de Lima, the oldest private club in the city, also maintains separate bathrooms for clients and nannies. In 2022, Talía Azcárate, a sports journalist in Lima, denounced the discrimination and racism that took place at Club de Regatas against Mide, her nanny. Azcárate left her 2-year-old son with Mide at Club de Regatas in the morning when she left for work, and while changing Azcárate’s son’s diaper, Mide was promptly harassed and followed by Club employees who told her she didn’t belong since she isn’t the mother of the child (Infobae, 2022). There are serious emotional, physical, and mental health concerns related to this kind of discriminatory treatment as well, as a recent survey found that 36% of household workers are depressed due to their precarious labor situations (Proyecto Anita, 2024).

Both subtle and more blatant forms of racism and marginalization frequently came up in my interviews with household workers. Jeny, in her late 60s and from Puno, shared that she had been happily employed with one family for a long time after some difficulties with previous employers early on. She shook her head and gently smiled at me through soft wrinkles and curly grey hair as she recalled how an employer advocated for her when she was denied entry to Limas’s Circolo Sportivo Italiano club. She brought her employer’s daughter to swim in the pool there and was turned away. She explained:

My boss belongs to the Italian club, and there are also swimming pools there, and one time they didn’t let me in. And. . . my boss, the girl’s father, told them that he’d leave the club if they didn’t let the worker in. “Because the worker comes to take care of my daughter” he said. . . And besides, this man pays his money so his daughter can enjoy the club, right? And after that, they let me in. ¹⁰

Only after employer intervention and the threat of losing an elite, dues-paying member did the club reluctantly allow Jeny to step inside and accompany her employer’s daughter to her swim lessons. Often when household workers are technically ‘allowed’ to enter these elite spaces, they must do so through a separate door and once inside, they are made to wait in a spatially delineated area, a small pen of sorts in which the workers cluster together. In 2019, there was an investigation launched after a member of Club de Regatas de Lima posted a complaint on social media about household workers (‘nanas’) entering the club to work but not paying dues like other members (El Comercio, 2019). In entering these elite spaces, they transgress a racialized, gendered hierarchy symbolized by their uniforms. Uniform usage perpetuates stigmatization through these markers of distinction around the city, signifying household workers as different from, and less than, everyone else via a colonialist/gendered form of social control (Casanova, 2013).

The new household workers’ law includes language prohibiting uniform usage outside of the employer’s home, though there remains a strong expectation that workers will wear uniforms while on the job (Gobierno del Peru, 2020). Back in 2010, the Peruvian Ministry of Labor and Employment Promotion (Ministerio de Trabajo y Promoción del Empleo, MTPE) declared penalties against employers demanding their workers to wear uniforms outside of the home in public space (including parks, beaches, malls, and restaurants). ‘They have been stigmatized enough. Workers wearing uniforms are often subject to sexual harassment in the street. This cannot be’, said the current labor minister at the time, Jorge Villasante ( Panamá America, 2009 ). He declared that warnings would be doled out to employers, and then secondary offenders would be fined between $58 to $2300 USD, all based upon unannounced visits to districts throughout the city (Panamá America, 2009). However, many employers still require uniform usage from their workers, both in and outside of the home, and uniform shops dot the landscape of wealthy districts such as San Isidro and Miraflores, interspersed with boutiques, upscale resto-bars, spas, and other European-import shops that line the main boulevards just as do workers themselves, marked as a silent, disposable army of crisp white and blue.

In this way, Peru mirrors neighboring Ecuador, where Casanova (2013) found workers to prefer not to wear uniforms outside of the house. Similar to my interviewees, a household worker from Guayaquil named Patty ‘described domestic workers’ uniforms as ‘sad dresses’ and saw the point of wearing such a uniform was for employers to demonstrate in a possessive way that ‘that person is his/her employee’ (Casanova, 2013: 576). The heavy discourses of shame, stigma, and discrimination based on visual appearance troubled many of the women I spoke to working in Limeño homes, though others took pride in keeping their uniforms tidy and freshly pressed. During my 10 months of field research and during more recent fieldsite revisits, however, uniform usage was still a ubiquitous part of the visual life of Lima, and they continue through the present moment to mark the embodied liminality of women as waves of blue and white workers in Lima’s wealthy districts.

Spatial

‘And when you come to Lima from the province, people here basically abuse you.

They pay you whatever they like, and because you didn’t make that much money in another city, this amount of money you get paid is like a lot. But if you’re observant, the prices are higher, and they go up. Everything goes up, everything’s expensive, and that money isn’t enough.

It just isn’t enough.’

—Clemi, 22, household worker from Ayacucho

The law obligates employers to provide for their household workers’ education, nutritional needs, and living accommodations according to the level of financial comfort that the employer enjoys. ¹¹ Language around responsibility and patronal relations between the employer over the worker demonstrates the dynamics of deference and maternalism that Rollins (1985) found to be salient patterns characterizing the employer/servant relationship (p. 157). Providing for the education of the household worker hearkens to the colonial family structure’s notion of ‘taking care’ of their servants as long as they did their duties and served the family well. Employers must provide housing, food, and resources for their school-age workers to study and be educated, and they often promise young women who come work in their homes the opportunity to attend night school classes. Even though Peruvian law prohibits children under 14 from working as household workers, nevertheless, they make up a large portion of all household workers, and only a small percentage attend Lima’s dismal night schools as they are too exhausted after completing their work to concentrate and study (Mauricio, 2025).

Additionally, most workers’ small, windowless rooms are a far cry from decent standards and hearken to a colonial past, when the family’s servant was to be cared for as a part of the estate and included in the building design, deserving a smaller room than the other bedrooms of the home. Peruvian National Building Regulations stipulate that each apartment buildings’ floor plan, for example, should have windows to let in natural light and exterior fresh air. However, many buildings offer only a window into the laundry room (if one at all) for household workers (Condiciones Generales de Diseño, 2012). While maid and service staff separate entrances to apartments exist in the US, they are less frequently built into newer apartments and they tend not to accompany a habitacion de servicio (‘maid’s rooms’). These rooms are very common in older apartment complexes across many districts of Lima. But they are also featured in newly designed, modern buildings of the wealthy and upper-middle class districts. ¹² Thus, even now in 2025, architectural practices of Lima’s new apartment buildings continue to replicate these inequalities as they segregate the family’s home from its extension, the household worker.

Workers who live outside of their employers’ homes also face the consequences of this spatial segregation, however, as some employers don’t allow live-out workers to use their toilet. A 47-year-old worker from Ayacucho, Florentina, explained how she ‘felt like she would burst’ after a 12-hour-shift. ¹³ This also became a significant issue during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. A leader from one of the household worker unions in Lima, FENTRAHOGARP, shared that many workers living in during the pandemic due to the lockdown were also not allowed to use the family bathrooms. Instead, employers installed toilets in the habitaciones de servicio, or maid’s quarters, next to their beds (Pereyra Colchado, 2020). And in non-pandemic times, the majority of live-out workers I interviewed were expected to enter their place of work through a separate elevator or service door, signifying further segregation in how workers must access the space they are to care for and clean. In this way, workers must know how to take care of all the intrinsic requirements of the physical structure of the home or apartment and the emotional well-being of those who dwell within it, yet remain compliant and without corporeal need at the same time.

Through these segregated living quarters, workers who live-in are also spatially demarcated as sexually other—a captive, confined prisoner—and therefore ‘safe practice’ with whom to sexually initiate their sons, enshrined in historical precedent (Díaz Uriarte, 1989; Maich, 2014). Understood as being part and parcel of the employer’s house when they agree to live in, many workers are denied control over their own sexuality as they are positioned in a highly dependent and vulnerable situation vis-à-vis the employer and subjected to sexual assault, which sometimes lasts for years and occasionally results in childbirth. ¹⁴ As a founder of the longstanding feminist organization Flora Tristan (2025) told me regarding the tradition of the family ‘using’ the household worker for sex, ‘Well, if it’s with “la chola” then it doesn’t matter; this is the idea here, more or less.’ ¹⁵ Just as it was previously widespread in Peru and across other countries of Latin America, this vestige of colonial control still continues in the contemporary Peruvian home (García, 2013).

Diana, 51 from Cusco, did not have the chance to experience the privacy of her own maid’s room, however. She describes the way she navigated dealing with a previous employer who relegated her to sleep on a cold leather Moroccan sofa, rather than a proper bed:

I slept on the sofa, the leather sofa, with a sheet. So, at midnight I went quietly so the boss didn’t wake up to sleep in the luxury sofa, because it was warmer. Usually at midnight, or at 1 am I went there, to sleep on the boss’ sofa, the one next to the expensive carpets, and I slept there until 5 in the morning. Then I got up and quickly went to the Moroccan again, because if the boss came down and saw me there all warm. . . Yes, I slept there silently. And I asked her for a bed, a real bed, and she didn’t buy one. And so I left. ¹⁶

Confronting a lack of restful sleep, no privacy whatsoever, and an unresponsive employer who saw her only fit to sleep on a sofa, Diana finally had to look for another job and therefore another home. If her employer were to discover her sleeping on the higher quality, warmer sofa, she knew she would face punishment or termination, and so she hurried back early each morning to the exposed, cold couch.

Lack of privacy can also imprison domestic workers in unsafe situations with other members of the household. While official statistics document that 15% of household workers have been sexually assaulted or abused, Roselia from La Casa de Panchita is certain this number is significantly higher, and my data tells a similar story (MTPE, 2012; IDWF, 2024b). Roselia runs a weekly radio program during which household workers from across the country call in to ask questions, learn about their rights, and resolve work issues. ‘Most of these accounts are not documented’, Roselia said. ‘Girls and women don’t have anywhere else to go; they don’t have any other job. It can continue for years before they are able to get out. And because they feel as though they are ‘less’ since they are from the interior of the country, they are trapped in a kind of nightmare’ (Mauricio, 2012, 2015). Indeed, the majority of women I interviewed referenced some form of past sexual assault or abuse during some point in an employer’s home.

Ximena, 26, survived an abusive situation when she was sleeping in the servants’ room with her fellow empleada in the bunk above her, as the employer’s 14-year-old son would enter their locked room each night with his key:

I mean, the boy, too, got in, because when we went to bed, he had the key and he got in the room at night when we were asleep, around midnight. I slept on the lower bunk bed. . . Um, he tried to touch me, but with that kind of thing if I’m bothered, I get really angry. . . When I get angry, I don’t care who he is, I tell him a few things that I don’t really like. However, the other girl, she did let him. She let him. I didn’t like it. And she said: “But I tell him, but he doesn’t. . .” And he got in the room. I pretended I didn’t listen. But when he tried to touch me, I said no. Other times he got in, I felt him, because I’m very alert when there are noises nearby. I felt him coming in and I look around, right? The lights are off. It’s him. And he climbs up, to the upper bunk bed, the other girl’s bed. ¹⁷

Like Ximena, many household workers live in fear of sexual assault while sleeping since their space and privacy is not truly their own. This type of supposed access to vulnerable women within the home traces back to the well-documented colonial practice of ownership and possession, when many household workers were expected to sleep with the employer’s son (as well as the father and/or other male relatives) (Bunster and Chaney, 1985; Díaz Uriarte, 1989; Jefferson and Lokken, 2011; Rollins, 1985).

Though the new law has stronger language against sexual harassment, it is a longstanding, pervasive and ongoing problem that isn’t easily solved given household workers’ location inside the private home, power imbalances found there, and the inherent challenges to reporting said crimes. In 2018, the Peruvian Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (Ministerio de la Mujer y Poblaciones Vulnerables, MIMP) cited more than 1686 reports of physical and psychological assaults against domestic workers (IDWF, 2024b). And in May 2024, a 19-year-old household worker tried to jump from the third floor of an expensive residence in Piura, north of Lima, in the wealthy Miraflores Country Club neighborhood (TVPE Noticias, 2024). She was trying to escape an attempted sexual assault and told police that after working in the household for only 16 days, she had already been sexually assaulted numerous times by a male member of the family (IDWF, 2024b). Household worker union leaders have also spoke up about rampant sexual assaults, and this case only adds to the push for ILO Convention 190 and Amendment 206, Violence and Harassment in the World of Work, to bring attention and protection to workers inside the privacy of the home. The location of domestic work in the private sphere of the home sets it apart, as legal governance of the home often privileges ownership of private property and the employer’s family over the rights of those working inside.

Temporal

Time is, in a sense, the most salient of the ways that colonial legacies persist, as the household worker is always expected to be at their employer’s disposal. Because workers labor within the privacy of the home to maintain its living, breathing livelihood, such is the nature of domestic work as women’s work, ‘never done’. While domestic work in the U.S. shares some of these characteristics, there is more often a predetermined arrangement and schedule of tasks or hours, such as hiring a cleaner or cleaning service for the home’s bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchen, or having someone to clean from 9 to 1 pm once each Tuesday or Thursday. Expectations are different especially because of the histories in these particular contexts; there is still a strong trend for household workers to live in as they did traditionally, which poses a challenge for workers who choose to live-out and who therefore need to carve out distinct tasks and set firm hours.

Many household workers I interviewed discussed feeling as though their time was not their own while at their employer’s house, since more and more duties were expected of them once they set foot inside. Carmen, 38, explained to me one afternoon, ‘When I worked at this house, see, I went to the house to clean—well, talk about people exploiting you. Supposedly, you go to the house to clean, but then they send you to do more things. That, I don’t like’. Workers are simply ‘there’; their status as a constantly available worker when positioned inside the home, much like a servant of colonial days, is unavoidable. A survey conducted between October 2023 and March 2024 by Proyecto Anita in coordination with ten household worker organizations and unions across Peru focused on questions around time. The survey was administered in the three Peruvian cities with the largest population of household workers, Lima, Trujillo, and Piura. One of the goals of this survey was to assess what tasks are expected of household workers, since workers may be hired as a niñera (a nanny to care for the children) but then over time may also be expected to complete other tasks, such as grocery shopping or laundry. This survey, conducted with 350 household workers in Lima, confirmed that out of 8 distinct household worker tasks, the vast majority of workers were expected to complete 3–4 tasks per shift while more than 15% of those surveyed were told to complete 5–6 tasks. These distinct tasks which are often full, specialized jobs in and of themselves include: cleaning, cooking, childcare, grocery shopping, washing clothes and ironing, caring for the elderly or someone with a disability, gardening, and caring for pets (Proyecto Anita, 2024).

Lydia, 29, from Cajamarca, similarly noted her lack of time when working cama adentro or con residencia due to performing these types of tasks and needing to be available at all hours:

Yes, because living in means 24 hours with her, with the person you’re going to care for or help. You have no schedule! Sometimes, at night they need you, and you have to be there. Just like with a child, at 10 in the night you have to be there. So, that being said, it’s better to sleep outside because then you have your own schedule, you end your workday and you go to your own place. That’s what I think. ¹⁸

She returned to the topic later when talking about past jobs, noting that is it difficult to sleep inside because ‘[y]ou have no. . .you have no social life. Just weekends. You have no time for anyone. You have no time for anything. You’re only dedicated to the house, you’re there 24 hours a day in the house; you have no time’. The irony is heavy here, as time is precisely what Lydia is giving of herself on a daily basis, and yet it feels expendable. Lydia’s time is not her own; she doesn’t have enough of her own time, and her comments point to the futility of regulating the working hours of an employment relationship in which the worker is situated as a servant, anticipating potential employer need at any moment. ¹⁹ As Pérez and Llanos (2017) found, there are signs pointing toward more workers living out, which may mean workers harnessing more control over their own time, though it may also signify more precarity or even that their rights are ‘further diminished’, (p. 567). More recent follow-up interviews confirm that this trend continues as does recent data, which demonstrate that out of the 1130 household workers registered in Lima in 2024, 70% were living outside of their employer’s home (sin residencia) and 30% were working and living inside their employer’s home (con residencia) (Mauricio, 2025; MTPE, 2024).

However, the law’s regulation of working hours here signifies an important legal shift, in that the 2003 law’s language reverses the former 1970 decree’s regulation of rest time to instead regulate working hours. Marlena, the lawyer, contextualized this important advancement:

The old decree said that they should rest for 8 hours at least—that meant that in a 24-hour day they could work for 16 hours. At least that changed. Anyway, there are some important improvements in the decree. The important thing is that they were recognized as workers.

Through inverting a required 8-hour night of rest with the implementation of an 8-hour workday, the law in effect deems the other 16 hours as time belonging to the worker herself rather than at the employer’s disposal.

Yet for Glyceria, 27, from Ancón, a district North of Lima, choosing to live in offers her more time, which she negotiates rather than going through the hassle of a dangerous, costly, and lengthy commute:

Look, in all my jobs I’ve stayed cama adentro because I’m from so far away, in Ancón. From Ancón to Surco or Angamos, it’s a three and a half-hour trip. So, I prefer to stay, yes (laughing lightly). ²⁰

For Glyceria, living in the central districts of Lima with wealthy employers saves her time, as she does not have to commute for 7 hours a day. A recent interview confirmed that the long distances and difficult transit throughout the districts of Lima continue to be an important factor as to why some household workers prefer to live in (Mauricio, 2025). The pandemic was also a contributing factor to why more workers are choosing to live out. In early March 2020 when the pandemic hit, many household workers were not welcomed back to their employer’s home after they took their 24 hours of rest on Sunday. They returned to their workplace on Sunday evening or Monday morning only to be locked out for fear of contamination (Mauricio, 2025). Other household workers had to choose whether to continue living at their employers’ home without leaving during the lockdown or face termination, lost wages, and a loss of their residence during the week.

Many household workers I interviewed choose to live outside regardless of the long commute, noting that it often provides them more control over their time. Diana explained how she understands the value of her working hours when performing the monotonous reproductive labor tasks necessary for household maintenance. Justifying the need for compensation when putting in extra time, she likens herself to a worker in a socialized setting, such as a factory, rather the individualized, isolated setting of the home as she involves the language of ‘shifts’.

It’s a lot of exploitation, and frankly the job hours, the law, it’s stipulated that they pay us 750 soles for 8 hours. If I worked 16 hours, my boss should be paying me 1500 soles. No? A double shift! Yes, double the time, but sometimes the boss doesn’t recognize that. ²¹

While efforts to stipulate working hours for household workers who live cama adentro seem like a shift from servant to worker status, the fact that working hours should not exceed 8 per day and 48 per week demonstrates the exceptionalism of household work, as most of the daily tasks of reproductive labor necessarily require more time, since they fall into sync with the day’s rhythms. Survey findings from 2023 to 2024 demonstrated that 20% of household workers worked more than 10 hours per day, demonstrating the difficulty in attempting to regulate the temporal aspect of household labor (Proyecto Anita, 2024). Additionally, research has shown that household workers who live-in are twice as likely as those who live out to work more than 48 hours per week (Bonnet et al., 2022). Drawing boundaries around time is challenging when workers are positioned at the central core of the household, however, and privy to the life of the family and responsible for supporting all of its moving parts.

As Aimalinda informed me, she left her family in the highlands and came to Lima at age 13, where she lived with and worked for the same family in the capital until age 19. ‘And how were your relationships with your employers?’ I asked. She instantly described the slavery-like treatment that she suffered for 7 years. ‘They never paid me. . .’ Aimalinda trailed off. They didn’t pay her because, as they rationalized, they provided her with a place to live with free rent, even though that situation not only forced Aimalinda to remain constantly available as free labor to the family but also maintained her slave-like status since she couldn’t possibly save up any wages to move elsewhere and seek other employment.

Now things are better; from 3pm to 8pm Aimalinda takes classes, but during the day she cares for her [new] employer’s young child and 90-year-old grandmother. ‘They’re both kind of like kids’, Aimalinda mused. The benefit to her of living cama adentro is that she doesn’t have to worry about commuting for 1–2 hours each way from the poorer districts on Lima’s periphery to the wealthier center of the capital, in the districts where most employers are concentrated (namely San Isidro, Miraflores, Surco, San Borja, y Surquillo). Yet now, while Aimalinda earns S/.400 (soles) per month (roughly $160 USD), which is substantially more than her nonexistent salary of 7 years, she still only earns half of the already very low Peruvian wage of 750 soles. ²² And the new household workers’ law can assist Aimalinda with regard to this salary if her employers choose to register her in the Ministry of Labor Registry, though most employers do not (Pérez and Gandolfi, 2024). Thus, what remains is a mutual, verbal agreement around wages between the empleadoras and the empleadas, instead of a codified set, defined floor of a standardized minimum wage.

Similarly, Laura, 64, discussed the issue of time and the impossibility of regulating the working day, though she distanced herself by using the third person during parts of our interview. ‘Well, first of all when they’re live-in workers, they are the first to get up, and the last to go to bed’, she said. ‘Everything, the employers get everything: everything’s clean, the house is clean, the lunch is made’. She shifted to speaking from a first-person perspective with her next statement, however, this time including herself as the general ‘you’: ‘More than anything, employers have to be more conscious. There must be something like two or three employers in every hundred who are really conscious. But not every single one is going to be. Sometimes they shout at you; you do all the duties, and they have the nerve to shout at you!’

Household workers’ right to enjoy paid holidays gestures toward a recognition of their labor as ‘real work’, worthy of scheduled relaxation and leisure time. ²³ While the earlier 1970 decree only granted Christmas Day and July 28, Peruvian Independence Day, as proper holidays for household workers, the 2003 law includes all seven of the national holidays. Their vacation is 15 days per year, though other recognized workers’ time off is twice as much, at 30 days annually. So even with these two provisions extending coverage to household workers, the vacation benefits are reduced to half of those granted to other workers.

The new law has changed this to bring household workers into equal coverage at 30 days annually, though most employers do not wish to comply (Pérez and Gandolfi, 2024). Employers do not always abide by this part of the law because they fail to recognize domestic duties as real labor. Herlinda explained the details of her Italian employer’s reaction to her attempt to exercise her right to holidays:

Because, during the holidays, the man said: “Ah really? Those aren’t holidays for you. Those are holidays for us,” he said. “Not for you. You have to work as per usual.” ²⁴

This sense that household labor is considered something naturalized within the home and therefore undeserving of time off is telling. However, Alma, a 44-year-old from Iquitos, told me that she noted the change in benefits:

The changes that happened, yes; they’re a lot. Today, for instance, in regards to health, okay? You have health insurance. Today you get paid holidays. Now there is a contract in which they consider you a worker with insurance, working for retirement, they pay you for the years you’ve worked there, you’re given yearly extra payments, vacations. . .you’re not like before. ²⁵

Having access to these benefits, such as health care, retirement, and vacation made Alma feel considered as a real worker. It also stresses the value of loyalty to one employer through longevity and length of service. While her job duties remained the same, she felt different—‘not like before’—due to acknowledgement of her labor inside the home.

The growing trend post-pandemic for household workers to live and sleep outside of their employer’s home may enable workers to carve out more time for themselves, their families, and their futures. Yet even those who are living sin residencia or cama afuera experience the lingering colonial tendancies of expecting the household worker to do everything in service to the home and the employer’s family. Beyond household work being a labor relationship of inequality, then, we also see its continued connection to the colonial home manifested in three distinct ways that perpetuate gender subordination—as embodied through racialized subordination and uniform usage, spatially through constructed segregation of servant-like sleeping quarters and eating practices, and temporally through the inherent impossibility of regulating working hours inside the home; the worker is constantly positioned at the employer’s disposal.

Discussion and Conclusion

The Peruvian law regulates household labor relations, and yet symbolically, it also creates an understanding of how the home itself should be organized and structured, much like the colonial home of the past. In order to understand the law’s current limitations, we must turn to history, and yet it is most certainly a non-linear path. As Radcliffe (2015) notes, the relationship between the state and civil society is always in negotiation and contestation, just as are groups of marginalized workers themselves (Fredrickson, 2015). In this article, I point out the way that Latin American state regulation and social policy toward women (especially poor, indigenous and mestiza, household working women) can at once appear to fit the liberal tradition of slow and steady advancements, chipping away at inequality, patriarchy, and classism with each legislative move, but which can, in fact, further ‘harden’ that entrenched patriarchy and deeply rooted coloniality, revealing deeply embedded characteristics of a colonial state (Dore, 2000).

In Lima, within this ‘profoundly antidemocratic sociality’ (Spitta, 2007: 298), the space of the home is rife with lingering colonial legacies since colonial ordering of the home sets particular limits on the kind of rights these women have as workers; they are rebuked, like Juana, to ‘get used to how you are’. Though household workers’ daily labor keeps the Peruvian capitalist economy chugging along, workers are continually looked down upon and viewed as less than, subordinate, and inferior, much like how the parts of the country many hail from are viewed by Limeños (Mezzadri et al., 2022).

Here, I show how colonial domesticity continues to marginalize indigenous and mestiza women from peasant backgrounds, and efforts to regulate domestic work through law reveal the inequitable treatment of household workers. Furthermore, the unenforceable nature of these newly won labor rights reflects a continuous logic and practice of coloniality in the private sphere, allowing us to contextualize the importance of household labor protections and also understand the devaluation of other occupation sectors, as well. While household work has a specific history and origin story, there are many important parallels to other sectors with colonial legacies for future research (Shin et al., 2023). This focus on historicizing the organizational structure of labor within the home holds profound comparative implications for other examples as well, such as the racial structuring of labor in the home in the United States. There are additional changes taking place in Lima and elsewhere with an increase in digital platforms for hiring household workers and other precarious workers, which often bypass any kind of employment contract or legal protections (Magallanes Janampa, 2021).

Furthermore, as discussed, workers have continued organizing and in 2020, the Peruvian Congress passed Law #31047 which offers more benefits to household workers than previously granted and thus may present new opportunities for improved working conditions and more transparency around employment relations in the home (Gobierno del Peru, 2020). However, early research finds continuing challenges to enforcement and improved household worker recognition and dignity. In Pérez and Gandolfi’s (2024) work that specifically takes on the ‘dead letter’ nature of the new Peruvian law, there is an overwhelming lack of compliance on the part of employers. Many of the challenges of the initial 2003 law remain, such as complicated procedures for employers to follow when fulfilling their legal obligations and responsibilities in the employment relationship, and there are no real consequences for employers who choose not to do so (MTPE, 2024). Efforts to bring those changes about, then, demonstrate the limits of the law as an instrument of social change, as it remains mired in colonial logics.

This analysis contributes to a growing recognition of contradictions inherent to the practice of paid domestic work stemming from modernity, feminist practice, colonialism, domestic servitude, legal change, and worker rights in Latin America and elsewhere (Carrillo, 2014; Feliu, 2014; Pérez, 2021; Ray and Qayum, 2009). Additionally, it extends the literature on paid domestic work in a few important ways. First, it demonstrates empirically that many of the assumptions underlying why it is thought to be difficult to organize household workers are reflected in why it is difficult to regulate their labor. Second, by showing the specificity of the ordering of the colonial home, I suggest that we must more fully theorize the historical organization of labor in the home itself, adding to the growing literature which recognizes it as a factor in the challenges to the organization and regulation of household work. Moreover, by focusing on the micro-relations of coloniality in day-to-day domestic service, it opens up space for further research that examines coloniality in other realms of precarious work as well.

Finally, the Peruvian case makes clear that while efforts to regulate labor rights attempt to democratize the space of the home, colonial domesticity continues to sanction the private sphere, ultimately revealing both the political possibilities and the very real challenges of carving democratic legislation out of a complex colonial past. These regulations serve to sustain the colonial structures, rather than transform them. This case gives us the opportunity to recognize and grapple with the implications of lingering colonial power not only in Latin America but in modern labor relations elsewhere, especially embedded throughout such a globalized, diffuse, and hierarchical industry of domestic work as well as located within other precarious and informal sectors (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2013; Mosoetsa et al., 2016; Narayan, 2005; Parreñas, 2015; Quijano, 2000). It also moves forward a historical understanding of the pervasive logic of colonialism which shapes many of our modern gendered and racialized labor relations and our understanding of power, domination, and inequality in the home and workplace.