Gendered exclusion from an unstable state: Guatemala's domestic worker movement

Women in Guatemala occupy precarious positions, navigating various institutions of civil society, the state, and the economy, all situated within a context of underlying political violence. Women navigate these public and private spheres differently, and indigenous women who perform labor in the homes of Ladinas for their livelihood face their own set of obstacles, such as verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse, lack of benefits, isolation, and discrimination. However, in the last five years, an “upsurge” in the labor movement is taking place in Guatemala as domestic workers organize for defined benefits, higher wages, a political voice, and economic justice.

Based on ethnography and interviews, I investigate the nature of this struggle for political legitimacy and claims to state- granted contractual rights as workers and women. Guatemala has suffered massive state violence throughout its history of colonization, bleeding into the recent civil wars of the late twentieth century, which disproportionately affected poor, indigenous populations. While acts of torture, terror, and assassinations of the desaparecidos were ubiquitous, military violence utilized a gendered component against indigenous women. Yet now Mayan domestic workers are organizing for democratic inclusion positing a new paradigm of rights recognition as women workers. However, violence continues in the contemporary Guatemalan context in a very public and chaotic way, targeting the general populace rather than those identified as espousing left-leaning ideologies or as guerilla sympathizers.

So then, how do Guatemalan domestic workers engage in the struggle for state recognition, and what does this struggle bring to light about relations between gender, politics, and the state in Latin America? My research aims to further understand this gendered context of chronic instability and violence and the ways in which [unstable] states and social movements negotiate with each other, and with what varied outcomes and consequences.