Harmonizing the rural Indigenous family: Mestiza gender trustees and the gendered modernization of rural Mexico

Abstract

The 2018 film Roma popularized the idea that domestic work is a site through which female employers and employees can support one another as they confront the relegation of reproductive labor to women. Echoes of this narrative can be heard in the workshops provided to Nahua men and women of the Huasteca region of Mexico by what I call gender trustees who are bent on modernizing rural men and women. This modernization is imagined as gender progress—one in which men and women come to redistribute housework and to adopt a dual earning marital model in which women work outside the home rather than as peasant women or housewives. These feminist notions of the good, therefore, demonstrate an affinity with neoliberal narratives of modernization that seek to move the Mexican rural population away from small-scale farming and into the service and maquila sectors of the economy. The ungendering experiences of Indigenous women domestic workers suggest that both the sororal narrative epitomized by the dominant interpretation of Roma as well as the idea that paid work makes women equal vis-à-vis their husbands continue to sanitize and euphemize the highly gendered and racialized and settler colonial labor niche which is domestic work.