MEXICAN AMERICAN WOMAN

Mexican American woman working as a domestic in Los Angeles

Mexican American woman working as a domestic in Los Angeles

Introduction

The literature on Mexican American women's domesticity continues today to flourish as evidenced by the large number of books devoted to African American women or domestic service. Unfortunately, only the book of Elizabeth Clark Lewis, Living In, and Living Out ??on immigrant African American from Los Angeles has a distinct historic structure. It can serve as a link between the current studies on domesticity (often women of color from the Americas) and past generations, who were either African American or from the working class in Los Angeles (Peiss, 1986). The text of Lewis Clark takes the themes already studied by Stansell, but trafficking of women defined by their race, that is to say even more disadvantaged in terms of their rights. There would be many parallels between the work of Clark Lewis and contemporary studies of the domestic female, for example with Other People's Children, Julia Wrigley, and Maid in the United States by Mary Romero, who focus their research on Mexican American woman who are working as a local in Los Angles, which constitute the majority of female domesticity in the West and in the American Southwest. The importance of the current literature is because what is discussed how conflicts of culture and class interferes with the parameters of race and culture, for Mexican-Americans and other women from Latin America. In the fields of history of the working class and the history of Mexican American woman during the past two decades, research on racial identity as well as on sexual transitions occupies the main square. Research on female domesticity link these themes and re-enter the mainstream of social history (Lamphere, 1987).

Researches dominated the historiography of Mexican American woman in the 1980s and 1990s focused onto the world of work, paid or not. Significantly, these studies were related to the great wave of monographs on labor history, which began in the 1970s. The book by Donna Gabbacia from Sicily to Elizabeth Street enriches the analysis by studying women (and men) in a highly diversified metropolitan economy. Similar studies have been published on the German (Christine Harzig 'unfortunately in German only ', and to a lesser extent by Laura Anker). Gabaccia devotes almost half of its study to the description and analysis of family life and work of his group of immigrant New Yorkers in their home village in Sicily. Such comparative studies are rare, especially in the historical literature. But we now have ethnographic work on transnational migrants from the Caribbean or Central America, carried out by anthropologists and sociologists (Laura, 2000),

The issue of women at work 'not only within the family and home economics, but as part of the American historical narrative devoted to the self' as a particularly important branch of historiography. In this area, the history of Mexican American woman has flourished for years. Two books on the workers, the United States, had in this ...