This essay uses gender analysis to interrogate the modernization of labor organizations in Ecuador from 1890-1950, with a focus on why domestic servants were excluded in this process. Although labor organizers challenged other forms of paternalism in labor relations, they remained silent on domestic service even though it was the main source of female labor in Ecuador's growing cities. Using publications by labor organizations, laws, and social welfare records, this essay seeks to understand not what life was like for domestic servants, but to explore the contours and contradictions in the relationships between workers, labor organizers, and the state during a critical period of modernization and state formation in Ecuador. I argue that the absence of domestic servants from labor discourses defined and reinforced specific forms of masculine dignity as the core of the modern worker identity. This masculine worker identity made possible the inclusion of indigenous hacienda workers in the labor movement, but women could be incorporated only if they worked in public settings (mainly factories). Domestic servants belonged symbolically to the realm of traditional labor, and their ties to the home placed them beyond the paradigm of class exploitation.

This article examines the internal structure and dynamics of the coffee economy in two districts of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). In both Palenque, in the northern highlands, and Soconusco, on the Pacific coast, production was oriented to international markets, direct foreign investment was a key aspect of coffee plantation development, and workers were recruited by the payment of wage advances (enganche), which they were then expected to pay off by labouring on coffee plantations. Yet, despite these similarities, the social relations that characterised coffee production in the two districts differed considerably. This article analyses those differences by comparing and contrasting the demographic factors, processes of land privatisation and the relationship between foreign investors, the national regime and local elites that influenced the nature and purpose of debt peonage in each district.