Chicanas Modernize Domestic Service

In this influential study, Mary Romero examines how Chicana domestic workers in the late twentieth century actively transformed the occupation of household labor. Rather than passively accepting the traditional mistress-maid relationship, these women renegotiated the terms of their employment — setting their own schedules, defining tasks, and establishing professional boundaries that challenged the deeply personal nature of domestic work.

Romero’s qualitative research reveals a process of modernization driven from below, as Chicana workers drew on cultural resources, community networks, and strategic agency to reshape domestic service from a feudal arrangement into something closer to a modern occupation with defined roles and expectations.

Published in Qualitative Sociology in 1988, this article helped establish Romero as a leading scholar of domestic labor and laid the groundwork for her landmark book Maid in the U.S.A.