Program of Latin American Studies

This article focuses on the lives of workers in small commerce and in domestic service in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. It seeks to understand both what united and what differentiated maids (criadas) and clerks (caixeiros), two types of laborers whose lives and work had much in common, and two categories of labor that, although ubiquitous, are frequently overlooked in Brazilian labor history. We consider how, together, class, gender, and race shaped the divergent trajectories of criadas and caixeiros over the course of the nineteenth century, and what the legal disputes in which they were involved during that period can teach us about the shifting dynamics in labor relations in a society marked by both slavery and labor dependency more broadly. As sources for this analysis, we draw on documents produced by legal proceedings from the 1830s through the 1880s, in which men and women involved in petty commerce and domestic service presented their cases before the courts to claim their unpaid wages. In recent years, Brazilian labor history has shown how the study of urban, non-industrial activities provides us with a privileged vantage from which to consider the connections between economic relations, the social and occupational structure of cities, and the ways in which workers have intervened in political life. New studies of urban labor have contributed significantly to an effort to rethink both the range of research questions and the general explanatory framework through which we have considered terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002085901700061X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 69.201.186.111, on 18 Jan 2018 at 22:36:48, subject to the Cambridge Core