María’s project looks at female domestic workers in Mexico City who fill the ‘servant’ role, a historically feminized and racialized occupation, which continues to relegate them to vulnerable positions within Mexican society. Her research interrogates workers’ experiences that are compounded by a lack of state support and social security coverage which require these women to devise strategies of survival to improve their lives. It focuses on revaluing and tackling workers’ everyday strategies of survival and to understand how they improve their lives in a context of little state support, insufficient income, racism, and under informal and precarious conditions. Using in-depth interviews and participant observation, the study links workers’ personal, individual struggles, to their collective, laboring identities; recognizing the diversity of needs and conditions that characterize workers’ livelihoods. From a sociological perspective, María’s project aims to identify common concerns on how workers link their experiences to their understanding of inequality, stigmatization, and informality; and to understand ‘life worlds’: how domestic workers themselves view, understand and describe their experiences.
Born in Mexico, María is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID). With an interdisciplinary background in History (B.A. Universidad Iberoamericana) and Latin American Studies (M.A. University College London), she has professional and academic experience working on historical and sociopolitical issues in Mexico and Latin America across private and public spheres. She joined the ANSO department in 2023 and, at the present time, she is planning to conduct fieldwork in Mexico City.