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Abstract
This paper is based on a study of how female domestic servants living and working in the city of Guadalajara (Jalisco, Mexico) between 1877 and 1910 created their own personal image through the creative use of fashion in clothing. Traditionally regarded in historical accounts of the time as passive “secondary figures,” this paper illustrates their agency. Based on a unique Register of Domestic Servants that recorded photographs and descriptions of 2,350 female domestic workers and other primary sources, this study found that the women showed great intelligence and skill when creating their visual identity. In dressing for their portraits, they wanted to both fit in and stand out during a transitional time of social mobility.
Notes
1 The Registro de Domésticos is a set of seven books containing entries for all men and women employed as domestic servants in Guadalajara during a part of the Porfiriate (1888–1894). Every entry has a photograph of an employee, with his or her name, place of birth, physical description, civil state (whether married or not), employment, wages, and employer. The creation of the Registro de Domésticos was part of the enthusiasm of the Porfirian authorities for having as complete a control of the population of the country as possible. Similar registers created at around the same time include the 1864 Register of Prisoners of Escobedo and other occupational registers kept in the state of Jalisco Historical Archive, such as those of Water Sellers, Porters, or Ticket Sellers. In the case of the Register of Domestics, the entry for each person in the book was complemented by a card belonging to the Police Department of Jalisco, which was detachable and contained the same information as was in the Book. The employee would have to give this card to his or her employer at the start of a new contract. Any complaint the employer filed against the employee would be noted on the card. Registro de Domésticos (Register of Domestics), Archivo Municipal de Guadalajara; 1864; Registro de Penitenciaría (Register of Prisoners), Archivo Histórico de Jalisco.
2 Registro de Domésticos, Libro I, ficha 65.
3 I have found the concept of a personal “front” used by the sociologist Erving Goffman to be central to my own analysis. See Goffman, La presentación de la persona en la vida cotidiana (Buenos Aires: Amorrotu Editores, 1997), 35, http://www.sociosite.net/topics/texts/goffman_self.php. Goffman includes among the elements of a personal front variables, some of which the individual can control and others he cannot—such as “insignia of office or rank; sex, age and racial characteristics; size and looks; posture; speech patterns; facial expressions; bodily gestures; and the like.”
4 José María Muriá, Historia de Jalisco, vol. 3 (Guadalajara: Gobierno de Jalisco, 1981), 522. The basket that Maria holds in figure also appears in figures , , and . This is a studio prop, not an accessory that the women owned.
5 The concept of mental representation was coined by the French theorist Roger Chartier and is defined as the ‘joining of definitive mental and intellectual links in relation to the social world and also in the sense of social identity that displays, opens, receives or rejects.’ According to Chartier, “the image is recreated and reworked by the group, the community, social class, and social representations.” Javier Burgos Rincón, Ricardo García Carcel, and Manuel Peña Díaz, “Interview with Roger Chartier,” Manuscrit, 11 (January 1993): 29.
6 The Spanish word cascabel means a (tinkle) bell, as on a cat’s collar, or else the sound made by a rattlesnake The word gata, ie, female cat, is still used disparagingly today in Guadalajara to refer to a female domestic According to Santamaría in his Diccionario de Mejicanismos, the word was used to describe a “pretty young maid or (female) artisan,” but here Benjamín Padilla is using the word as an insult
7 Lechógeno, a product intended to help women produce more milk, was frequently advertised in this periodical; its mysterious appearance in the letter betrays the editor’s own pen.
8 Benjamín Padilla, “Letter to the Editor,” El Kaskabel, March 8, 1908, Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Jalisco.
9 Censo Peñafiel, Citation1888, Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Jalisco, http://www.inegi.org.mx/est/contenidos/espanol/proyectos/metadatos/censos/scgpv_11.asp. The General Directorate of Statistics was created in 1882 and published their regulations in 1883, establishing that the Directorate should create a general census of the inhabitants of the country, every ten years, in addition to the local residents.
10 Inventario de los bienes del Señor Don José Palomar, y liquidación de los gananciales habidos durante el matrimonio con la Señora Doña Dolores Calvillo de Palomar. Libros de Notarios, Notario Félix Ulloa Rojas, vol. 4 (1869), Archivo Histórico de Jalisco. In the mid nineteenth century, José Palomar was a prominent business man. In 1843, he was a member of an association that owned the textile factory La Escoba and became governor of the state of Jalisco in 1853. Muriá, Historia de Jalisco, 106, 108.
11 Arturo Camacho, El rostro de los oficios (Zapopan, Jalisco, México: Amate Editorial, 2006), 32.
12 Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, vol. 4 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004–2005), 154.
13 Julio Guerrero, La génesis del crimen en México (México City: Editorial Porrúa, 1977), 168.
14 Civil Code of Jalisco, Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Jalisco.
15 Calderón de la Barca, La vida en México, durante una residencia de dos años en ese país (México City: Editorial Porrúa, 2006), 161 and ff.
16 Miguel Galindo, “Apuntes sobre la higiene en Guadalajara” (PhD diss., Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara School of Medicine, 1908), 192.
17 Daniel Cosío Villegas, Historia moderna de México, la República Restaurada (México City: Editorial Hermés, 1993), 391.
18 Juan Panadero, March 19, 1876, Biblioteca Pública del Estado de Jalisco.
19 During the nineteenth century and a large part of the twentieth century, the national identity of Mexico was created, beginning with the process of independence from Spain (1810–1820). In this context, the concepts of native and foreigner had a great significance in the national consciousness, occasionally in conflicting ways between what was considered legitimate and patriotic, and what was not. The relation between the elite who ruled (and continue ruling) the country and the indigenous population was profoundly egregious during the Porfiriate. Only the revolution in 1910 would vindicate, in some perhaps incomplete way, the first inhabitants of what is today Mexico.
20 In terms of professions, the most frequently found are cook (approximately 45 percent), chambermaid (approximately 39 percent), nanny (approximately 9 percent), errand runner or porter (just over 1 percent), wet nurse (just over 1 percent) and scullion maid (approximately 0.6 percent).
21 In the Register of Prisoners, Registro de Penitenciaría libro 10 bis b, the percentage of women wearing scarves goes down to sixteen, so, if the rest wore a shawl, the implication is that using shawls was much more common than scarves, among prisoners at least.
22 The scarf was extremely popular during the whole of the period studied, and the business records of the time support what the photographs tell us. As early as 1845, records document 380 dozen silk scarves coming into Guadalajara from abroad, with a value of 5,700 pesos. Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Comercio exterior de México, desde la conquista hasta hoy (Mexico City: Banco Nacional de Comercio Exterior, 1967), pl. 49.
23 Photographs of street scenes are in the Municipal Archive of Guadalajara as well as various private collections, including that of the author.
24 See Lourdes Cerrillo Rubio’s study of the rise of fashion as art in nineteenth-century France, or Philippe Perrot’s much-cited book, Fashioning The Bourgeoisie. Cerrillo Rubio, La moda moderna. Génesis de un arte nuevo (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2010); Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
25 My assumption that female domestic servants seldom wore corsets is based on the following arguments: in the photographs in the register where the sitters are shown full length, their jackets are very loose, without the stiffness provoked by a corset. Had the women in these pictures been wearing corsets—as in the case of those female domestics whose corsets are evident in their photographic portraits—their outer garments would serve to show off the corset and not to conceal it. Also, the high temperatures in the city of Guadalajara practically all the year round and the long working days of these women explains their unwillingness to own and use an uncomfortable piece of clothing often foreign to their social and cultural environment. The decision not to wear a corset was not confined to Mexican working women in the nineteenth century, as Gerilyn G. Tandberg shows in her 1985 article “Towards Freedom in Dress for Nineteenth Century Women,” where she refers to women living in the hot southern states of the United States of America. Tandberg, “Towards Freedom in Dress for Nineteenth Century Women,” Dress 11, no. 1 (1985): 12, 29. DOI: 10.1179/036121185803657617.
26 Gilles Lipovetsky, in his book The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (El imperio de lo efímero: la moda y su destino en lsa sociedades modernas), traces the beginnings of this process of acquisition of agency on the part of the working classes (not the educated or aristocratic) in the middle of the nineteenth century, when individual self-awareness was developing in the western European mind. Lipovetsky, El imperio de lo efímero. La moda y su destino en las sociedades modernas (Barcelona: Compactos Anagrama, 2007), 65.
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Notes on contributors
Beatriz Bastarrica Mora
Born in Spain, currently living in Mexico, Beatriz Bastarrica Mora’s studies are in Fine Arts (First Degree), Art Theory (MA) and Social History of Dress (PhD). Her dissertation, “Guadalajara, 1850–1910. El vestido, la moda y la ‘civilización’ (Dress, Fashion and ‘Civilization’),” won Honorable Mention in the Francisco Javier Clavijero award given by Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (México). She is a tenured professor at the University of Guadalajara, where she teaches History of Dress and Fashion, and Aesthetics, and Contemporary Art Theory.