Introduction

Domestic service and Chilean literature: fictional experiments in narrating the household

“…(1964) or, more recently, in Alia Trabucco's Limpia (2022), the theme of domestic service proves one of the principal obsessions of the Latin American novel and its inquiry into the workings of the continent's care economy. However universal domestic service has been, literary criticism on this topic has been surprisingly recent, as per groundbreaking studies such as Sonia Roncador's Domestic Servants in Literature and Testimony in Brazil (2014), and María Julia Rossi and Lucía Campanella's Los de Abajo (2018). 1 Similarly, until the 1990s, the social sciences afforded little attention to the phenomenon, a startling neglect given that domestic service has been one of the principal occupations of women in Latin America historically, the institution advancing side by side with capitalism's development in the region.…”