Washing, Drying, and Ironing in Mexico City: Work, Culture, and Class Relations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Examining legislation, censuses, license petitions, and other archival sources, this paper considers the laundry room as an arena of intersection in eighteenth and nineteenth century Mexico, and as a generator of class identity. The laundry business involved access to water and work space, relations between diverse clientele and washerwomen, work that produced livelihoods and laundered images, and government regulation and reform of washerwomen and wash rooms. The cultural, political and economic history of laundry shows the blurring of public and private spaces of everyday life into overlapping arenas.