Maruja Barrig "El mundo al revés: imágenes de la mujer indigena".

Her main interest is to answer the question of why indigenous women in Perú are invisible in feminist discourses as well as for development organizations. She follows the way both discourses are transverse by complementary notions of Indigeneity as a sign of backwardness, savagery but also degeneration on the one hand and notions of indigenous people as heirs of the grandiose past of the Inca state portrayed as a unifying and benevolent state. If the strong feminist movement developed in Perú especially since the 1970s have avoided the question as a result of both a claim of universality in the female condition (derived probably from the previous experiences in Marxists activism) but also as a “conspiracy of silence” in regards to the intimate relation of many feminist and the indigenous house keeping women at their homes. The Ngo’s on the other hand seem to be continuing the line of romantized Indigeneity which also relies on gender discourses that deny inequalities and the validity of thinking gender and ethnicity, as they portrait the indigenous women as a proud and rough defender of tradition. I am mostly interested in the her reflection upon the “muchachas” domestic service indigenous woman. She shows that in Peru of 17th century it was mostly women who were performing domestic service, and not just recently promoted female migration to the cities. If men who migrated to the city were merchants and cattle carers, women were confined to the domestic spaces and subordinated. In this the indigenous woman was considered more easily subordinated, it was denied the possibility for social mobility that men could gain from going to the city and erasing their indigenous identity into a mestizo one.
If previously the women were distinguished as women that needed to have the tutelage of white families, contemporary women are migrants but still in way regarded as minors in need of education and guidance. AS house keepers they live in an intimate relation with the family yet without ever “mixing” with it, rather they have to follow a set of rules that maintains the distance and reproduces difference of the social groups inhabiting the house. In a way that reproduces old patterns of mobility and fixity, domestic service women get fixed to the space of the house live there which puts them in a state of constant service, but also in constant moralizing view of the patrons. Despite some authors regard domestic service as a mutual empowerment of middle class women (that can develop professionally with the help of a housekeeper) and indigenous women that can get work and housing in the city as they arrive to it, domestic service fixed women –again- to the space of the house. This distinguishes the experience of migrant men and women, while men by dedicating to other activities can change their ethnic identity into a mestizo, women “remain” being indigenous.