When Work Has Gender

Women, Silence, and Invisibility in Latin American History (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries)

Abstract

This article examines the history of labor in Latin America between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a gender perspective, emphasizing the processes of invisibilization and silencing of women's labor practices. Drawing on labor history, gender studies, and anthroposemiotics, it argues that labor is a historical and symbolic construction shaped by regimes of recognition that define value, memory, and legitimacy. By examining silence as a mechanism of erasure and the historical boundaries of what has been considered legitimate work, the study shows that the exclusion of women from dominant narratives does not result from their empirical absence, but from historical processes structured by patriarchal, colonial, and racialized relations that have shaped the worlds of labor in Latin America. These dynamics have been intertwined with coloniality, racialization, and the sexual division of labor, producing specific forms of invisibilization affecting Black, Indigenous, and mestiza women. The anthropossemiotic perspective adopted here highlights how silence operates as a mechanism of meaning-making and symbolic exclusion, contributing to an understanding of the centrality of memory and struggles for recognition in the constitution of gender inequalities in labor.