In 1584, Antón Zape, a Black enslaved African originally from Sierra Leone, received his manumission letter after a long trajectory of military service to the Spanish Crown. Although his enslaver was reluctant to grant him freedom, the Audiencia de Panama considered Antón’s services worthy of a royal grace. The president of the Audiencia himself intervened by writing to King Philip II to force his enslaver to grant Antón the manumission he deserved. The king heard the Audiencia’s recommendation and granted Antón freedom along with a substantial annual pension of 50 gold pesos to live according to his calidad (“quality,” but better translated as status). Philip II ordered Antón’s former enslaver to pay him this annual pension and to supervise the correct distribution of the stipend for his entire life; until Antón’s death, his enslaver’s descendants were required to fulfill the duty of paying him his annual pension. Because the pension was financed by Antón’s past enslaver, it subverted the enslaved person–enslaver relation, requiring the enslaver’s lifetime commitment to his former enslaved person. In addition to freedom and a pension, Antón was granted the privilege of bearing arms, signifying a public and official royal sanction of honor and calidad.1

This essay uses gender analysis to interrogate the modernization of labor organizations in Ecuador from 1890-1950, with a focus on why domestic servants were excluded in this process. Although labor organizers challenged other forms of paternalism in labor relations, they remained silent on domestic service even though it was the main source of female labor in Ecuador's growing cities. Using publications by labor organizations, laws, and social welfare records, this essay seeks to understand not what life was like for domestic servants, but to explore the contours and contradictions in the relationships between workers, labor organizers, and the state during a critical period of modernization and state formation in Ecuador. I argue that the absence of domestic servants from labor discourses defined and reinforced specific forms of masculine dignity as the core of the modern worker identity. This masculine worker identity made possible the inclusion of indigenous hacienda workers in the labor movement, but women could be incorporated only if they worked in public settings (mainly factories). Domestic servants belonged symbolically to the realm of traditional labor, and their ties to the home placed them beyond the paradigm of class exploitation.

This article provides an intellectual history of Jean Meyer as an effort to shed light on the role that foreign historians played in the shaping of the Global Sixties in Mexico. His three-volume text composing La Cristiada (1972–74) has endured as one of the most cited and reprinted books in Mexican history, and to this day, its author has remained a hegemonic voice in Mexican academia. Yet little is known about the making of this groundbreaking book. In this effort, this article situates its methodology, revisionist arguments, and immediate perception in the political context of the era. It brings attention to Meyer’s rise in Mexican academia and examines the intellectual impact that three culminating events—the Cuban Revolution (1959), the progressive Catholicism of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), and the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968—had on his generation and in the shaping of the Global Sixties in Mexico.