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Paper short abstract

This paper examines shifts in handmade tortilla production from domestic to commercial spaces in Chiapas Mexico. In a social reproduction lens, I explore how demand for natural foods reconfigures women's labour as domestic tasks move to the market, both reproducing and eroding patriarchal categories

Paper long abstract

This paper examines reconfigurations of women's work in the elaboration of handmade tortillas in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Since the 2000s, urban demand has led to a resurgence of handmade tortillas, semiotically associated with domesticity, rurality, authenticity, and naturalness. Since the colonial period, tortillas' availability as a commercial product outside the household was largely limited to domestic service in wealthier households, a legacy of colonial labour structures binding marginalized workers (primarily rural indigenised women) to elite families (primarily white-mestizo). During the twentieth century, some domestic workers turned to selling tortillas in urban markets, making this handmade product more widely available as a commercial commodity. Since the 1970s, urban demographic and social transformations, coupled with a widespread sense of ecological crisis linked to industrial products such as machine-made tortillas, have led to a revalorisation of "natural" foods. Drawing on 18 months of ethnography within market spaces and households, I mobilise a social reproduction framework to explore how this valuation of "handmade" and "natural" tortillas reconfigures the labour and livelihoods of the women involved in their elaboration.

I trace how domestic food work transforms through various entrepreneurial activities, and how these extensions within and beyond the household reproduce but also erode patriarchal gender categories. How does the valuation of handmade foods as "natural" reconfigure the boundaries of interpenetration between reproductive and productive labour? What transformations does the outsourcing of previously domestic tasks produce, in response to growing demand for natural foods, as their elaboration extends from kinship relations to market relations?