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28

Goldman

They plastered the walls of their adobe homes, served as curanderas (healers), midwives, servants, nurses, and even as overseers of Indian women slaves. Two WPA/FAP artists have pictured women working in adobe house construction. Manville Chapman's Layin 'Dobes is a view of a partially constructed house in which the man mortars the sun-baked mud bricks and the woman carries them to him; Lloyd Moylan's The Plasterers is a rather ungraceful, almost cartoon-like view of three women, one on a ladder, carrying out a traditional task of plastering the finished house, while the man sits lumpishly on a log holding a small child. 43 The curandera is an ongoing phenomenon in the Southwest and has been treated in a series of etchings by Texas-born artist Carmen Lomas Garza. 
Aspects of this pre-capitalist mode endure to this day (or rather have been revived and modified) in isolated parts of New Mexico where women are engaged in work as artisans with husbands and families in making painted or carved religious images, silver jewelry, ornamental tinwork, straw inlay, rawhide work, embroidery, quilting and weaving. 44
By the 1920s, Mexican American women had entered the wage labor force in large numbers because families could not survive on the man's income alone. The cooking, canning and weaving previously done in the home were transferred into industries: women worked in packing, canning, textiles, in garment factories, or as maids, waitresses, cooks and laundresses. Agriculture employed large numbers of women and children in seasonal, migratory labor; however even in this low-paid employment, occupations and wages were sexually (as well as racially) divided. 45 Until the success of the United Farm Workers Union, little consideration was given to pregnancy or the care of small children, nor were proper housing and sanitation available - making women's unpaid domestic labor much harder. At all times, women workers carried the double burden of wage work and housework. 46

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