All photos by Author.
Until a few decades ago, it was common to find handwritten signs outside the houses of middle and upper class neighborhoods in Lima seeking domestic servants (1). “Se necesita muchacha cama adentro” (“Indoor Maid Needed”) was written on large pieces of paper and displayed in windows and doors to tempt potential applicants to inquire about the job. Those who applied were almost invariably young women in their teens or twenties, born in the highlands and recently arrived in Lima seeking escape from the difficulties of rural life and a better future. For them, such signs were life lines in a city known for its hostility toward Indigenous migrants. Yet the signs were also visual reminders of the enduring demand for workers for a job that had changed little since the nineteenth-century, and which embodies inequality and segregation.
Long before these contemporary signs (see image above), there were others, published in newspapers, asking not for new domestic servants but demanding the capture of escapees and their immediate return to the master’s household. These runaway ads seem now like relics of a cruel and arcane past, available only in archives and libraries, but for decades, they worked to reproduce slavery and bondage in the Americas. While often associated with African slavery, in what follows I introduce a different type of runaway ad. In them, we learn of fugitive domestic servants, primarily Indigenous children (male and female) fleeing their masters’ households in Lima during the 1860s.
