Barbados to Brazil: Dress, Respectability and Domestic Migrant Labour

In 1910, on the cusp of the rubber fever that gripped South America, New York photographer Dana Bertran Merrill was hired to document the transnational construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, built deep in the Brazilian Amazon. The project became memorialised in the U.S. & Brazilian press as ‘the Devil’s Railroad’, due to the shocking death toll of its exceptionally diverse workforce who had travelled to Brazil from over 52 nations including Britain, Germany, China, Greece, India, the Caribbean, Portugal, and Japan. Merrill was assigned under the premise that he must capture the speed and progress of this imperial project of US capitalist expansion and exploitation of South America. He documented the North American administrative class, Indigenous peoples, Brazilian civil engineers, local rubber tappers, and workers of the Global Majority that included Black Caribbean women who laboured in the hot and humid Steam Laundry on site. These women were responsible for the heavy and repetitive standing labour of washing, starching and ironing clothes and linen for the transnational frontier society that sprang up around the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, yet scant attention has been given to them in existing historical sources.

Black Brazilian feminist scholar Lélia Gonzalez provides a critical framework to speculate on the diasporic experiences of these anonymous migrant women through the lens of fashion, reorientating our understanding of Merrill’s archive from the vantage point of Caribbean women on the railroad. Gonzalez (1935-1994), the daughter of an Indigenous domestic worker and a black railroad worker, provides a radically different point of departure to move beyond an understanding of how black female labour was devalued under colonial modernity, to recognise them as active subjects involved in processes of resistance, accommodation and reinterpretation through dress. Reading fashion into Merrill’s photographs, as this paper underlines, yields insights into the erasures that have shaped fashion’s histories in Latin America at their intersection with commodity frontiers.