Susie Porter’s From Angel to Office Worker is a welcome addition to modern Mexican women’s and labor history. Like Porter’s Working Women in Mexico City, her new book builds on an impressive array of Mexican archival sources and an analysis of popular culture to get a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of middle-class Mexican female office workers in Mexico City. Porter begins by examining women’s entrance into “office work” in the late nineteenth century and their transformation as office workers who were identified as members of the burocracia femenina up through the years leading up to women’s suffrage. Based on archival documents including government records, advertisements, correspondence, and petitions, Porter’s argument is twofold: as debates over women’s roles in government work as empleadas públicas shifted with women’s increased participation as office workers, so too did ideas and perceptions about middle-class identities. The very meaning of “middle class” was...
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