This dissertation examines the relationship between the mid-twentieth century Latin Ameri-an novel and domestic service, an institution that throughout the 20th century was the principal occupation of working women in the continent. Focusing on novels such as Rosario Castellano’s Balún Canán, Clarice Lispector’s A Paixão Segundo G.H. (1964), José Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970) and Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s Un mundo para Julius (1970) I show how these novels register a transition from rural servitude to urban domestic service that came as a consequence of agrarian reforms, decline of rural economies and urban industrialization, while they experiment with advanced literary techniques that by the sixties had consolidated the Latin American Novel in the globe. Working with theories on the peripheral novel such as the ones outlined by Roberto Schwarz and Ericka Beckman and with new strands of feminism such as the Marxist Feminist’s Social Reproduction Theory, I make two principal claims. First, I argue that there is a hidden history of the Latin American novel that can be discovered when looking into its relationship with domestic service. Much of the experimental aspects of the studied novels can be explained in relation to changes that happened within the bourgeois reproductive sphere and domestic service as consequence of a restructuring of peripheral capitalism between the 1950s and the 1970s. The second argument that I make is that the novel provides a window into larger historical processes of domestication of afro and indigenous women within well off households, processes that have been understudied by Literary Criticism and the Social Sciences. In taken together, these two arguments make an intervention into the field of Latin American Literary Studies that makes place for feminism and reinvigorates a social historical analysis of the novel.