Asian Pacific American Short Stories

The word “dirty” is an interesting word coming from a poverty and race context. We often think of people who aren’t “white” as “dirty.” I’ve heard it time and time again, “Dirt Mexican,” and it’s such a cruel way to describe a person who is just out here trying to work their way out of poverty. “Dirty” is a name we can’t get rid of; it is a word associated with race, financial status, and locations. There is a clear connection between poverty, slums, and race in creative texts; when applying theory, some things can be deciphered in a more theoretic way. I argue that many Asian Pacific American works of literature bring to light issues of poverty, slums, and race through creativeness to demonstrate to a mass audience how living in poverty isn’t …show more content…
Looking at McDougal’s “Dirty Laundry,” it seems to talk about people from a different race/ethnicity (usually those with a darker complexion) as dirty; if you’re “dirty,” then you’re poor and beneath those who are “white” and are a lot more financially stable. This text talks about a person’s appearance being “dirty” and their clothes being smeared with dirt (hence Dirty Laundry), but this text can also be interpreted as someone being dirty from working outside in the dirt all day to earn just enough to survive. The text states, “All the dirt from the day before runs down the drain in a dark, stream. I am still the clean one” (McDougal 33). I enjoy this quote because the way I interpret it is on the idea of people who are a different race/ethnicity are seen as dirty and unclean. To me, this interpretation stands out to me because I imagine my mother and father coming home from doing a minimum wage job in agricultural work, and they would always come home covered in dirt; if people saw my parents, they would assume they are “poor Mexicans” who are probably illegal, although that wasn’t the case. My parents loved me and cared for me, and they did and gave me everything they could. After washing their clothes away, the dirt would disappear, but they would still be “Dirty Mexicans” in the eyes of …show more content…
Applying theory to this, we see why they don’t allow them to escape out of this social construct; theory of poverty and slums tells us that nobody cares about the poor (yet they judge them for being poor) because if they’re not making money off of them, or if they’re losing money off of them, then people just don’t care. People are left to struggle with financial uncertainty because people just don’t care. Cheap labor is what lets big business profit from the poor. Yet with a low income, many people are left to live in the slums which lacks basic infrastructure such as water, yet when they can’t even take a shower because of this infrastructure, they’re seen as dirty and gross—yet they aren’t given any resources to help cope with this. We live in a generation where people judge others for smelling or looking dirty because they don’t have access to water, yet as we’re judging them, we aren’t giving them any resources for them to do something about