Week 3 Readings and Responses

Looking for Work, by Gary Soto
The Best Deal in America, by Bebe Moore Campbell

Immigrants in Our Own Land, by Jimmy Santiago Baca
We are Americans Now, We Live in the Tundra, by Marilyn Chin
What are you Patching, by Ruth Lisa Schechter
In Texas Grass, by Quincy Troupe
The Old Italians Dying, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Dust World, by Adrian C. Louis

Response to Looking for Work  by Gary Soto

                Gary Soto is a Mexican-American writer whose work primarily focuses on the Chicano experience in the United States.  Both his poetry and prose examine the lives of Mexican-Americans.  This story in particular addresses the narrator’s attempts to reconcile his reality with the idealized versions of American life that he gathers from media representations of the family. 

                For the nine-year old narrator, his aspirations are shaped by the representations of an idealized “normal” American family that he sees on television.  In his mind, what separates his family from the perfect families he sees on television are simple, basic things.  Indeed, getting his “brother and sister to wear shoes at dinner” is the “first step” toward salvation. 

                As we quickly discover, however, such attempts to conform (and make his entire family conform) to an idea of life based on viewings of Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best are consistently confounded by his family’s refusal to play along, as well as his own occasionally wholehearted acceptance and happiness with his life as it is.  His brother and sister laugh at his attempts to make them wear shoes to dinner, and his brother comes to dinner in his bathing suit.  Their meals are “loud with belly laughs and marked by [their] pointing forks at one another,” rather than the examples of decorum for which he yearns. 

                Interestingly, the young narrator foils his own attempts to “become wealthy, and right away,” betraying his own ambivalence in regard to his desires.  Within hours of earning money by doing chores for others in the neighborhood, he heads off to the pool with a friend and his sister to spend it all.  And, despite his desire for his family to act as the Leave it Beaver family does, he’s also only too happy to imagine a day swimming in a ditch-river and throwing around clods of dirt. 

                It is also interesting to consider that the narrator’s visions of a different life, one free from such activities as “killing ants on the kitchen sink,” are not only limited to the idealizations of white middle-class American life, but rather are constantly shifting and vastly differing.  Thus, not only do we see his desire for the family to dress up for dinner and act more like the white neighbors, but also his wish that the family eat turtle soup, as he’s seen a Polynesian tribe do on television.  As we see, the nine-year old boy’s vision of a life different than the one he is living is easily changed and not incredibly discerning.  What is clear, however, is that this boy in confused by media portrayals of other people and the ways in which these portrayals differ from his own reality.  

Week 3 Response – Dust World, by Adrian C. Louis

                Adrian Louis’s poem, Dust World, presents a terrifying and vivid vision of a Native American reservation (or at least an area in which Native Americans live) as a “hell the white God gave us” (18)  The speaker, a 40-year old man, drunk and driving, relates a rather mundane and unromantic series of experiences (driving, renting movies, stopping by his house), within a scene of hellish and haunting images.  As Leslie Ullmann points out, this poem, along with others in the collection from which it has been excerpted, “ring[s] out as Louis's indictments against himself and his tribe, simply telling it like it is in the present-day scheme of things” (189). 

                The poem is divided into three sections, the first of which seems to self-consciously introduce the poem itself as an act of prayer, while simultaneously recognizing the futility of the “dust words for my people dying” (17)  In the vision presented here, communication with God has been cut off, and all that is left are these “dust words.”  To speak these words, however, is a seemingly futile act, for the “whirlwinds of hot autumn dust / paint every foolish hope dirty” (17).  In sections two and three of the poem, the speaker abandons the introductory and explicative statements, and adopts a descriptive and conversational tone.  His descriptions tend toward images that are reminiscent of a kind of hell, darkening otherwise normal, even pleasant scenes with spookish details.  Consider, for example, the children in the arms of teenaged mothers, described as “pupil-dilated putti,” or the ashes swirling in the air of the video store – “a small fan ripples sweat / and scatters ashes upon two young attendants” (17). 

                The poem is also suffused with a sense of alcoholism, sexual tension, and violence.  We see teenaged girls holding their babies and drinking beer, and one of the girls is “beautiful enough / to die for except for rotten teeth,” (again a vision that inspires a certain dark horror).  She and her friends--those of the “sweet Sioux butts”--“court frication” (18).  For the speaker, even the young boys working in the video store are “almost flirting” with him “because I’m fatherly, half-buzzed up, / and have biceps as big as their thighs” (18)  His very words with them are a product of the “whiskey talking now” (18). 

                Overall, the poem projects a dark vision of an ugly, dusty, drunken, and somewhat pointless life.  It is one filled with circular and repetitive actions (the speaker visits the video store, sees the girls, and drives home, only to return to see and do the same things again), lonely pursuits of onanism, and adolescent type acts of braggadocio (“I suck in my gut and lay some rubber”) meant to impress (18).  One suspects that even the moments of happiness, when the speaker “[floats] happily through the dark streets / of this sad, welfare world,” are perhaps the product of the whiskey that has spoken earlier in the poem, and that as the speaker has told us from the opening lines of the poem, he has only “dust words / for my people dying” (17-18).               

Sullivan, James. "Gary Soto." Magill’s Survey Of American Literature, Revised Edition (2006): 1-5. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 23 Aug. 2013

Ullman, Leslie. "Betrayals And Boundaries: A Question Of Balance." Kenyon Review 15.3 (1993): 182. Academic Search Complete. Web. 26 Aug. 2013.