Summary Of Looking For Work By Gary Soto

In this story, “Looking for Work”, the author creates a Hispanic, young boy as the main character that wants to work and make money. He had a vision of wealth that he wanted to achieve in order to imitate the families he saw on tv. The boy explored the neighborhood, looking for jobs he could do for neighbors. From learning from the families on tv, he hoped that by improving his appearance, eating and dressing nicer, the white people might like him more. The boy talks about his school and how the teacher rotates the good students and the bad students to try and make them smarter. The boy and his friends sat with the bad students. After watching tv and seeing how the white people on the shows live, the boy tells his siblings that he wants

At the beginning of the story, the boy, young Gary Soto, goes out looking for jobs to do for neighbors to make money and become rich. He hopes by becoming rich that the white people will like them and then maybe he can live like the “comfortable lives of white kids”.(28) However, at the end of the story, Gary still goes out looking for work, even though he was told that white people will never like them. I think he decides to still go look for work to do at the end because he’s accepted his place but he likes working and making money. This story is mostly having to do with class. While reading, I could tell that Gary was in a lower class than most people. His main goal throughout the story is to move up in class and imitate the lives of white people that he sees on tv. When he brought up his idea of dressing nice for dinner, it wasn’t really because he thought there was something wrong with the way his family dressed. It was more about the fact that the upper class white people dressed nice and Gary thought if his family did, they could be upper class too. He also talked about his neighbor, David King and how he was the only person they knew who resembled the middle class. But, at the end of the story, it says how David ran off with Rick exchanging foul language, which is not modern practice for the upper class. I thought it was interesting that Gary still thought David was so much higher up than