Sweat's Depiction Of Relations Between Migrant Workers And Working Class Americans

Sweat’s Depiction of Relations Between Migrant Workers and Working Class Americans Lynn Nottage’s 2015 play Sweat is centered around a group of 5 blue-collar factory workers from the extremely poor city of Reading, Pennsylvania in the 2000s. The play shows the characters attempting to deal with a lockout at the factory as their jobs are outsourced to migrant workers for lower pay. As the play goes on, the characters become more and more enraged at their situation and, eventually, take out their anger on Oscar - a Columbian-American bar worker who takes a job at the same factory that the main characters were locked out of. This tragic fight leaves Stan, a neutral third party who is attempting to break up the fight, permanently disabled and

The brutal attack by Chris and Jason on Oscar represents this xenophobia. To the characters in Sweat, Oscar represents the Latino community, while the characters like Jason, Chris, Tracey, and Jessie represent many working class Americans who felt cheated out of their jobs. Because of the perceptions of Latinos as job stealers, or “scabs” as Oscar is referred to in the play (Nottage 79), by the characters in the play, they unleash their rage at losing their jobs in an attack on Oscar even though he had nothing to do with it. As David Román, a critic who saw the premier of Sweat at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, puts it, the attack begins as microaggressions before erupting into a “terrible display of white rage” (Mohler et al.). While this is an extreme case and most racism was and is likely most prevalent in the form of stereotypes and discrimination, the anger that is felt by the characters in this scene is representative of the hispanophobia felt by people in the real world during the 2010s and the attack is a symbol of the very real damage that hispanophobia and stereotypes have on the Latino