Geographies of the Dishpit

by Ana Cantu (class 2021, Humanities major)

NOTE: Thinking about water from a different perspective than my classmates, in my final project I reflected on the workplace where I washed dishes in what is called a “dishpit” during my first year at Rice University.

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The conversations that follow explore the dynamics of a workplace I became a part of on January 8, 2018. Working between 32 and 40 hours a week for the past few months has, I think, allowed me to become integrated into a pan-Asian diner restaurant well enough to form a more than a simple opinion about work as a part-time dishwasher.

I hope to present my experiences in a holistic and honest manner and to reflect on them with a self-awareness that ties together personal experience with ideas from critical theory, social history, and class readings about youth as a cultural category. The point of this creative non-fiction project is not merely to summarize three months of work at this restaurant; rather, I want to critically consider and evaluate select behaviors and habits that characterized my time.  Much of what stimulated my thinking had to do with class discussions about access.  On reflection, I have come to think of these conversations as “geographies.”

Ultimately, I don’t know that this writing will reach a well-defined thesis: instead it functions as a discussion of my encounters, my interpretations of them, and their possible relationship to the issues of access we have studied in class, especially as they involve skin color and education. I will also briefly address themes of youth in the workplace as well as the idea of access for citizens and non-citizens. In addition to brief biographies I sketch about my coworkers, I will supplement this investigation with thinking drawn from sources in feminist theory such as Anita Harris. My hope is that by including Harris, I can better understand and analyze what I call the geographies of the dishpit in a way that steps outside the classroom and into the workplace, combining the two for a public audience that may not have experienced the same encounters I have in the past three months.  Most importantly, I hope to initiate a discussion within the realm of the public humanities.

Issues of Access to “Youth” as a Category: Norma

The inspiration for this project, Norma, is 19 years old, a hard worker, and a self-declared grown up. As the only coworker at the diner within my age range, it is not surprising we became friends immediately. Both Mexican, young, and determined, Norma and I hit it off quickly and deeply. Both hard workers in the eyes of our coworkers, reliable employees, and most importantly, in need of a job, we were perfect candidates for the roles we came to fill in the workplace. Despite our similarities, though, there were nonetheless a few residual but prominent differences that stuck out between us, outside of work.

“I just want to act my age,” Norma told me one Thursday morning. It was 4 A.M. and we were parked in a gas station by an expressway I couldn’t recognize. I didn’t need gas, but when I had picked her up earlier that night, Norma had handed me four crumpled dollar bills and insisted it was all she had.  She was drunk and incredibly vulnerable.  Still, I had little else to offer besides a ride, some food, and empty advice.

It was at this moment that I learned that her life was a collection of dejected expectations: born into an unsympathetic household, Norma could not escape to college like I did. No matter how hard she tried, she could not simply leave behind the responsibilities she had been filling since her teen years. It just wasn’t an option. Understandably, she was overwhelmed by problems that couldn’t be fixed by any solution I could fathom. Despite knowing this, I tried to offer my sympathy, but she refused to accept it. “You don’t get it,” she repeated, “I can’t act my own age.”

In a way, she was right: I didn’t get it. I saw her problems as obstacles to climb over with better communication, longer hours at work, or even a lowering of her expectations. But that morning, I learned how wrong I was. In reality, the problems she confided to me were more deep-rooted, un-scaleable walls that she only complained about when things got really, really bad.  Like they had that morning, when the problems at home became too much.  My conception of her life was, I realized, skewed; while we shared a workplace, working side by side shift after shift, we went home to drastically different lives. Her issues of access, then, weren’t easily solved, and no matter how hard she tried, they weren’t going to be fixed by solutions like “better communication” or whatever other naïve advice I may have proposed in that moment.

Writing about girls in the context of globalization, the feminist sociologist Anita Harris captures the disparity between us by generalizing young women into two groups: the can-do and the at-risk girl. On the face, Norma and I fill these roles easily, our lives branching off from each other once I began attending Rice University and she dropped out of college because of the financial burden it became.  While there is a bit of an overlap in where we come from (that is, Mexican, lower-income, nuclear households) and where we are at this point of our lives (working at this location, unsure about our futures), Norma and I represent two supposedly different types of girls, experiencing wildly different circumstances even at our same age.

Norma has repeatedly told me that, in her view, I am privileged to go to Rice. After I cooled down from my initial defense, saying I earned my spot here on campus, and after watching her take pictures of the long walkway towards Sid Richardson (my residential college), a walkway I had long since stopped appreciating, I had to agree.  Even as I agreed, though, she mused about stressing about school work and going to parties . . .  the way she said it implied she didn’t think she would experience those kinds of problems again.

Her life, at this point, seems headed in a defined direction. Mine seems headed in another, more open-ended. Even as Norma has repeatedly expressed being OK with not knowing what her future holds, we know that it is almost certainly going to involve something akin to our workplace now; and while I have a degree plan and major requirements to follow, I am nonetheless overwhelmed by the options in front of me. Attending Rice University has provided me with access to a variety of choices for my future.  Even as a first generation student, with all that means, I have a lot of choices.

Though we may share similarities, compare callouses and cuts from work and trade gossip about our coworkers, our lives are on different tracks because of our educations.  Anita Harris captures this sentiment perfectly by concluding that education—more specifically, academic performance— is the largest determinant of one’s life. She goes on to contend that academic performance has an intimate relationship with access to resources that encourage further education. For example, my access to a college counselor with scholarship advice facilitated my being awarded with the Questbridge scholarship, alleviating the financial burden that would have hindered my matriculation into a 4-year university.

Ultimately, access is, as we established in class, more complicated than just having something. Rather, access has more to do with a sense of belonging in the world. While Norma and I are similar in many ways, our futures are decidedly different and in the end, it has more to do with our access to different lives and experiences than where we come from. Though the two are closely related.

Norma’s drunken remorse about being unable to act our age captures the message of access: while I am able to live the “typical” 19-year old experience, she cannot.  And even as we share a workplace, we go home to different lives, and in the end, I have the burdens of the typical 19-year-old youth, while she doesn’t; I get to act my age, while she doesn’t.

There have been differences at work too, disparities that I could not help but notice.  At first, I could not really specifcy the reasons why.  It took time until I realized that our other coworkers elevated me in status because of their previous associations with Rice.

Beginning with my first day, everyone except for my boss and Norma has referred to me as “Anita.”  Interestingly enough, my boss has been the only one to be offended by this nickname; he’s corrected my coworkers a number of times, insisting I am “Ana” and not “Anita.” No matter what he said, though, my coworkers ignored him. I am just Anita to them.

Norma, in her six months at our restaurant, has earned the nickname “Ya Quisieras.” Known for her brash, if not crass, attitude, Norma’s nickname captured the story behind the time she responded to a coworker’s advances with a disgusted “you wish.” While I have arguably never had an encounter like this one, I am sure I would be Anita to my coworkers, no matter what I told them.

These nicknames hold their respective connotations, indicative of what our coworkers think of us. While I am essentially babied each time I have burned the rice, miscounted food prep, or broken a dish, Norma is openly scolded, even for less significant mistakes. This happens often and so blatantly that, once, I asked her about it. She reasoned that they must have higher expectations for her in the workplace, but couldn’t tell me why.

Again, I believe it has much to do with the fact that I go to Rice.  My coworkers apparently think I will not stay in the dishpit for very long.  They regularly ask me how school is going, and about endeavors I pursue outside of class.  My mistakes will be short-lived they seem to think, and any bad habits I pick up will be abandoned once I eventually leave, as everyone expects me to do soon enough.

Racial Geographies: Debates about (Alleged) Whiteness

“Your face wash is making me whiter,” Norma muttered to me one morning as she washed her face in my sink after sleeping over in my dorm room at Sid Richardson College.

I knew that the brand of my face wash was one of the least significant differences between us.  Still, she considered it representative of the disparities between us. When she used face wash, she said, it was purely for practicality. When I pushed her to explain her comment more precisely, she explained that I had obviously paid for a better face wash, because I could afford it.  She considered this a sufficient explanation, stubbornly associating the expenditure with my race and believing it to be as simple as how much I paid for it.  I didn’t push, unable at the time to articulate exactly why what she said had rubbed me the wrong way.

Coming from the Rio Grande Valley, where the population is overwhelmingly Hispanic and the Mexican border is a quick 10 minutes and a toll away, I have always known I am pale. In my youth I was constantly defensive about it, citing my parents’ birthplace, my norteña accent, or my mother’s accented English as evidence for the case of my Mexican heritage. More recently, moving to Houston and coming to Rice affirmed my confidence in my heritage. Here, no one questioned whether I was Mexican. I just was, even if they didn’t realize it before I told them.

When I was initially hired at this restaurant in January, I was immediately slapped with an attitude that brough back the doubts I had experienced at home. Many of my coworkers, native Mexicans and Guatemalans, looked at my light skin, heard my non-native accent, and questioned where I came from with a scrutiny that told me they considered me to be an American, and little else.

Geographies of Citizenship: Privilege of the Temporary (Ramon)

It may be commonplace to complain about your workplace and dread the dredge of a shift.  For me, these complaints were marked by a tendency to muse about leaving the workplace. While the employee turnover rate wasn’t necessarily low, meaning workers did leave, my coworkers could still be easily be divided into those who seem to have plans to move on, and others who, as much as they may want to, really can’t.

Tall and domineering, Ramon first introduced himself to me as “papi chulo.” He has been at our restaurant for 12 years.  While he refused to tell me how old he was in hopes of maintaining a semblance of youth, he proudly told me that his current role as a drahma cook was a promotion from his original hire as a dishwasher, like me.

Whenever I ask Ramon, or the other long-term employees, why they’ve stayed in the same workplace for so long, they usually shrug and say something along the lines of “Es un trabajo.”

Omid Rafin, a manager who regularly mentioned his University of Houston degree when he was required to work in “the back of the house” (the dishpit), once told me that the only reason people didn’t quit a dysfunctional workplace like ours was because it was the only job that that would take them, without papers. While I don’t know how true this is, in the last three months, one coworker was let go after, as my manager told me, this papers “bounced back.”

While I am still unsure about my coworker’s citizenship, I do maintain that worker’s status as citizen or not plays a role in employees lives in our workplace.  They could not leave because the lack of citizenship limits other opportunities. This is yet another example of an access issue: where I have access to something (job opportunities) though others do not.

When I asked Norma where she saw herself going next, she shrugged her shoulders and told me, “I don’t know…one, maybe two years, and I’ll see where life takes me.” Since then, she has expressed hopes of being promoted and trained as a cook, confiding in me, excitedly, that she could be manager someday.

While I intend on staying at our restaurant for as long as I can handle it, I appreciate my freedom to put in my two weeks’ notice at any point.  Actually many of my coworkers never expected me to stay this long.  Norma, for example, told me she never expected me to last as a dishwasher. When I showed up at first to sign my paperwork, she told me later, she thought I was a ditzy white girl whose parents were making her work.

Conclusion

Ultimately, whenever a shift seems longer than usual for whatever reason, I think back to Ramon’s 12 years at our restaurant, and the years ahead. My time as a dishwasher has left me with more than cuts on my hands, callouses on my feet, and wrinkly fingers; I have learned about my own privilege as well as the issues of access I never have had to consider in my life. Frankly, I don’t know that I would have had to face these various issues of access had I not worked here.

While I don’t know how long I will stay at this restaurant, I will say this: I hope to, one day, be as proud of my career as Ramon is about his promotions, or as excited about my prospects as Norma is about hers.