History Main / EthnicMenialLabor

Hispanic Laborers will always have a thick Mexican accent and will be prone to sprinkle their (sometimes unusually precise) English speech with Spanish words or sentences. Alternatively, they will not speak English at all. LatinoIsBrown is likely to be [[UnfortunateImplications played straight]]. The most common variant is the Hispanic Maid. Also often seen are the Hispanic Pool Boy, Hispanic Farm/Ranch Hand, Hispanic Busboy/Dishwasher, and Hispanic Gardener.

Britain, by virtue of having one of the most open policy toward immigration from the 2004 EU entries (second only to Ireland and Sweden), also has a lot of manual labourers and tradesmen from Eastern Europe, mostly Poland but with a sizable minority from Lithuania and Slovakia. Contrary to popular belief, most are expatriates rather than immigrants, arriving in the country with the intention of working for a few months and then returning home. At one point there were believed to be more than a million migrant workers in the United Kingdom; there are fewer nowadays as the source countries have become more prosperous, making it less profitable to work here. They show up or are referenced in quite a few works set in post-2004 Britain; fictional examples are almost invariably Polish.

Throughout history, there have been stereotypes that certain ethnicities are more prevalent in menial labor such as maids, nannies and farmhands. This stereotype is often an exaggerated case of the truth: Certain minority groups ''have'' indeed been over-represented in menial jobs due to a variety of factors. In PoliticallyCorrectHistory this will be carefully sidestepped, but in accurate or exaggerated {{Period Piece}}s and HistoricalFiction, the older versions of this trope can still be found.

In Britain, a similar stereotype for the male Irish workman emerged, as most of England's canal network in the Industrial revolution was made by Irish labour teams (as it was cheaper). The slur "Navvie" refers to this stereotype and is highly insulting to many Irishmen today.

Discrimination relegated most Chinese immigrants to menial labor after they entered the United States. This trend was mostly contemporary with the Irish Laborer. The Chinese suffered especially hard in the 1870s, when legislation denied them the basic rights of citizenship based on their ethnic origin.

One recurring figure from this period is the {{Mammy}}, a nursemaid who would continue to provide an important mothering role well into adulthood. The Black Maid, Black Farmhand and Black Railroad Worker are also common. There are a lot of parallels between {{Mammy}} types and {{Magical Negro}}es.

Hispanic Laborers will always have a thick Mexican accent and will be prone to sprinkle their (sometimes unusually precise) English speech with Spanish words or sentences. Alternatively, they will not speak English at all. LatinoIsBrown is likely to be [[UnfortunateImplications played straight]]. The most common variant is the Hispanic Maid. Also often seen are the Hispanic Pool Boy, Hispanic Farm/Ranch Hand, Hispanic Busboy/Dishwasher and Hispanic Gardener.

Though rarely depicted in modern fiction, during the 19th century Hawaiian workers were widespread throughout the West Coast and into Canada; back when Hawaii was still an independent kingdom. Hawaiians came to the United States to work as fur trappers, sailors, cooks, cowboys, fisherman, miners, field hands, and many other jobs.

This stereotype can also be seen in the United States with the ''au pair'' nanny, who is not menial in reality, but is often treated so in fiction. She is a young European girl, usually Swedish, Norwegian, or Finnish, for some reason. Occasionally she'll be German or French (or some flavor of Caribbean). Germans and French were more common in the post-World War II period through the 1970s, as those countries were still rebuilding their ruined economies and a trip to America was a good way to get ahead.

* In an episode of ''TheSimpsons'' Marge is cleaning her house because she's afraid that a hired cleaning lady will gossip about how dirty it is. In her imagination three cleaning ladies with extremely sterotypical [[{{Oireland}} Oirish]] accents do just that.

* ''Film/TheShapeOfWater'''s main character, Elisa, is a cleaning lady at a secret government facility. She's white, but most of her coworkers aren't, including her TokenBlackFriend Zelda (played by Creator/OctaviaSpencer). There's also a scene where the two of them smoke weed with some black guys who work in the facility's loading docks. This is contrasted with the science and security personnel, who are all white men in nice suits. The movie is set in 1962 Baltimore, and spotlights the inequality of its setting.

* Dilsey and her extended family serve the Compson family in Faulkner's ''Literature/TheSoundAndTheFury''. Like the above examples, she is a fully realized character, and offers one of the only morally and mentally sound perspectives in the whole book.

* Played with in ''Series/AllInTheFamily'' with Lionel Jefferson, a young black man who would come by the Bunker house once a week to pick up their dry cleaning. Archie, a cranky old racist, initially takes a condescendingly affectionate attitude towards Lionel, but it evaporates the moment he learns that Lionel's family own the dry cleaner, make a lot more money than he does, and want to move into their neighbourhood. He eventually forms an OddFriendship with Lionel's father, George, whose business skills and hard work he can't help but admire. And eventually Series/TheJeffersons would get their own SpinOff.

* ''Film/AngelAndBigJoe'': Angel is a migrant farm worker. He forms a bond with Big Joe, a telephone lineman.

* In ''WebVideo/{{Idiotsitter}}'', the Russel family employs a hispanic maid named Joy. She speaks fine English and is fairly well-treated by her employers -- except for that time a [[IntoxicationEnsues high-on-peyote]] [[GenderBlenderName Billie and Gene]] laugh and commander her to suck on their dicks.

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheBoondocks'' episode "The Itis", all of the kitchen staff in Granddad's soul food restaurant are Mexicans. They're the only employees left over from the previous restaurant in that location, because Ed Wuncler I fired everybody except the illegal Mexicans. Played with when Chico, one of the line cooks, takes Huey's side in an argument with Granddad about the value of soul food, and expounds on how soul food was a survival technique for slaves who had no other choice but to eat the parts of the pig that the masters wouldn't eat. Huey and Granddad reply with open-mouthed stunned stares, to which Chico says: "What, I can't take an Afro-American Studies class at the community college?"

* An important plot point in ''Film/GodsOwnCountry''. The film is set on a farm in Yorkshire, and Johnny's family hires a migrant laborer from Romania, Gheorghe, as the elders of the family are getting old and need additional assistance. Johnny resents Gheorghe's presence at first, and treats him with some xenophobia, but then they fall in love...

* ''Film/{{Cake}}'' has Claire's housekeeper/caregiver Silvana, who is arguably the {{Deuteragonist}} of the film. Claire also has a gardener named Arturo, whom [[SexAsSolace she sleeps with]] in one scene.

* ''Film/TheShapeOfWater'''s main character, Elisa, is a cleaning lady at a secret government facility. She's white, but most of her coworkers aren't, including her BlackBestFriend Zelda (played by Creator/OctaviaSpencer). There's also a scene where the two of them smoke weed with some black guys who work in the facility's loading docks. This is contrasted with the science and security personnel, who are all white men in nice suits. The movie is set in 1962 Baltimore, and spotlights the inequality of its setting.

* ''Disney/{{Fantasia}}'''s "Pastoral Symphony" segment includes two centaurettes, [[http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Sunflower Sunflower]] and [[http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Otika Otika]], who are clearly designed to look black, while the rest are [[AmazingTechnicolorPopulation oddly-colored]] and Caucasian-looking. Sunflower is shown doing menial jobs like polishing the other centaurettes' hooves, while Otika serves as part of Bacchus' entourage. Both have been removed from later releases due to controversy.

* Bart, protagonist of ''Film/BlazingSaddles'', starts out as a railroad worker. He later comes back for the other laborers [[spoiler:so they can build a fake Rock Ridge to trick the bandits, in exchange for some land to grow crops.]] While Bart is black, Chinese and Irish workers also show up.

* Mammy Two-Shoes in ''WesternAnimation/TomAndJerry'' is a more controversial reminder of the time when the original shorts were filmed. She was a heavy-set black housekeeper who often had to deal with the title characters' antics. Attempts to get around this have in the past included redrawing her as a slim white woman with an [[UnfortunateImplications Irish accent]], or more recently by redubbing her original performance to remove more offensive dialect from her lines (but not changing her race). A recent revival replaced her part with another slim white woman explicitly referred to as ''Mrs'' Two-Shoes. The character was apparently inspired by Hattie [=McDaniel=] and not surprisingly, Lillian Randolph, the woman who played her, was ''also'' frequently cast as a maid.

* Enrique the [[spoiler:gay]] pool boy in ''Film/LegallyBlonde''

* ''Film/{{Machete}}'' centers on migrant workers, including the title character who seems to be just a day laborer.

* ''Film/Cake'' has Claire's housekeeper/caregiver Silvana, who is arguably the {{Deuteragonist}} of the film. Claire also has a gardener named Arturo, whom [[SexAsSolace she sleeps with]] in one scene.

* The cleaning woman that George falls for in one episode of ''Seinfeld'' mentions that she grew up in Panama.

Also now rare in modern fiction (in fact, it seems to have been rare in ''any'' fiction unless written by Filipino-Americans), this especially became common in the early 1900s, when the U.S. invaded and colonised the Philippines (seizing it away from Spain), and many Filipino men came to work to the American mainland, mostly as farmers on fruit and vegetable plantations, but also as fish cannery workers, sailors, houseboys, and dishwashers and restaurant workers in existing ethnic enclaves like the various Chinatowns. Many of this early wave of Filipino labourers, now known as ''manongs'' (roughly, "big brothers" or sometimes "uncles"), were also drafted to work in Hawaii itself (then also a U.S. colony, like the Philippines was), thus producing a bit of overlap with the Hawaiian Labourer example, above.

* A minor character in ''ComicBook/TheSandman'', Lyta Hall's BlackBestFriend Carla, lives off the money her grandmother made by playing a maid, like Hattie [=McDaniel=] below.

In modern incarnations, the ethnic group is often a kind of AcceptableTarget.

* ''Film/ElNorte'' is a grim tale of a brother and sister who flee political persecution in El Salvador, becoming undocumented laborers in the United States.

[[folder:Anime & Manga]]

* Martha Jones is stuck as a maid in the ''Series/DoctorWho'' two-parter "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood". But it seems a little bit different in her case, in that she's basically the undisputed protagonist for those episodes, the other characters are blatantly prejudiced toward her and she tries to demonstrate to them how wrong they are, and she's usually a [[HospitalHottie med student]].

* In ''Series/WhatsHappening,'' single mom Mabel Thomas worked as a maid. The actress' objection to the portrayal was one reason why she eventually left the show.

[[folder:Web Comics]]

!! Hawaiian Laborer

* Richard Henry Dana's classic memoir Two Years Before The Mast frequently mentions Hawaiian workers

* The popular sea shanty John Kanaka is a tribute to Hawaiian sailors on American ships, known as Kanakas

!! Eastern European Laborer

[[folder:Web Comics]]

!! Eastern European Laborer

[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
* In ''Webcomic/AxisPowersHetalia'', there was a series of comics in which Lithuania lived with America and was hired to help take care of his house. This was to represent American outsourcing to Lithuania in that time period. Lithuania himself was pretty happy with the arrangement (it meant no longer working for [[PsychopathicManchild Russia]]), but had to go back to his old job after America causes a depression.

[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
* Eva Starzia Schnorbitz Melitzskova in British sitcom ''Baddiel's Syndrome''.
* Magda in British sitcom ''Lead Balloon''.
* Pete Campbell more or less rapes his neighbor's German au pair in Season 4 of ''Series/MadMen''.
* In the ''Series/DoctorWho'' episode "The Sontaran Strategem" the Sontarans disguise their army of human clones as Polish migrant workers who can't speak English very well so that nobody will notice [[CloneDegeneration they're not capable of speaking any language very well]].

[[folder:Literature]]
* Upton Sinclair's ''Literature/TheJungle'' was all about workers in Chicago, but the main character Jurgis was Lithuanian. Poles and Slovaks were mentioned extensively (as were the Irish, but the Eastern Europeans had [[http://www.online-literature.com/upton_sinclair/jungle/6/ mostly displaced them]] from the most menial jobs).
* Matya the Hungarian nanny in ''Literature/{{Capital}}'', despite her degree in mechanical engineering. Lanchester has said he was writing about the real-life social phenomenon of highly educated Eastern Europeans coming to do menial jobs in Britain in search of higher wages and the "London dream".

[[folder:Web Comics]]
* ''Webcomic/SequentialArt'' has "Crazy Sven". Though he's actually a taxicab driver.
* ''Webcomic/{{Polandball}}'' comics often have Polandball working as Britain's plumber.

Throughout history, there have been stereotypes that certain ethnicities are more prevalent in menial labor such as maids and farmhands. This stereotype is often an exaggerated case of the truth: Certain minority groups ''have'' indeed been over-represented in menial jobs due to a variety of factors. In PoliticallyCorrectHistory this will be carefully sidestepped, but in accurate or exaggerated {{Period Piece}}s and HistoricalFiction, the older versions of this trope can still be found.

* Celia on ''Series/DharmaAndGreg.'' She's a pretty standard case in most episodes, but when the main characters attend her niece's wedding we learn all sorts of surprising facts about her from her family and old friends, including that she [[NinjaMaid worked as a sniper during her home country's civil war]].

* Lupino on ''WesternAnimation/KingOfTheHill''

-->-- '''Music/TomLehrer''', ''George Murphy''