San Diego's New Trailer-Park-Themed Restaurant - Perpetuating The Trend Of Treating America's Impoverished As Entertainment

August 20, 2017
By Brooke Binkowski

A new restaurant has opened in San Diego’s Gaslamp District. That in and of itself would not be something remarkable but for the name and theme of this particular eatery - Trailer Park After Dark. The underground restaurant and self-described “five star dive bar” features fashionably mismatched furniture, shopping carts & wheelbarrows for seating, wood wall paneling, and actual trailers scattered around the room. Were this mere 1970s nostalgia, I would have no issues with this restaurant. Even if this was the theme, if done respectfully, I still would have no qualms. But the way this place is set up and presented, with its stench of classism and whiff of racism, is wrong.

As a kid, we were poor enough that I lived in a trailer park with my grandparents for a while. It wasn't a hardship. In fact, I loved its compactness and our neighbors. We never had a lot of money and went through some extraordinarily lean years, but we got through them as best we could. I thought my family did a good job of it, too. However, it was eventually made clear to me, through years of subtle looks and pointed comments, that trailer parks are considered by most to be “trashy.” The things I loved were tacky. 

It was a first look into an increasingly clear pattern of classism that I would experience for years. I only felt more out of place after I dropped out of high school and got into media. Since journalism jobs rarely pay well, they often attract people who already have money. (They can afford to have low salaries.) I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I made a study of those who were rich, the ones who acted, looked and even smelled expensive. I knew they could smell poverty on me. I spent a long time studying people of higher classes in order to try to emulate them. How did they speak? What did they say? How did they hold their forks? Dress? Do their hair?

I finally made it into the middle class in my 30s, after I made enough money to put myself through college and earn a bachelor’s degree. I am extremely lucky and I know it. And now people with disposable income will be imitating my childhood, eating overpriced foods that people think are “trailer trash” like. As if we’d have eaten canned green beans and tater tots covered with melted government cheese if we’d had a choice.

Not to mention that this restaurant is situated in San Diego’s Gaslamp District, less than a mile away from huge homeless encampments that exist primarily because developers artificially push up the cost of living in the region and because people were displaced by construction of the stadium there, and because being homeless is treated in San Diego as an unsightly crime, rather than the deep societal problem it actually is. (San Diego, an incredibly prosperous city, has one of the highest rates of homeless people in the entire nation, thanks to a dearth of affordable housing, addiction, and mental health services.) Meanwhile, rich people can walk down Fifth Avenue avoiding the eyes of people trying to panhandle - then go into this restaurant and buy a $10 hot dog and laugh together at how tacky "trailer trash" can be.

America has a long history of treating its impoverished as either entertainment or political footballs, which are always punted straight back to the poor. During the Gilded Age of the 1800s, money flowed freely - to the people who were already wealthy. Rich New Yorkers would stand in line for hours to see the way people lived in the slums, sometimes posing as charity workers (in what they called "slumming parties," eventually truncated to just "slumming") so that they could push their way into peoples homes and get a good look around. A version of this practice appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, when television shows and movies portrayed poverty-based narratives as gritty, albeit hopeless - realism about lives that were nasty, brutish, and short, around the same time that Americans started traveling to places like India and Brazil to take slum tours.

But slum tourism and poverty porn do not just exist at the fringes or in the bowels of history. You can see these at play in present-day Oliver Twist-style "inspirational" stories about the plucky poors that Americans so love. The restaurant employee who walked fifteen miles each day just to get to work because he couldn’t afford a car. The homeless man who was a radio star before addiction claimed his career. Nearly every story that appears in Western media about Haiti.

All of these “inspirational” stories, like carnivals and slum tours, have a secondary purpose - reinforcing stereotypes. The helpless poor person, who is almost always non-white, is saved from an untenable situation not by pluck alone, but by a generous rich white person who just happened on the situation, with not a single thought spared for the underlying structural forces - a lack of available health care or addiction treatment; ever-rising housing prices; redlining; stigma attached to mental health issues, to name just a few examples - that cause them. The spectacle of poverty is big business, and so classism remains intact.

Perhaps this restaurant has more of a conscience than I am perceiving. It would be easier to believe if the owners of this business didn’t charge so much and treat those of us who grew up impoverished like the backwoods denizens of a strange land in their restaurant - an issue endemic to restaurants bearing this theme across the country, from California to New York City. Perhaps they are doing good works out of the spotlight.

But even if they were doing homeless outreach, serving people for free who can’t afford to eat, or building homeless shelters on their days off, they are still using my own life and the lives of many other people who have to fake their way through daily class prejudices, both conscious and unconscious, as fodder for the rich-kid nightclub set. We’re still being treated as empty entertainment by people who openly sneer at us for being poor and dirty and hoard money while offering us no path out of the same poverty that will afflict more than half of Americans at some point in their lives.

That, more than anything else, leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

A version of this article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times
Brooke Binkowski is a reporter and the managing editor for the fact-checking website