Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. One of the major issues in Sweat is NAFTA, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which led to outsourcing jobs to other countries. What is NAFTA? How did it affect people living in the United States?

Teaching Suggestion: High school and college (or even older) students may know very little or nothing about NAFTA. Group brainstorming may help in collectively piecing together information and speculation; it might be helpful to provide these or similar resources with the guiding discussion topic of what NAFTA meant to the average person in the United States. This connects to the theme of The Human Cost of Production (and Outsourcing).

• This video from Quartz, “NAFTA Explained by Avocados. And Shoes.” gives a clear explanation of how NAFTA worked and how it affected regular people in positive and negative ways.
• Since the play takes place in 2000 and 2008, this video, “Terrorism, War, and Bush 43,” from Crash Course US History sets the scene of the world of the play.