News at Eleven: In many ways Fresno is very like Detroit,

the city where I grew up. That sounds nuts, but socially and culturally, the two were quite similar. You had a very small minority--you might almost say "royalty"--who owned everything and who ran everything, even politically. And then you had the workers, a class with its own mythology attached.

I found that same mythology in Barcelona: this mythology about the useless people from the south who come up to the city and ruin it. In Barcelona, they came from the rural south of Spain, and in Detroit, of course, they came from the southern U.S., and in Fresno, they come from Mexico. And the mythology is that those people are lazy and stupid and useless.

from News Review: Words that work

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