Politicians may troll the white working class for votes, but except for an occasional art deco version of working-class heroes and their machines, our cultural arbiters have deemed them benighted and even bigoted throwbacks to a rusted-out, less enlightened era. Much as farmers of the earlier populist moment resented their own loss of status as our culture drifted away from the agrarian ideal, today’s white working-class men stew over their diminishing place in the contemporary American pantheon.

If Trump really wants to speak for forgotten Americans, he would travel to the Mississippi Delta and the rural Black Belt of the American South, where conditions are so wretched and dire that even a struggling Rust Belt factory town might seem like a bountiful paradise of opportunity and wealth. Campaign events tell the real story of who’s forgotten and who isn’t, and the verdict is clear: White working-class voters in the Rust Belt are far from forgotten.

Detroit is a city that is very familiar with poverty, especially in its low-income and minority communities. Among other financial ills, the city is suffering from a rapidly shrinking tax base as people flee the city to go to other cities where more job opportunities are present. But Detroit has an opportunity to turn its situation around by embracing technology and reinventing itself as the “Technology Hub of the Midwest.” Detroit needs to position itself as the place where technology meets the future economy. 

There are 633,782 people experiencing homelessness every day in the United States, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH). Many of the people Muñoz feeds claim a number within that homeless group since they are jornaleros by day and homeless by night. So why risk homelessness in this country rather than back home? “Your life depends on a random stranger who could kill you, will probably disrespect you, and will most likely pay you much less than you deserve. But even those prospects are better than the ones you used to have.”