Willmar, Minn.
In 1949 my aunt and uncle moved from Minneapolis to this town in west-central Minnesota, where they started a small steel distribution company. I visited them regularly for 50 years. About 40 years ago, my aunt whispered to me one day that she had been in her local grocery store and had heard someone ... "speaking Spanish."
It was said with wonderment not malice. It was surely my aunt's first encounter with new immigrants in her largely white, Lutheran, Scandinavian town, where she and her husband - two Minnesota Jews - had been about the most exotic things going.
Since I've been visiting towns around America for two years, I decided to go back to Willmar to see how it had changed. At Willmar High School, the principal, Paul Schmitz, showed me a big world map in the lobby, with pins representing all the different places the students hail from.
That map has pins from 30 countries across Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and the rest of the world. Willmar, population 21,000, is now nearly half Latino, Somali and a Noah's ark of other East African and Asian immigrants. The languages spoken in the high school include English, Arabic, Somali, Spanish and Karen (spoken by an ethnic group from Myanmar).
The cliché about America today is that we're divided between two coasts that are liberalizing, pluralizing, globalizing and modernizing, and in between is "flyover America," where everyone voted for Donald Trump, is suffering from addictions and is waiting for the 1950s to return.
That's not what I've found. America is a checkerboard of towns and cities - some rising from the bottom up and others collapsing from the top down, ravaged by opioids, high unemployment among less-educated white males and a soaring suicide rate. I've been trying to...