City of Champions
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A portrait of Brockton, Massachusetts
Brockton, Massachusetts, is my hometown, where my Irish great-grandparents supported their family with shoe-factory paychecks. Those businesses and the people they supported have vanished, and the once-shiny streets are now tattered. Old timers mourn the proud place they remember, and blame the newcomers. Yet new immigrants, from some of the world's poorest and most war-torn countries, take the place of the old, cultivating lives on a landscape others have abandoned. Poverty, renewal, decay, hope — contradictions embroider life in a once-proud American city some people call "dead."
