Warren picks a faded mill city for presidential announcement

By PHILIP MARCELO
February 9, 2019

LAWRENCE, Mass. (AP) — When U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren officially jumps into the race for president, it won’t be from her Cambridge hometown where Harvard and MIT reside, or nearby Boston, where presidential hopefuls have launched campaigns over the generations.

Instead, the 69-year-old Democrat is widely expected to kick off her campaign Saturday some 30 miles (50 kilometers) north in Lawrence, a faded mill city that’s one of New England’s poorest and most heavily Latino.

The struggling city, once a center of the American textile industry and where one of the nation’s most significant labor strikes occurred, provides a fitting backdrop for Warren’s economic message of fighting for workers in the face of powerful corporate interests and a growing wealth divide.

With a long tradition of welcoming immigrants, the nearly 80 percent Latino city is also a place where the fight over immigration deeply resonates.

“Lawrence is a microcosm of the story Democrats want to tell about where America has been and where it wants to be,” said John Cluverius, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts in nearby Lowell. “It’s an industrial city where American workers fought for fair wages and labor conditions. It’s also an immigrant city that’s grown from many of the policies that President Trump and Republicans now oppose, like family or chain migration.”

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