Alba Lopez remembers inviting the secretary of the company she works for to a birthday party. And the woman asked where she lives. "I live in Wyandotte County. And the boss say, 'No, no, no, no, no, don't go there.' She's driving a Mercedes. And he say, 'Oh no, when you get out and pick up your Mercedes, you're not going to have tires. And it's going to be on top of blocks.' And I'm like, 'Come on, why you say that?'"
Lopez lives among a large population of working-class Mexican immigrants in Kansas City, Kan. She said when she gets home from work at night she sits on her porch and enjoys the quiet. So she recorded a video showing where she lives and sent it to her colleague and asked if she thought someone "is going to steal your tires or something?"
Lopez told her, "Please don't listen to people wrong. Because they are wrong. They don't live where we live."
Lopez shared her experience during a conversation as part of our series "Seeking Common Ground." Reporters from 10 NPR stations talked with nearly 30 small groups of people across the country to try to understand how people think about community in this divided nation.
When Lopez said, "They don't live where we live," she tapped into a sentiment we heard a lot: We know our own communities but we don't often get a chance to sit and listen to people in other communities. The project also encouraged people to define themselves in ways that didn't start with politics.
The way we asked questions had a lot to do with how we got people talking about their personal experiences rather than their political opinions. We teamed up with a nonprofit called Cortico, which is affiliated with MIT and works to facilitate conversations and spot themes across a large number of conversations.
Over several weeks in the fall, reporters from those 10 NPR stations hosted small groups of three to six people who had something in common and were comfortable sharing their stories — in Orlando, Fla., western Colorado, Kansas City, Kan., and many more communities, big and small.
We asked every group the same set of open-ended questions: about their sense of community, what they thought people from other communities did not understand about them and what they wanted to learn about other people.
This project yielded hours and hours of taped conversations. So we used Cortico's AI tools and a prototype from MIT to search for shared themes across all the recordings so that we could listen more closely. We only used the AI tools to analyze the conversations, not to generate any content. That's NPR policy: Everything we do is written and edited by real people.
'I don't think I could live another way'
People we spoke with described a longing for community at a time when many social indicators, as cited by a recent Surgeon General's report, suggest the nation is experiencing an "epidemic of loneliness."
People found community, quite often, in those closest to them.
"Community has always meant family to me because, being Mexican, we're raised as a large community of just your family members," said Dominga Titus, who lives in Austin, Texas. "If you needed something, mom or grandma was down the street."
Rancher Brady Pearson said that in Loma, Colo., on the state's western edge, "everyone's our neighbor, whether you're 2 miles away or 5 miles away." One time some of his cows got out from his feedlot up in Gunnison.
"They were 12 1/2 miles away from our place and a neighbor called, said he saw them," he recalled.
Pearson and his son went and brought the cows back. "It does seem like everybody is trying to help everybody," he said.
Heidi Sourwine grew up in a rural hamlet in northern New York.
"When I was a kid," she said, "Sundays were for Sunday drives. So we would drive around from farm to farm and pull in the driveway and my dad would have conversations about either the corn or how things are going on the farm."
As a kid, she just wondered when her dad would be done talking. Now she misses those times. "As I've gotten older, I don't think I could live another way, honestly."
"And I've become more grateful for the fact that I know people on more than a transient level," she said. "So when I go to the grocery store, I'm not just buying groceries from a random person. I can ask them how their day was. I can care about things in their life, and that makes my life more fulfilled."
Of course community isn't just about small towns and neighbors and nostalgia. We spoke to people from across the country who felt part of communities based on who they are or what they do: new immigrants in Aurora, Colo., moms in a book club in Abilene, Texas, a demolition derby team in northern New York state, farmers and ranchers in western Colorado, or Muslim women in Orlando, Fla.
Jamey Merkel, who lives in Canton, N.Y., finds community in action.
"On Sunday … we protested Israel bombing Lebanon, and that was a really good sense of community, like we all have a similar shared vision and we're standing up together."
'I don't like being put in a box'
We asked participants in the conversations to talk about what other communities might not understand about them and they described being labelled, stereotyped or misunderstood. We heard this a lot, no matter where people lived, the demographic group they felt part of, or the jobs they have.
Pearson, the Colorado rancher, said he feels that people like him are unfairly vilified because he raises cattle.
"You hear stuff all the time about, 'Oh, the cow farts,'" he said. "They're trying to demonize the cattle industry as a whole." But "we're not out there trying to ruin the planet at all. We look at ourselves as environmentalists in a way that we want the best for the ground and the earth too."
Pearson is getting at something similar to what Lopez, the woman from the neighborhood in Kansas City, hinted at when she said: "They don't live where we live." We heard it again from a recent graduate of a college in Colorado Springs, Colo., when she said others often don't understand how she can both identify with the LGBTQ community and also be a Second Amendment advocate.
"What I want people to understand," said Edgar Galicia, who has lived in Kansas City since 1985, "is that we are a trying community, we are a working community." His family migrated from Mexico before landing in Kansas City. In the discussion we hosted, the group spent a lot of time talking about how immigrants boosted the city's economy.
"This may be a misperception," Galicia said, "but we're not staying put. We're investing, we're working, we're bettering."
Dominique DiLorenzo is a family practice physician in Orlando, Fla. She wears a hijab, the traditional Muslim head scarf, and described a time she felt stereotyped.
"I recently took Harry Potter pictures with my family over the weekend and it got so many comments," she said. "I think people thought it was really unexpected of me and my family to do that, but I love Harry Potter. I love the books, I love the movies, I grew up with it."
She suspects the response came from an assumption that Muslim families are all the same.
"I don't like being put in a box," she said.
We contain multitudes
Even so, DiLorenzo pointed out a universal truth about communities: most people are part of lots of them. Those interwoven, overlapping memberships can help people defy stereotypes – and, perhaps, transcend divisions.
"I feel like I have a lot of different communities," DiLorenzo said. "I have my Muslim community and then I have my physician community that I identify with, and then there's my neighbors. We went through a hurricane recently, and so you come together in community to clean up your yard and make sure everybody's okay."
It doesn't take a crisis like a hurricane to bring people together.
Sourwine, the woman whose father took her on Sunday drives, finds community in those conversations with people she runs into at the grocery store.
Her hometown of Redwood, N.Y., has fewer than 500 residents. In the fall, tourists head home. People start driving slower, businesses close up shop.
But fellow Redwood resident David Magbee said that the season somehow brings people together.
"In the winter months when there's a concert happening or something, everybody's there because there's only so much going on," he said. "And there's actually something that's really beautiful about that because it forces us to be present almost always."
This project is part of a partnership with Cortico, a non-profit affiliated with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. They have developed methods and AI tools to help spot themes across conversations. But everything you read here was written and edited by humans. The project was made possible with support from the Knight Foundation.
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