Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work

There are no true heroes or villains in this text; everybody Laskas encounters is complex, multivalent. She presents them as characters, of course, but none of them become flat, stock characters. The only hint of this is in the opposition between the worker and management. At all times, workers are presented positively, whether the worker is a coal miner, a migrant farm worker, or an air traffic controller.

If any of the workers are unhappy, it is not because of the work that they do, but because of unnecessary or irrational restrictions placed on them by management. This is most obvious in the section on the air traffic controllers, but is evident as well in Sputter’s section, when Laskas discusses the shortage of truck drivers and the restrictions under which they labor.

Throughout the text, Laskas uses lists in a variety of ways. In the section on migrant workers, for example, she ends the chapter with a list of things Urbano and his sons see on the way to buy school supplies: “pots of petunias hanging and American flags flapping and banners strung lamppost to lamppost” (76). Here, the list demonstrates the ways in which