His father was a door-to-door salesman of household items like dishes and blankets and, eventually, saved enough to buy a ranch house in the working-class community of Warwick, Rhode Island.

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Bedford-Stuyvesant, a community in Brooklyn, New York, of predominantly working-class African-Americans, is the group's only urban sponsored community.

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Vice President Joe Biden was recently dispatched to Democratic stronghold Jefferson County in the important swing state of Ohio, in part because Obama barely eked out a win over John McCain in the predominately white, working-class community.

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We are a small, working class community of 1, 400 diverse people, mostly African-American and Latino, with significant populations of White, Asian, and or some combination thereof.

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More recent immigrants have tended to come from lower-skill trades, and the community is a mix of the working and middle class, said Mr. Lavarro, adding that concerns about crime and the draw of the suburbs have led some to leave.

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