"Better than the Walmart parking lot": Valle, Arizona epitomizes the extreme poverty that is the dark side of the American Dream

The ideal of the American Dream encapsulates the US' founding ideals of freedom of opportunity and the promise of upward social mobility. But what happens to those for whom that dream has failed? Since 2013, Susannah Crockford has been visiting Valle, Arizona, where many residents live on the margins of society in extreme poverty. She writes that, like many of America’s poor, Valle’s most vulnerable are victims of a spiraling cycle of misfortune that they may never emerge from.