Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Growing up around the rows of corn and soybeans in Fremont, Ohio, Mónica Ramírez spent her earliest days being looked after by her maternal bisabuela, or great-grandmother, Virginia Guardiola. From her home in town, Guardiola served as an informal, one-woman welcome committee for farmworkers who arrived in Fremont, disoriented and alone.

Ronald Shrewsbery II used to be the Robot Doctor. Now he's known by the more bureaucratic-sounding title "WCM (World Class Manufacturing) Electrical Technical Specialist," but he still doctors the robots. There are a thousand of these machines inside Ohio's Toledo Assembly Complex, a 312-acre manufacturing leviathan dedicated to producing Jeeps. The Toledo Assembly Complex is one of the most heavily automated car factories in the United States. It can extrude 500 cars in a shift, far more than the Cove, the old Jeep plant that was shut down in 2006. And the machines make the work easier. There used to be a lot more lifting, more pushing.