Joplin: Personal Narrative

Prior to the tornado, my experience of Joplin was limited to a dozen family visits over two decades. My lasting impression from those years were of a city that felt more like a small town. However, Joplin is the fourteenth-largest city and the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Missouri, boasting 49,000 residents and a daytime population of 270,000 taken from the metropolitan population of 400,000 citizens. Of the citizens who self-identified their ethnicity in the 2010 census, 85.6 percent were Caucasian, 3.3 percent were African-American, 4.5 percent were Hispanic/Latino, and the remaining population were Native American, Asian, and Pacific Islander. Citizens of Joplin, primarily middle-class and blue-collar, worked in manufacturing,