If there's something we can state about the recent years in U.S. (and Western) politics, it is that its complexity is determined to great extend by the influence of large sectors of the society that previously remained invisible. There is a relatively clear narrative about the low-income working-class disenchanted relationship with traditional politics that have provoked the success of extreme politics all over the western world. Nevertheless, the liberal discourse keeps failing to understand the contradictions of such regions, like Appalachia in the U.S. We can intuit that there is a need for local and idiosyncratic stories, stories that include a wide variety of contexts, characters and institutions. 
In that state of affairs, Community Colleges (CC) could be one of the fundamental institutions to address those contradictions and a potential ground to develop strategies that deal directly with the issues of those extensively invisible social sectors. CC enroll almost half of the country’s undergraduates and have a fundamental impact in the education of the majority of underrepresented student populations in the United States. As locally oriented institutions, CC reflect the demographics of the areas where they are situated, but there is still a lack of extensive strategies that can correlate the concrete issues of the localities to the goals of CC. There are not national policies that reflect on CC diversity of students, programs, missions and funding structures. 
Essential to a re-definition of CC policies will be avoiding their commonly accepted shapeless river identity based on the situation that students just go along without a clear set of goals and vision of the outcome of their studies. The locally-oriented CC can approach specific education-labor market issues through their programs instead of designing general ones that won’t prepare the student for the challenges of their future work life. CC can use their academic flexibility to open to the possibility to design credits and non-credits programs that match local labor needs. Besides the goal to transfer students to four-year institutions, CC are essential in providing training in technical education. Nowadays there is an increasing interest in education that focuses on giving the student access to specific technical skills. Maybe a symptom that tells us about those tendencies is that last year Apple released a free app development curriculum designed specifically for high school and CC students. There is clearly a need to support and finance high-skill careers in rural areas, which can help to revert the “hopeless” situation of some of those regions in the U.S. 
A clear example of the possibility of using CC networks towards a direct participation in reconfiguring local economies is the work of the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE). NACCE has slowly built a strong network to promote their two main goals on CC campuses: to (1) Empower the college to approach the business of leading a community college with an entrepreneurial mindset; and (2) Grow the community college’s role in supporting job creation and entrepreneurs in their local ecosystem. The NACCE has succeed in developing initiatives in regions such as rural Appalachia, where they have build ecosystems maps that help leveraging community resources. 
The Hispanic Outlook on Education has consistently given attention to CC as fundamental parts of higher education for minorities. Specifically, for the last two years, the magazine’s February issue has been dedicated to the discussion about it. With that regular interest, Hispanic Outlook is building a wide spectrum of approaches to the subject that becomes a fundamental tool for understanding the situation of CC and their growing impact in Latino and Hispanic communities.
The realities of CC change dramatically depending on their location. It is precisely that variety of forms that CC assume depending on their contexts and what could give them the possibility of becoming important actors in promoting the extremely necessary alternatives to address the economical and social issues of communities across the U.S. CC can become one of the few institutions that can effectively tackle the question of how to open a dialogue with parts of invisible America and include them in progressive political practices. •