No matter how high I climb socially, my working-class identity is clearly rooted: I was born and raised on Factory Street, in West Warwick. Indeed, my dad fought a yearlong battle in the late '60s to keep the industrial name of our street. La Chapelle Boulevard hardly seemed appropriate for what was once a main thoroughfare winding through the thickest factory section of the Pawtuxet Valley.

The Town Council tried everything to defeat my dad -- secret meetings, meetings during blizzards, overlong meetings -- but he won. The antipathy of Rhode Island's political powers to Indian gaming notwithstanding, it now seems, however, that he may have gotten only a reprieve. From sweat to smiles and sinews to service, West Warwick hopes to ghost-bust the factory-spooked spirit of the old mill town as it fights for the wet dream of capitalism: a full-service casino.

On and around Factory Street, workers were once able to pass the largest cotton mill in the world, Arctic Mill. They can still pass the oldest continually operating mill in the country, Lippitt Mill. Industrial work wasn't holy service (although Blessed Brother Andre, nee Alfred Bessette, spent time as an unskilled factory hand in the Phenix section before later miraculously building a Montreal chapel to Saint Joseph, the patron saint of workers), but it did differentiate work from pleasure. Indeed, one of the very first film shoots was a Louis Lumiere recording of workers leaving the invisibility and alienation of the factory and returning to the light of individual and community life.

Service work is very different, despite a commonality in trying to fob off the lowest pay, most meager benefits, and least job security. Especially in the popular industries of gambling, tourism, and dining, service toil requires as "part of the job" that workers must seem "to love the job."

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the phrases "managed heart" and "emotional labor" to specify the toll exacted on workers by the 21st-century service economy. Though most experts see the dangers of a casino in a rise in gambling addictions and the influx of low- and high-end undesirables, Hochschild cites the greatest danger as further alienation of the worker's most private sense of self.

To be sure, the state has treated the Narragansetts unfairly. But it's also worth noting that Brother Andre's kin, the French-Canadian settlers, called their adopted home here Jericho. Perhaps well-versed in their local history, casino proponents may be as determined as Joshua to bring down not just the last brick walls of Factory Street, but the final separation between private self and the laboring life.