By **Justin Alvarez**

Just as the NFL championship returned to its roots with the Vince Lombardi trophy awarded to the Green Bay Packers for the first time in 14 seasons, another standout of Sunday night’s Super Bowl broadcast reminded the world where manufacturing innovation was born — Detroit. Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” Super Bowl ad for the Chrysler 200 recognizes that in order for Michigan to be reinvented — as state Governor Rick Snyder stated endlessly during his campaign — the transformation must first address its image.

John Patrick Leary touched upon this issue in his article “Detroitism” featured in the January 15th issue of our magazine. “Detroit has been hit as hard as any city by the foreclosure crisis and by unemployment,” Leary wrote, “and so it embodies the looming jobless future, or more precisely, our worst fears about that future.” People believe Michigan is dead. However, what Chrysler’s eloquent portrayal of Detroit reminds us is that even though Detroit’s reinvention won’t come easily, “…it’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel.”

See the full ad below.

Copyright 2011 Justin Alvarez

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Justin Alvarez is a blog intern at Guernica. Read more about him here.

To read more blog entries from GUERNICA click HERE .

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