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Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town
Beacon Press
October 2013
On Sale: October 19, 2013
264 pages ISBN: 0807001813 EAN: 9780807001813 Kindle: B00CNOSM24 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction | True Crime
The true story of an immigrant's murder that turned a
quaint village on the Long Island shore into ground zero in
the war on immigration In November 2008,
Marcelo Lucero, a thirty-seven-year-old undocumented
Ecuadorean immigrant, was attacked and murdered by a group
of teenagers as he walked the streets of the Long Island
village of Patchogue accompanied by a childhood friend. The
attackers were out “hunting for beaners.” Chasing,
harassing, and assaulting defenseless “beaners”—their slur
for Latinos—was part of their weekly entertainment, some of
the teenagers later confessed. Latinos—primarily men and not
all of them immigrants—have become the target of hate crimes
in recent years as the nation wrestles with swelling numbers
of undocumented immigrants, the suburbs become the
newcomers’ first destination, and public figures advance
their careers by spewing anti-immigration rhetoric.
Lucero, an unassuming worker at a dry cleaner’s, became yet
another victim of anti-immigration fever. In the wake
of his death, Patchogue was catapulted into the national
limelight as this formerly unremarkable suburb of New York
became ground zero in the war on immigration. In death,
Lucero became a symbol of everything that was wrong with our
broken immigration system: fewer opportunities to obtain
visas to travel to the United States, porous borders, a
growing dependency on cheap labor, and the rise of
bigotry.
Drawing on firsthand interviews and
on-the-ground reporting, journalist Mirta Ojito has crafted
an unflinching portrait of one community struggling to
reconcile the hate and fear underlying the idyllic veneer of
their all-American town. With a strong commitment to telling
all sides of the story, Ojito unravels the engrossing
narrative with objectivity and insight, providing an
invaluable look at one of America’s most pressing issues.
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