January 2014 Mirta Ojito author of Hunting Season published by Beacon Press
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Hunting Season, Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town
Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town
Beacon Press
By Mirta Ojito
Published by Beacon Press
ISBN-13: 978-0807001813
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.
Mirta Ojito
Photo Credit: Juanita Ceballos
About the Author
Mirta Ojito
Mirta Ojito, a newspaper reporter since 1987, has worked for the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and, from 1996 to 2002, the New York Times, where she covered immigration, among other beats, for the Metro desk. She has received numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2001 for a series of articles in the Times about race in America. She is the author of Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town (Beacon Press, Oct. 2013). Ojito is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Board of Trustees of the Phi Theta Kappa Foundation. She contributes to several publications, in English and Spanish, and writes a twice-a-month column for The Miami Herald. She teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, where she lives with her three children.