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Book of the Month Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
Additional Conversation Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
January 2014 Book of the Month
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
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.
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.
January 2014 Additional Conversation
Ileana Araguti
Photo Credit: Joseph Gutiz
Ileana Araguti
New Trends Press
Should you meet Ileana Araguti today, you cannot tell of any troubled past, either from her childhood or as an immigrant. She camouflages her past well with joyous laughter. She loves living life to the fullest. Her writings are intended fo inspiration and awareness.
Araguti is a graduate from the University of California, Riverside. She earned two Masters’ Degrees in the fields of Arts and Education. She is currently an educator, a writer, wife, and a mother of a son and a daughter. She enjoys traveling with her family and resides in Southern California. Some of her work has been published in Spain.
She returned to visit her native country of Nicaragua twenty-one years later after her exile. Upon her return, she rediscovered a totally different country from the one she left behind. It was then that Shattered Paradise was written, with the hope of bringing awareness about the devastating effects of war, particularly in children, and ultimately about her beloved and vanishing rain and cloud forests.
Shattered Paradise, Memoirs of a Nicaraguan War Child
Shattered Paradise: Memoirs of a Nicaraguan War Child
By Ileana Araguti
Published by JG Publishing/New Trends Press
ISBN-13: 978-978-0988402539
Shattered Paradise is a lyrical, stunning and poignant memoir of survival and quick adaption–as Ileana, alongside with her rooted Roman Catholic mother, manage to break free from a war infected life in Nicaragua, bullying school masters, and a womanizing father whose obsession with women and inner strength manage to carve an unexpected destiny for the two.