November 11, 2013

Quick Reads: “Hunting Season” by Mirta Ojito


 

Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town

By Mirta Ojito

BEACON PRESS

In November 2008, seven Long Island teenagers “hunting for beaners” set upon two Ecuadorean immigrants in the quiet village of Patchogue. When Marcelo Lucero fought back, he was fatally stabbed. Former New York Times reporter Mirta Ojito reconstructs the night in painstaking detail, illuminating the anti-Latino sentiment that bubbled up as new-immigrant lifestyles clashed with suburban mores. Though she sometimes gets mired in the minutiae, she aptly captures a town’s struggle to reconcile its lily-white past with its increasingly diverse present. Of Lucero, Ojito writes: “Only in death were they forced to see him.”

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

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