On a November night in 2008, seven teenaged boys--six of them white--attacked two Ecuadorean immigrants in Patchogue, N.Y. During the melee, one of them pulled a knife and killed Marcelo Lucero. In 1993, Lucero had illegally entered the U.S. from Gualaceo, the small Andes valley town where most of Patchogue's Ecuadorean community originated. The fabric of the suburban Long Island town came unraveled as resentment between the immigrant population and the remaining "locals" exploded. Pulitzer-winning journalist Mirta Ojito (Finding Mañana) saw in this tragedy not only a dramatic news story, but also a microcosm of the controversy over immigration in the U.S.
Hunting Season is a first-rate study of prejudice and institutional indifference. With thorough research and tight prose, Ojito asks how Patchogue, a city built by Italian immigrants, could become such a hotbed of intolerance, fear and hate. Though an immigrant herself, Ojito rarely interjects herself into the narrative--the court and police records, U.S. Census Bureau statistics, her interviews and on-the-scene observations speak for themselves.
Only in the epilogue does she speak personally: "There were no winners in this case. Eight families were shattered," she writes. "After three years of reporting and writing this book, there is a lot I will never know." Fortunately, Hunting Season shines its light on a community, a crime and a social milieu so well that readers will know more about the historical and contemporary challenges of American immigration than they ever did before. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.