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.”
