Strangers Among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America

by Roberto Suro

Strangers Among Us is a lucid, informed, and cliché-shattering examination of Latino immigration to the United States--its history, the vast transformations it is fast producing in American society, and the challenges it will present for decades to come. In making vivid an array of people, places, and events that are
little known to most Americans, the author--an American journalist who is himself the son of Latino immigrants--makes an often bewildering phenom-enon vastly more understandable.
He tells the stories of a number of large Latino communities, linked in a chronological narrative that starts with the Puerto Rican migration to East Harlem in the 1950s and continues through the California-bound rush of Mexicans and Central Americans in the 1990s. He takes us into the world of Mexican-American gang members; Guatemalan Mayas in suburban Houston; Cuban businessmen in Miami; Dominican bodega owners in New York. We see people who represent a unique transnationalism and a new form of immigrant assimilation--foreigners who come from close by and visit home frequently, so that they virtually live in two lands.
Like other groups of immigrants who preceded them onto American shores, Latinos, as they begin to find a place for themselves here, are changing the way this nation thinks of itself. These are people who defy easy they are neither white nor black; their households often include both legal and illegal immigrants; most struggle toward some kind of economic stability, but so many others fall short that they have become the new face of the urban poor. Some Latinos endure the special poverty of people who work long hours for wages that barely ensure survival. Their children grow up learning more from their televisions than from their teachers, knowing what they want from America but not how to get it.
Looking to the future, we see clearly that the sheer number of Latino newcomers will force the United States to develop new means of managing relations among diverse ethnic groups and of creating economic opportunity for all. But we also see a catalog of conflict and Latinos in confrontation with blacks; Latinos wrestling with the strain of illegal immigration on their communities; Latinos fighting the backlash that is denying legal immigrants access to welfare programs. Critical both of incoherent government policies and of the failures of minority-group advocacy, the
author proposes solutions of his own, including a rejection of illegal immigration by Latinos themselves paired with government efforts to deter unlawful journeys into the United States, and a new emphasis on English-language training as an aid to successful assimilation.
Roberto Suro has written a timely, controversial, and hugely illuminating book.

Genres: Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published May 18, 1999

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is well-written and engaging book with some very disturbing assumptions underwriting its analysis. What the book does well is capture the heterogeneity of the Latino population in the U.S., the variety of and the generational tension within communities. I also appreciated its focus on people's voices and stories rather than statistics or predominately top-down analysis. That said, the book could with a little structural analysis. The book seeks to explain the failure of second generation undocumented immigrants to achieve the American Dream through culture (recalling 'culture of poverty' arguments) rather than looking at factors like class, racism, and imperialism.

For example, he refers to second-generation Mayan youth as "unemployable delinquents" and blames the parents for failing to correctly raise their children as Americans. The book ends with recommendation against bilingual education, blaming Latino communities for the rise in undocumented immigration, and calling for Latinos to turn against undocumented friends and relative to stop illegal immigration. The arguement is that the immigration is bad for both the immigrants and existing populations.

[Maddie]

racist.gross.conservative/assimilatio... propaganda

[Marta · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to give this one up. I read through several chapters and the author seemed to keep repeating the refrain of the first generation immigrants are hard working, but the second but generation is just a problem. It just can't be that simplistic.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with other commenters that this book is in need of more structural analysis. The focus is on the problems associated with rising immigration to the United States, but I found the policy recommendations to be dated and unhelpful (for example, the author recommends against bilingual education). However, a strength of the book was that you really gain a sense of the diversity of Latino immigrant groups and their disparate experiences, as each chapter focuses on a different city and ethnic group.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an account of the various latino/a worlds in America and how they are changing our identity as a country.