About this item
2014 International Latino Awards FinalistThe 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.
About the Author
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" (Beacon Press, Oct. 2013) . She teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, where she lives with her three children.
Photographer Copyright Credit Name: Clare Holt, 2013
