Latino voices in New England edited by David Carey Jr and Robert Atkinson
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Lat i n o voice s in Ne w Engla nd David Carey Jr and Robert Atkinson (eds.) State University of New York Press, NY, 2009, 251pp., $24.95, ISBN: 978-0791493786 (paperback) Latino Studies (2012) 10, 608–609. doi:10.1057/lst.2012.44
Latino Voices in New England is a well-written and clearly organized first-person account of 12 interviews with foreign and US-born Latinos who adopted Portland, ME as their homes. The interview narratives are brief stories told by the interviewees to answer a set of standard questions. Participants are transformed into storytellers who often responded to open-ended questions with personal stories. The interviews are introduced by David Carey in the beginning of the book and discussed by Robert Atkinson as a conclusion to the book. The introduction provides the historical and social immigration context of Portland, ME, whereas the conclusion summarizes the main themes elicited by the Latino storytellers. The interview narratives are creatively edited into chapters placed in the middle of the book, titled with the real or changed name of the storyteller and subtitled according to one of the major themes brought forth by the interviewee. The editors analyze the content of the narratives on the basis of interesting immigration theory arguments in the Latino Studies literature that concentrates on the political, economic, cultural, social and historical foundations of Latino community trajectories in new urban immigration areas. The main thesis of the book is that Latinos in Portland have united and built a transnational
community despite national, cultural, gender, age and class diversity. The developing collective identity of Latinos enabled Latino residents to become social actors who have been able to organize the Latino community in Portland to make positive contributions to the economic, social and cultural life of the city, and struggle against racial and ethnic discrimination. The integration among the Latinos and between them and Portland is considered as part of the same process of Latino identity formation. This book contributes to Latino Studies in several ways. First, it provides historical and empirical evidence collected from a variety of experiences of the first-generation Latinos in Portland, one of the Whitest cities in the United States. The narratives provide real-life histories and stories that illustrate the emergence of and challenges to a pan-Latino identity of the Latino residents originally from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Venezuela, Peru and the United States. Second, the themes discussed throughout the book include important issues faced by most Latinos in the United States, such as the conflicts between acculturation/assimilation and cultural preservation, integration in a dominant White society, racial and ethnic discrimination, transnationalism, and Latino identity
r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 10, 4, 608–609 www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Book Review
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