THE NEW FACE OF SMALL-TOWN AMERICA, a ten-year-old study of the realities that piss off White Nationalists

THE NEW FACE OF SMALL-TOWN AMERICA: Snapshots of Latino Life in Allentown, Pennsylvania
EDGAR SANDOVAL
A Keystone Book
$24.95 trade paper, out of print

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Allentown, Pennsylvania, is a small city located along the Lehigh River in the eastern part of the state. Once the hiding place of the Liberty Bell, Allentown has become a popular destination for Latino immigrants. These Latinos, mostly from Puerto Rico, now make up about a quarter of the city's population, and their numbers continue to grow. The thirty-one stories collected in The New Face of Small-Town America do not reflect the reality of Allentown alone. With U.S. Census figures showing the arrival of Latinos in more small American cities than ever before, Allentown will continue to serve as an example.

These small cities have already experienced, or are about to experience, the transformation Allentown saw. Few communities embrace such change. It is only when one becomes familiar with a foreign concept (or foreigners) that fear disappears and understanding begins. Edgar Sandoval's essays show that behind the accents, ethnic customs, and other cultural differences exists a common humanity with universal problems and dreams. The Latinos profiled here want what everybody else wants: to fit in, to prosper, to offer their children a better future, to be recognized as important members of society by the mainstream. They want to coexist. These stories are not just about Latinos in Allentown, after all; they are about Latinos everywhere.

My Review: A series of newspaper columns written by a Mexican man hired to cover the largely Caribbean Latino population of the Lehigh Valley, this book offers a charming, if choppy and repetitious, insight into the new majority of many, if not most, smaller American cities, the Latinos.

Sandoval was hired by the (Anglophone) owners of the Allentown Daily Call to report on the 25% of the local population that the paper was simply missing. Typically, they hired someone from Mexico! These are *not* the same culture, not even a little bit, and the local Puertoriquenos and Nuyoricans and Dominicans were a little bit wary of the furrin dude with the wild-assed accent. He won them over by dint of his reportorial chops, his charm, and the way he could blend into the woodwork or the crowd, depending on the situational need.

The organizational thread of the book is...well...not very organized. It's all over the town, even the Valley. But it's a collection of newspaper pieces! It's NOT A NARRATIVE, so don't read it as such and you'll find it ever so much easier to enjoy. The book is intended by the author and the publisher to provide an Anglophone audience with a short entree into Latino life and community thought. This goal should be froemost in any reader's thoughts to make the book a successful reading experience.

Well, Mr, Sandoval and I hail from the same part of the world: Nine miles from Mexico, on the Texas/Nuevo Leon border. He's quite a lot younger than I am, but he was a reporter for The Monitor, the Rio Grande Valley's newspaper of record, so I betcha we know people in common: The longtime mayor of McAllen, Othal Brand, is a cousin of mine, and lots of the staffers at the paper know my brother from his years reporting there. So I started this book with a lot of points given to the writer for commonality of experience.

In the end, that is what gave me the reason to give the man 3.75 stars. Really and truly, the book isn't all that; not because Sandoval is deficient as a writer, but because the origin of the stories is a newspaper. There isn't any problem with that, basically, but it really doesn't make for a deep and hearty stew of a read, rather a tasty, lightly buttered toast-point with a decent pâté on it. Not bad at all! Just not something I'll charge about demanding others read instanter.

But do look into it if you're one of the many, many anti-immigrant idiots infecting the body politic. This is the story of your own ancestors, unless you're 100% Native American.