Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration is Transforming America.

• Author: Uriarte, Mercedes Lynn de

Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration Is Transforming America by Roberto Suro Alfred A. Knopf. 323 pages. $26.95.

Roberto Suro breaks new ground in his book, confronting sensitive subjects with both grace and thoroughness. The task he has undertaken--to tell the story of Latino immigration, both legal and illegal--has daunted many. Suro tells it well, not only the tale of new arrivals, but of the earlier immigrants they find here when they arrive. On these pages appear the Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans in New York barrios; the Cuban complexities and contradictions in Miami; the Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who are sometimes separated by more than the few miles between South Central and East Los Angeles; and the Central Americans in Washington, D.C.

Suro is a journalist for The Washington Post. His book profits from his sharp interview techniques and his sense of narrative style. He brings the best of journalistic balance, neither hesitating to uncover warts nor fearing that acknowledging the positives will lead critics to label his work "advocacy."

Rich in vignettes, Strangers Among Us is a comfortable read. It is also courageous, wading into subjects too seldom addressed. For example, Suro explores the way Latinos sometimes choose to identify as minorities when it is useful to do so and, at other times, identify with the mainstream and distance themselves from their darker-skinned counterparts.

Suro debunks some American mythology. "The glories of the melting pot ignore the anti-Semitism, the nativism, the restrictive covenants on housing and the many less explicit forms of prejudice that circumscribed America for many immigrants and their children," he writes. "For years, many Americans have viewed Latinos as less than white and have enforced this perspective to exclude them from education, employment, political representation, and much else." Because Americans tend to address civil rights in terms of black and white, Latinos are often caught in a vise between categories. One result is their frequent absence in reports on racial issues.

The black and white polarity posed legal barriers to broader equity. Because people tend to perceive Mexican Americans as outside both categories, it was "easier to keep lower-class Mexicans in their place," Suro reminds readers. "When Latinos began to rebel against Texas racism in the 1950s, the first thing they had to do was to prove they were a distinct category of the population. They had to...