Description:
Busboys and Poets Books welcomes author Mirta Ojito to sign and discuss Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town
?An account that is as unflinching as it is important. Both an incisive reconstruction of a heartbreaking murder and an unsparing diagnosis of a national malady . . . with HUNTING SEASON Ojito has done truth an invaluable service. Extraordinary.? ?Junot D?az
Pulitzer Prize_winning journalist Ojito achieves another award-worthy feat, this time for her treatment of the minefield issue of immigration. Her focus is on a tragic 2008 incident in which a group of teenaged Long Island boys intended only to harass an illegal Ecuadoran immigrant. But the encounter resulted, instead, in the man?s death. After conducting extensive research and listening painstakingly to everyone involved who was willing to speak to her, Ojito then writes with such clarity and evenhandedness that this could be about an emotionally neutral topic?say, apple pie. Yet even as she maintains a dispassionate though not unfeeling distance while relating everyone?s points of view, she does tie everything to the overarching concerns that shape each of the boys and their lives. The fact is, they have families who care about them and who tried to raise them to be decent people. And the deceased, Marcelo Lucero, also had a loving family and his own plans for the future. In Ojito?s hands, the aggregate effect of their stories is one that is far more effective than the diatribes of pundits on both sides of the complex, deeply human question of immigration reform.
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 Ma?ana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City, where she lives with her three children.
This event is cosponsored by Busboys and Poets, DC Latino Caucus and the Office of Latino Affairs
