Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration is Transforming America.

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 become blacks in the eyes of the law."

With the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Hernandez v. Texas, Latinos gained new ground. "For the next forty years, the idea that Latinos constituted a minority group had gained credibility and power. They had confronted and largely dismantled a system of economic and ethnic subjugation imposed by whites across Texas, the Southwest, and California.... This special status remains an important legal tool because the nation offers no other means of dealing with discrimination."

Rooted in this history are racial tensions and a historic separation between African Americans and U.S. Latinos. Here, too, Suro introduces a much avoided subject.

In a time of a growing backlash against civil rights, minorities find themselves pitted against one another for jobs and resources. Opportunities to build coalitions went mostly unaddressed during the early years of the black civil-rights struggles and as affirmative action policies went into effect.

As a result, the basis for combining forces was not as firmly established as it could have been. "Blacks and Latinos live side by side, but inhabit two different worlds," writes Suro, referring specifically to Los Angeles. "They are neighbors, yet strangers, and the differences go beyond language and culture."

Suro performs a real service by looking boldly at tensions among minority groups, especially those who feel overrun by immigrants. "When Latinos take over homes, schools, churches, and jobs, many blacks sense a confirmation of white racism. They think the newcomers are being advanced in order to keep African Americans down. Many Latinos encourage this because they harbor racist perspectives of their own and sometimes view their new black neighbors as lazy, defeated and corrupt."

In the ensuing jostling for opportunity, Suro notes, "Blacks have history on their side. Latinos have the power of numbers."

Neither does Suro avoid the controversy about who is entitled to benefit from affirmative action policies. Should the newly arrived, affluent immigrant of color, for example, be hired under affirmative action policies before the Mexican American, whose family has been excluded from upward mobility since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe? Was affirmative action legislation, which was intended to address a history of exclusion of Americans of color, meant to be expanded as an immigrant benefit? These issues generate tension across all population groups.

Suro lays out powerful arguments against unlimited and especially illegal immigration. The greatest negative impact takes economic form--most directly against the poor--by bringing down wages. Two decades of research show that only the lowest-paid workers are affected. But to significantly improve wage and labor conditions in the United States requires reducing the illegal influx. Workplaces that fail to observe tax, safety, labor, and environmental laws "should be considered the workplace equivalent of high crime areas," writes Suro. But, he says, controlling access to cheap, desperate workers is a necessary step.

In the past twenty years, immigration--43 percent of which is Mexican--has both increased the number of the perennially poor and changed the nature of poverty. "Latinos have the highest poverty rate of any group. Latinos suffer the poverty of the working poor." Suro cites studies showing that "Mexicans start out with the lowest wage levels of any nationality and their wage gap actually widens substantially over time."

In the face of these difficulties, Suro notes the common bond that unites those who live together as Americans: "Ideas, not biology, are what generate oneness and homogeneity in the United States, and so long as faith in those ideas has remained strong, the country has shown an extraordinary capacity to absorb people of many nationalities."

Roberto Suro prods readers to rethink American history, immigration, education, and labor policies.

Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte teaches journalism and Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.