Overview

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.

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Reviews

The New Face of Small-Town America offers vivid portraits of the people and families behind the demographic statistics, revealing a little-known aspect of contemporary immigration: far from the big cities and the border towns, in small inland settlements often written off as victims of deindustrialization, Latinos are restoring public life, renewing entire communities, and working hard to build a new urban future for our pluralist democracy. Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, University of New Mexico

The author presents many interviews from all sides of the cultural challenges and gives readers a sense of how life has been modified and improving in recent years in this community. </p> Al Holliday, <em>Pennsylvania Magazine</em></p>

The New Face of Small-Town America offers vivid portraits of the people and families behind the demographic statistics, revealing a little-known aspect of contemporary immigration: far from the big cities and the border towns, in small inland settlements often written off as victims of deindustrialization, Latinos are restoring public life, renewing entire communities, and working hard to build a new urban future for our pluralist democracy. --Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, University of New Mexico

The author presents many interviews from all sides of the cultural challenges and gives readers a sense of how life has been modified and improving in recent years in this community. --Al Holliday, Pennsylvania Magazine The New Face of Small-Town America offers vivid portraits of the people and families behind the demographic statistics, revealing a little-known aspect of contemporary immigration: far from the big cities and the border towns, in small inland settlements often written off as victims of deindustrialization, Latinos are restoring public life, renewing entire communities, and working hard to build a new urban future for our pluralist democracy. --Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, University of New Mexico In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickeled and Dimed, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and Isabel Valle's Fields of Toil, Edgar Sandoval's accounting of Latinos in Allentown is not just a set of stories worthy of coverage; it's a window into how public sociology is emboldened by reading those who live, eat, and breathe in the communities they cover. Sandoval's stories are a form of knowledge that should be neither dismissed nor discounted. --Ronald Mize, Social Forces

Author Information

Edgar Sandoval is an award-winning journalist who spent almost three years writing about the Latino community of northeastern Pennsylvania. He has been a staff reporter at several newspapers, including the McAllen Monitor, the Allentown Morning Call, the Los Angeles Times, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the New York Daily News, where he is currently employed.

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