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MUDDY CUP: A Dominican Family Comes of Age in a New America, by Barbara Fischkin. Scribner, 367 pp., $24.
WHETHER YOU call it scapegoating or shortsightedness, it's clear that the growing numbers of Latin American and Asian immigrants to the United States have increasingly been viewed with disfavor in their new country over the past 30 years. On the other hand, older waves of European immigrants, who were not exactly welcomed with open arms, are now remembered with a fond nostalgia, and their place of entry, Ellis Island, has been restored as a museum. Can't anybody make the connection between then and now? The answer here is yes: In "Muddy Cup," former Newsday reporter Barbara Fischkin attempts to restore the common threads of the American immigrat experience.
Born out of a mid-'80s assignment to follow the lives of a "new immigrant" family for New York Newsday, Fischkin's book meticulously records the Almonte family's journey from their country town in the Dominican Republic to their eventual home in Elmhurst, Queens. Dominicans form one of the largest immigrant communities in New York, totalling more than 1 million people, or about one-seventh of the population of the island they left behind. When Fischkin began her story they had received more immigrant visas than...