by Arlene Martínez
Book review
As a boy living in a tiny town in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, Edgar Sandoval dreamed of becoming a superhero who doubled as a journalist and lived in a metropolis. The superhero thing never really panned out, but being a journalist did. In 2000, 25-year-old Sandoval arrived in Allentown, Pa., to begin work at The Morning Call.
It’s a city he’d never heard of and didn’t especially want to be in, and he didn’t really want to cover Latino affairs, a beat sometimes disparagingly referred to as “The Taco Beat.” The Morning Call saw it as answering a need to cover the town’s surging Spanish- speaking population. Still, Sandoval felt pigeonholed. His editor, Mary Ellen Alu, asked him to look at it in a different way. “You can give a voice to a group who feel they’re being ignored,” Sandoval recalls her saying. For three years, Sandoval did that, telling the stories of business owners, immigrant workers, teenagers and others who often had little in common but a language.
Many of their lives are the essays that make up his new book, The New Face of Small-Town America: Snapshots of Latino Life in Allentown, Pennsylvania. (Penn State University Press, 168 pp; $29.99) There is the story of the two young mothers who emigrated from Honduras with hopes that one day their children would join them. It never happened for one of them, Naomi Eda Zelaya. Walking across an Allentown street, she was struck and killed by a car, leaving behind five children.
There is the story of Mexican immigrants Armando Cervantes and Sergio López, both 26, whose deaths in a van accident bared a bigger story on the plight of workers’ attempts to assimilate in communities where they are not always welcome.
There are others — about Edith Morales’s pride in watching the launch of the region’s first Spanishlanguage broadcast station and of Roberto Clemente Charter School principal David Vázquez’s efforts, sometimes frustrated, to improve student achievement.
One of Sandoval’s favorites, and the one with which he opens the book, is of Nerivonne Sánchez, whom he visited regularly in the months leading up to her lavish quinceañera, 15th birthday milestone. Sandoval captured Nerivonne’s struggle in transitioning from her Tweety stuffed birds to French manicures. His account was “not about a tiara or a party,” he says. “I focused on this girl who was having a hard time being a woman.”
Born in Los Angeles to parents who emigrated from Mexico, Sandoval was familiar with the customs, food and music of the country he lived in until he was 16. When Sandoval began at The Morning Call, the U.S. Census Bureau was in the midst of releasing data that showed the Hispanic population in the area had rapidly grown from 2000 over 1990.But Sandoval had less experience with the Puerto Rican and Dominican populations that make up most of Allentown — and his accent and occasional word choices outed him as being not from any island in the Caribbean.
He began learning the slang, the customs, the foods. The community grew to embrace him and his stories. “They liked to be shown for what they were, real people,” he said. The book is available at Barnes & Noble, www.amazon.com or by request. A paperback version is slated for release next year. Though many of the stories fi rst appeared in The Morning Call in a different version, there are some original pieces.
As for the fantasy a young Sandoval dreamed of, another piece eventually came true. Not that of being a superhero but of living in a metropolis. In 2007, Sandoval became a reporter for the New York Daily News. He lives in Hell’s Kitchen. Hispanic Link. Former Hispanic Link editor Arlene Martínez reports for The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa.)
