Gary R. Mormino

The Reader and the Worker: Los Lectores and the Culture of Cigarmaking in Cuba and Florida

“You know what Victor Hugo say?” asked Jose Vega Diaz. Thus began a lengthy recitation, the product of decades of labor agitation, listening to Les Miserables , and rolling cigars. He had been asked to explain the influence of el lector (the reader) on the lives of cigar workers. The answer filtered through ninety-five years of experience in Cuba and Florida.“You know what Victor Hugo say? In all the towns, in every place, they have a schoolteacher. And in every town, the schoolteacher is the light. He lights the candle. But in every town they try to blow away the light. The preachers, the priests. Thats why they [the church, the owner] dont want the reader. The reader lights the candle. It was a good thing.”

Book Review: Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American WorkersMilitants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers. By GabacciaDonna Rae. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Pp. 239. Cloth,

Bowers. The book has nothing original or innovative to add to the literature on the issues of race and crime. It does a competent job of covering familiar ground, and thus would be useful, perhaps, to someone who was never previously exposed to any criminology. My own feeling is that reading an introductory criminology text would do the job just as well as this book. While there are many aspects of the book 1 found objectionable, I will mention only a few here. Mr. Bowers treatment of minorities is clearly impassioned and motivated out ofconcern for the historical injuries minorities have suffered. But the book fails to go beyond the most superficial level of data analysis, and has simply missed a lot ofjournal published material which ought to be in this book. In fact, the bibliography is overburdened with secondary sources (such as introductory criminology texts) and journalistic sources (such as news magazines and newspapers) at the expense of better material. Conceptually, the book fails to illuminate or extend what has already been debated at length regarding the problem of what is a minority, which is nota self-evident .concept. It is also not revelatory of complexities tied to the analysis of intra-group discrimination and legality, the ethnicity/race distinction problem, the two-edge sword problem of civil rights legislation, and a host of complexities attached to the criminological race/ethnicity/crime nexus. It is surprising that Mr. Bowers is so categorically assumptive and one-dimensional about the well-established racism of the criminal justice. He simply ignores William Wilbanks interesting work on racism in the American criminal justice system, as well as other work, such as Blacks, which has shown that race is often confounded with class, demeanor, and a host of other more proximal variables to criminality. In this regard I must also note I am puzzled by Mr. Bowers frequent references to the paucity of criminological literature on race and crime, or the lack of substantive literature on the topic. Indeed, in the introduction he states that race and crime as a phenomenon is one of the most neglected areas of criminological research. Ijust do not believe that this characterization can be taken seriously. Even his own bibliography belies his own statement. It also does a disservice to the work of numerous criminologists who have devoted substantive portions of their careers to studying the race/crime issue. Minorities and Criminality is a disappointing piece of work. If the reader desires a quick survey of the topic, I recommend a text like Seigels or Reids, which in a chapter or two will cover the same ground. For those interested in Flowers critical ideological perspective, Pepinskys Myths That Cause Crime will give the reader a more innovative set ofideas. Walkers Senseand Nonsense About Crime would be a better investment in terms of criminal justice policy and its complexities. To see a head-on and well-argued rebuttal to Bowers whole set of assumptions and assertions, I recommend William Wilbanks The Myth ofa Racist Criminal justice System. These alternatives represent more effectively crafted pieces of intellectual work or more efficient presentations of the topic.

45.00; Paper,

argues persuasively against the view that Italys peasantry wallowed in a sea of tragedy, hopelessness, backwardness and downtrodden status. I reached much the same conclusion in The Immigrant Upraised. However, today I would maintain that at one particular level there did occur a type of personal damage overlooked by most specialists-the intrapsychic dimension. However, Bells book is not about troubled psychological roots. It is a demographic and cultural study. This volume suggests that Italys peasants developed a world view from which flowed their basic social loyalties and affiliations. Bell has looked, reconstructively, at the demography. of four country villages since the year 1900. He has sought to recapture peasant life, appraising such concepts as fortuna (fate), onore (honor) and campanilismo (village provinciality). At the heart of the interaction between peasants and their environment, of course, is famiglia (family). Peasants-relying on a set of assumptions that are almost endemically shared have, according to the author, moved toward a future that is not so scarred by misfortune as other writers have averred. He sees Italys peasantry as active, flexible and shrewdly shaping their destino. While I agree in part with this healthy revisionism, Professor Bell would have strengthened his thesis by looking at how the values of la familglia (both in Italy and abroad) came under persistent attack. The psychological response to environmental stresses lead one toward important psychiatric and psychoanalytic considerations. The study of high birth rates, illiteracy, religion, crime and other sociological data are, in my opinion, only a conscious-level means of getting at deeper unconscious material. This illusive, hidden system of beliefs will have to be exhumed before we can achieve a total history of a people. Troweled over by a veneer of rationality is a masked world of impulses, drives, disappointments, ambiguities and ambivalence. Bells book, however, along with the work of John Briggs, Thomas Kessner and Humbert Nelli, defies past cliches and brings us closer to a realistic view of the Italian character. Although these authors also examined the urban scene, their conclusions resemble Bells findings. One also sees in this book some of the folk wisdom of Luigi Barzinis earlier controversial appraisal of Italianicity. In short, Bell demonstrates that perceptive shrewdness that he ascribes to the peasants he studies. Despite its stiff price, this book belongs in most general libraries. It is a refreshingly welcome piece of research and writing.

20.00.

Since its birth the United States has been proclaimed a classless and unified nation, as typified by the myth of the American melting pot. This book seeks to demonstrate that the reality is very different - it is a country divided along the fault lines of class, race, and ethnic identity. Beginning with a look at social divisions as they existed in the 1930s, the book investigates the effects of World War II, the Cold War era, the growth of the suburbs, the new frontier and the great society and the fragmentation of Vietnam, concluding with an analysis of the effects of Watergate and the election of Jimmy Carter. The result is a documentation of the change and continuity that characterize four turbulent decades of American life.