Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era

Stranger is an accounting of, as it says, the experience of being a Latino immigrant in America’s current cultural moment. Unsurprisingly, the account is grim.

Jorge Ramos is a journalist best known for his work on Univision. At a campaign stop in Iowa, Ramos attempted to ask then-candidate Trump about immigration and was physically escorted out of the building, where a Trump supporter then verbally accosted him. Ramos was eventually allowed back inside and even managed to have something close to a conversation with Trump. But the incident shook Ramos, so much so that he was compelled to write this book, which uses that incident as its launching point.

Ramos describes his experience living in America and becoming a US citizen and how that experience has shifted dramatically for him–and many US immigrants–since Trump’s election. In honest and vivid prose, Ramos describes his boyhood in Mexico and his eventual move to the US, a nation that has, in the past, been lauded as a “melting pot” of immigrants from all nations, a land accepting of difference rather than afraid of it. This book is intended to help white and native-born Americans understand that Trump’s rhetoric isn’t simply bombast; it has real and devastating effects on people’s lives. His anti-immigrant policies aren’t bloodless–they uproot lives and put them in serious danger. They incite violence. They incite intolerance. They fly in the face of basic human rights. Ramos attempts to show you what that kind of pain and disruption actually look like when they affect you. So while much in the book will come as no surprise to fellow Latinos and immigrants or to those who know them, there is much to learn here for those who still think Trump and his policies are simply “unfortunate.”