Juan Gonzalez's Harvest Of Empire

At a time of heated and conflict-ridden debate over immigration, Juan Gonzalez, an American progressive broadcast journalist, wrote his second book Harvest of Empire to enlighten his readers about the struggles of daily life as a Latin American. In this book about the history of Latinos in America, Juan touches on many key aspects that embrace the struggles of Latin Americans that are vague to many Americans today. Using different methods to portray his information obtained in his found sources, and unique sections to help organize the information depicted, Gonzalez makes an argument that the overflow of immigration from Latin America to these shores and the enormous demographic shift that Gonzalez calls the “Latinization of the United States”

The 64-year old investigative reporter spent over eight years writing his remarkable book, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, which was published in 1999. In his early life, Gonzalez was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico and was raised in East Harlem and Brooklyn. As a journalist, and before that as a Puerto Rican community activist who helped found and direct two national organizations, the Young Lords in the 1960’s, and the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights in the late 1970’s, Juan Gonzalez has spent decades living in and reporting on scores of Latino communities throughout the United States and Latin America, devouring in the process every study or account of the Latino experience he could find (Gonzalez, XXII). With the many historians that have conducted research in the recent decades, Juan realized that by connecting the past to the present and by crossing academic disciplines, he could touch on more than one Latino group while still making the entire process comprehensible to both Latinos and

In the first section, the author provides an educational synopsis of the history and colonization in the Americas. Because of the framework being talked about, Gonzalez congregated a plethora of sources that were well researched in order to display an easy enough to understand explanation of these times. The key strength of section one, “roots,” is the way Gonzalez justifies the different societies that exist in the United States and Latin America today. With this, his notion is that the historical experiences of Latino colonization have resulted in the different societies that exist today in our present-day culture. For section two, “branches,” the main strength is the interviews Gonzalez conducted with the many immigrants, which gives the reader descriptions that help identify each of the different Latino groups. Because Gonzalez ties together his historical research with the information gathered in immigrant interviews, he is able to stress the importance of individuality between each of the several Latino immigrant groups that are here in the United States. Lastly, for the third section labeled “harvest,” Gonzalez’s focal point is about the several issues regarding the Latinos living in the United States. He gives his advice about what we need to change as a country in order to guarantee success to Latinos in the United States. This is the strength of the third section of the book because