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Pursing Power: Latinos and the Political System. Edited by F. Chris Garcia. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. 480p. $50.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.
Jose E. Cruz, SUNY-Albany
F. Chris Garcia's Pursuing Power is an excellent and useful contribution to the scholarship on Latino politics. It covers the most significant issues that Latinos face in their pursuit of power, and it offers insightful analyses of these issues, including electoral participation and representation; community organizing; the contribution of women; educational, language, and foreign policy issues; immigration; and affirmative action. The concluding section offers an array of provocative perspectives and raises a set of fundamental questions both for research and practice, focused on the future of Latino politics.
Although the book is theoretically suggestive, it does not break new theoretical ground. It does not offer a new model to explain the distinctiveness of the Latino case, as attempted by Rodney Hero in Latinos and the U.S. Political System: Two-tiered Pluralism (1992), nor does it spell out the contextual and strategic requirements for the maximization of Latino political participation in the manner of Fernando Guerra and Luis Ricardo Fraga ("Theory, Reality,and Perpetual Potential: Latinos in the 1992 California Elections," in Ethnic Ironies, ed. Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio, 1996). Instead, the material is organized according to the Eastonian political systems framework, although Garcia is quick to point out that this is a heuristic rather than an indication of theoretical bias.
The lack of theoretical focus is understandable in an anthology such as this. Implicitly, however, the book rejects all existing paradigms as inadequate and all the proposed distributions of power that follow from existing paradigms as unacceptable.
Power cannot be foreclosed to Latinos-as structuralists would argue-given the...