Leland T. Saito offers us a Beyond the Melting Pot for the 1990s, transferred to California and focusing on the nation's newest ethnic communities, Asians and Latinos. He stresses their success in warding off discrimination, achieving political representation, and forming coalitions of minority interest. This method gives him a ringside seat on the action he analyzes, but leaves him open to the charge of over-identification with his subject. He is clearly an advocate of minority political power.
Political participation is a double-edged sword in the adaptation of immigrants to American society.
Ethnic politics clearly identifies group agendas and maintains group boundaries. At the same time, these debates are carried out in the arena of American politics, signaling a high degree of acculturation. Paradoxically, it is precisely by pursuing their own agendas that recently arrived groups become incorporated in the larger body politic. There is much in Saito's book to suggest that ethnic politics is an effective vehicle for acculturation to American life. Asian Americans in the San Gabriel Valley sought office to assure that their views, which they believed were too often ignored in planning decisions, would be represented within democratic institutions.