Fanning weighs a compact study of how American media have pictured Caribbean migrants, and finds it well suited to teaching. Celeste sets New York Times coverage from 1994 to 2004 beside photographs, captions and celebrity biography to show Haitians rendered as a flood and Cubans as refugees from communism, with the Elián González affair and the charge that Haitians carried AIDS as her two test cases. Racial hostility, Celeste concludes, explains the gap better than Cold War politics do.

The review admires her step-by-step account of method, which it suggests could be turned on European coverage of Syrian refugees, and singles out the chapter on Mia Love, whose Haitian background is deployed while her family's migration story is played down. Its main reservation concerns the interviews with fans, summarized rather than transcribed, which leaves later scholars little to work with.