Make Your Home Among Strangers

At the vigil, Lizet wants to ask questions, but she worries they might make Mami angry. They walk toward Ariel’s house where a group of women in black are praying, but Mami ushers Lizet into the house across the street. It is crowded and crazy, with Cuban food on a big table. Lizet eats as Mami falls into her element—she knows everybody, including a cute but intimidating boy named Victor who won’t stop staring at Lizet. Eventually Lizet and Victor talk, and she thinks he is flirting until he accuses her of using Little Havana as a research project for Rawlings: “You left once, right? You’re already a sellout, right? So, what makes you think you can just come back like nothing? With no consequences?” (341). Lizet leaves angrily and later cries in the bathroom about his comments. That night, the crowd winds down and Lizet sleeps on the couch in the house, struggling to fall asleep. She reflects on how she remembers the next moment years later—how she focuses on Victor, to ignore her mother’s role in what happened next. 

Lizet wakes up in the middle of a riot. People pull her off the couch and out of the house. Police vans and men with guns have raided Ariel’s house and are tearing down doors. Inside, Lizet imagines her mother, soaked in pepper spray. Lizet watches as Ariel, in the arms of a strange woman, is taken from his Miami relatives: “He looked huge. His terrified wet face shined in my direction” (347). Lizet goes inside Ariel’s house and surveys the wreckage and the chaos of weeping people. She calls for her mother, falling and putting a nail through the heel of her hand.

When Lizet finally finds Mami, she is holding and kissing Caridaylis. Lizet is shocked, betrayed. Her mother looks up but does not acknowledge her. “My leaving had allowed for someone new to come in […] the real replacement was right there in my mom’s arms: someone she could be proud of, someone whose decisions she understood and would have made herself had it been her life, a daughter who’d taken on more than anyone thought possible but who’d done it through no fault of her own” (352). Lizet finally leaves and walks home, where Leidy blames her for allowing their mother to be harmed or arrested. Lizet calls Omar to get a ride to the airport, and in the car, Omar realizes they will never be together again. 

Back on campus, Lizet is like a zombie; she is so traumatized and focused on Miami that she barely feels present. Ethan finds her that night at the library and tries to talk to her, but Lizet isn’t able to focus or explain. They get into an argument, and Ethan leaves. The next week, Professor Kaufmann asks Lizet to stay after class. Though Lizet is late returning her forms, Professor Kaufmann asks her to keep the internship in mind; Lizet tries to explain that she needs to be home with her family, but Professor Kaufmann doesn’t seem to understand.

The rest of the semester is a blur. Ethan emails Lizet once more, with an old joke, but she ignores it. She reflects, “I was proud of myself for giving him that, for releasing him from the obligation I might’ve let myself become” (363). The semester ends with Lizet believing, “I could only rise so far above where I’d come from, and only for so long” (363). 

Ariel is deported in June, three weeks after Lizet arrives back in Miami. Leidy is happy Lizet is back: Mami has lost her job, money is tight, and sometimes, while Leidy is at work, Mami leaves Dante alone at home while she joins a protest. Lizet becomes Dante’s babysitter. One day, while Mami is attending a peaceful protest, a group of White Nationalists drives by, celebrating Ariel’s deportation. In that moment, Lizet realizes she doesn’t want to be home anymore. She makes an impromptu early-morning call from a pay phone to the internship program director in California and secures a last minute spot in the lab.

Professor Kaufmann doesn’t ask for explanations, which reassures Lizet, though Lizet does have to pay for her own plane ticket. When Lizet tells Leidy, Leidy becomes violent and brutal, screaming and hitting Lizet. Mami interrupts, but when Lizet tells her the news, Mami becomes even more enraged. “No, she’s right Leidy. This is all about her. Her whole life is gonna be all about her from now on, right Lizet?” (374). Mami throws Lizet out, and Papi picks her up.

Papi is much more supportive, though he doesn’t entirely understand. He waits with Lizet at the airport, saying, “You’re learning something, we’ll see what it is. We’ll see where it takes you, right? It’ll take you somewhere. Look, you’re going somewhere already, right?” (378). Lizet cries while boarding the plane, waving at Papi through the airplane windows.

Many years later, Lizet is working as a lab manager based in San Diego, doing research on coral reefs. She wonders if she will tell her parents she is going to Cuba, one of the few Caribbean islands she hasn’t yet visited, where reefs are better preserved than anywhere else in the world. She reports on the lives of many characters in the story. Leidy is married to David and now has a duplex and three more children, and Mami, who lives in the other half of Leidy’s duplex, has only recently given up activist work. Omar is married to a girl from Hialeah Lakes.

Lizet reports that she went to grad school at Berkeley for a year, though by then, Ethan had dropped out of his program and wasn’t around. She wrote letters to Leidy and Mami in an effort to connect: “I imagine I was trying to explain myself as a way of asking for forgiveness” (387). She says she left graduate school after discovering her advisor and many other academics didn’t want to hear about research that would benefit poor communities of color. Lizet decides she probably won’t tell Mami and Papi about going to Cuba.

The novel ends as she remembers casting an absentee ballot in the 2000 presidential election between Vice President Gore and Governor Bush, a ballot that was likely never counted. She thinks, “I wish I’d known, as I pushed through one choice over the other, how little it mattered which side I ended up betraying, how much it would hurt either way” (388).