42 pages • 1 hour read
Jennine Capó CrucetMake Your Home Among Strangers
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Racism and Code-Switching
Racism and code-switching, or the need for people from marginalized communities to assume new behaviors and identities to fit into white systems of power, is a prominent theme in Make Your Home Among Strangers. Lizet is, at various points in the novel, made into a token Latina, seen as violent or “ghetto,” not taken seriously or disregarded as an authority, and rejected for her desire to work with and for poor communities of color.
Lizet experiences racism most acutely at Rawlings, where she feels the need to lie about her identity in order to suit the narrative that others have already created about her life. She lies about Omar’s personality and her relationship with him. She allows herself to become a stereotypical Cuban girl because it is easier than arguing with bias.
In other moments, Lizet is assumed to be violent or stupid because she is Cuban. Jillian accuses her of being racist against white people. Lizet’s feelings are monitored and judged more heavily than white girls’ feelings—when she gets into a fight with Tracy, a girl from her floor, she is blamed, though Tracy was the one mocking her. Lizet is also told, simultaneously, both that she has to have an opinion on Ariel Hernandez and that she is too close to the situation to have an opinion. She is forced to weigh in when she doesn’t want to, and her opinion is frequently disregarded because of her background.
Lizet’s final moment of anger over the systemic racism in academic communities comes at Berkeley, when she is told that she can’t get funding for researching problems that plague primarily poor communities of color. Her advisor says, “Lizet, there’s not a lot of money in […] Those kinds of […] questions […] I’m interested in developing you as a scientist, not as an activist” (384). Soon after, she leaves Berkeley, unwilling to erase her Cuban-American identity completely to assimilate into that world.
Cuban-American Identity
The struggle to come to terms with oneself—defining the self and acknowledging the complicated nature of identity—is Lizet’s primary challenge as a character. The duality of her life is first represented by her options for adulthood: either to be a successful, professional woman in a predominantly white environment, or to be a mother and a good Cuban-American wife in Miami. Mami pushes Lizet toward Omar, hoping for the latter path, but Lizet is more interested in what it means to pave her own way. Lizet learns that with change comes loss, not only the loss of a young love like Omar but also the loss of who she understood herself to be when she was with him. The grief feels most poignant when she is in Omar’s car the night before she leaves for Rawlings: “He kissed my forehead, and it felt less like a goodbye and more like the start of something much more dangerous for each of us: the beginning of who we were going to be” (64).
Lizet also realizes that her idea of herself as Cuban isn’t as straightforward as she once thought. This is most clear when her father tells her point blank, “You’re not Cuban” (314), after she has spent months playing the role of the token Cuban girl at Rawlings and being introduced as simply “Cuban” to all of Jillian’s friends. At Rawlings, Lizet is only Cuban, an archetype of a Cuban person, but to her father, who was born on the island, Lizet is simply American. Lizet wishes for a simpler, less confusing identity, but in the end has to live with the contradictions.
Finally, Lizet confronts identity in her struggle with imposter syndrome. Although Lizet was accepted and given substantial aid to attend Rawlings, she frequently fears that the university has made a mistake and will at any point rescind her admission. Lizet also feels like an imposter back in Little Havana, where she is seen as a sellout by those who stayed behind. She struggles to come to terms with the fact that she exists somewhat in both identities, but never fully in either of them.
Upward Mobility
Lizet’s desire for upward mobility, and the losses she has to endure in order to achieve it, make up the central conflict of the novel. This conflict is mirrored in Ariel Hernandez and his mother, who died trying to give her son a better life. This idea of loss for the sake of a better future is inherent to the immigrant experience, which Lizet discovers is just as relevant to her own life as a second-generation American.
The novel begins by revealing that Lizet has made it as a research scientist, working in a lab in California. Because the novel begins this way, with Lizet looking back at her past from a place of relative success, it is clear that Jennine Capó Crucet meant for this novel to focus on the losses that come with upward mobility. By removing the mystery of whether or not Lizet will succeed, Crucet focuses instead on Lizet’s experience and what she chooses to leave behind as she pursues her dreams.
Lizet carries a number of weights as she fights for upward mobility. She wasn’t raised in what her probation hearing calls a “culture of success” (96)—meaning, essentially, that she went to a high school that didn’t prepare her adequately for college life. She also has Omar, who gives her an engagement ring that she describes as “heavy,” an admission that Omar himself is a weight holding her back. Although she loves him, he ties her to a physical place, Hialeah, where she knows she won’t find success. Lizet’s other ties to Miami—Lizet, Mami, Papi, and others—also hold her back. Though she loves her family, their desire for her to stay home and help them manage their lives interferes with Lizet’s professional aspirations.
Lizet also sees herself as a weight, someone whose struggle could bring others down. She says, after ending her relationship with Ethan, “I was proud of myself for giving him that, for releasing him from the obligation I might’ve let myself become” (363). She feels that her background, Cuban-American identity, and lack of cultural capital make her a potential liability for those looking for a similar kind of upward mobility.
Related Titles
By Jennine Capó Crucet
