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.
Chapter 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Narrator Lizet introduces her work as a scientist studying the demise of coral reef systems. She relays the stories she shares with researchers, postdocs, and undergrads about what her family, who lived for many years near a canal in Little Havana, dumped into the water: motor oil, a whole car transmission, a dead hamster in its plastic cage, “dried-out watercolors, homemade tape recordings of [her mother’s] own voice, parched hunks of white clay” (2). Lizet acknowledges her audiences’ shock and discomfort at these tales, and reveals that there are many stories she does not share; for example, when her father and his friends found a dead body in the canal and left it there to rot.
Lizet also reveals that while working underwater on the West Coast, she accidentally swallowed contaminated water and had to take antibiotics. The memory reminds her of a family story she hates: When Lizet was three, she blew up her own water wings and jumped into the canal behind the house while her mother was talking to the neighbor. She was rescued by her parents, “who take embarrassingly long to discover me floating across the street” (4); they took her to the hospital. Ultimately, Lizet says that, although the details change when others tell the story, the ending is always the same: “All that worrying, all that time and money and crying wasted—and for what? She was fine. It made us want to kill her” (5).
Chapter 2 Summary
Lizet shows up in Miami on Thanksgiving Day in 1999 after her connecting flight is overbooked in Pittsburgh. She doesn’t know yet that she is arriving on the same day as Ariel Hernandez, a “five-year-old Cuban boy rescued from a broken raft by fishermen earlier that day after watching everyone else on the raft, including his mother, die” (6). Lizet has used work-study money earned at the library to pay for this surprise flight home. She isn’t sure whether or not she will tell her mother about her issues at school—she is failing chemistry and had to testify in front of the Academic Integrity Committee for accidentally plagiarizing part of an English paper. She gets on a shuttle with an older white couple and a young, professional Latina and heads to her mother’s new apartment in Little Havana.
Chapter 3 Summary
On the shuttle, the old white couple get off early. When the door opens, Lizet smells the salty ocean air and tears up, not realizing how badly she has missed home. Lizet is left alone with the professional-looking Latina, whom Lizet imagines is a professor, though she’s never seen a Latina professor at Rawlings. The woman suddenly begins to cry, and moves around strangely, fishing in her bag for her compact and sighing.
Lizet asks the woman what is wrong, and the woman is evasive, revealing only that she is coming home from her final year as a postdoc in Michigan. Soon, the two are talking; they grew up in the same neighborhood, and the woman is amazed that Lizet got into Rawlings College after having attended a poor, inner city school like Hialeah Lakes. Lizet comes clean to this woman, telling her how badly her first semester is going: “Everyone else seems to just know stuff and I—I don’t. It’s like I’m the only one. I don’t even know how I got in sometimes, that’s how hard it is, how much I’m messing up” (19). The woman hands Lizet her business card as she gets off the shuttle and tells Lizet to email her: “I’m a resource. We’re two girls who left Hialeah for, you know, better things, right? More opportunities? And I want to help you any way I can” (20). Lizet rips up the card after the woman leaves, letting the pieces fall on the bus floor. The shuttle heads into Little Havana.
Chapter 4 Summary
Lizet finally arrives at her mother’s new apartment. She knocks on the door, and her sister Leidy and her nephew Dante greet her with a mix of confusion and something that sounds like anger: “What the fuck are you doing here” (24). Mami greets Lizet with a shriek before scolding her and returning to the TV, which is playing reports about Ariel Hernandez. Leidy folds baby clothes and tells Lizet they had a bad Thanksgiving, with Mami so attached to the news reports of Ariel.
Later, Leidy tells Lizet she has no right to act so impulsively, to not let anyone know she is traveling, or where she is. Leidy demands Lizet rely on her to keep secrets in these moments, and then mocks Lizet for using words she picked up at Rawlings—“Awe-some, awe-some! What other stupid words you picking up at that school?” (31).
Chapter 5 Summary
The next morning Mami wakes before dawn to go to the Ariel Hernandez protest two blocks away. Lizet spends the morning playing with Dante, whose growth in three months signals how much has changed. Leidy is home from her work at a local salon, watching TV and avoiding her baby. Lizet reveals that Dante was the product of Leidy’s long-dead relationship with his father, Roly; Leidy stopped taking her birth control when Roly didn’t propose by the end of senior year of high school, trying to trick him into marriage by becoming pregnant. Roly left Leidy when he found out, and only visited Dante a few hours after the birth nine months later.
While Leidy’s marriage was coming apart, Lizet was applying to colleges on a whim, looking for her own “test that would measure whether or not I was really headed for the same future” (33). Lizet was accepted into only one school, Rawlings College in New York state. Her parents saw her departure as a “betrayal” and as an excuse to end their own marriage, which had been on the rocks for as long as Lizet has been alive.
Chapter 1-5 Analysis
Like Ariel Hernandez, the Cuban boy found floating on a raft (and a parallel to the real-life boy Elian Gonzalez), Lizet arrives in Miami feeling like a stranger among her relatives. She is alienated simultaneously from her family and from her life at school because of the need to code-switch, or change cultural identities and behavior in order to fit into her communities.
At school, Lizet’s lack of familiarity with traditional academia and college life alienates her from her peers. At the same time, the way that her college experience has changed her identity alienates her from her family. A woman she meets on the airport shuttle seems to empathize with Lizet’s feelings of living between worlds; she invites Lizet to keep in touch with her—“I got the feeling she really meant it, like she was saying this to some old version of herself” (21). Lizet rips up the woman’s card, not ready to identify with someone who felt so obviously out of place back in Miami, and not ready to admit that she is having some of the same feelings.
The more Lizet assimilates into the predominantly white world at school, the more her family views her as a sellout. Her life contrasts sharply with her sister Leidy’s experience; Leidy, who had a baby with a high-school boyfriend that she married and then divorced, works at a salon and leaves Dante alone with Mami, a woman who, for reasons that will become apparent later, is more engaged with the Ariel Hernandez saga than with her own family.
Lizet’s shifting identity extends beyond her struggle to fit in at a predominantly white liberal arts college. She also struggles with the recent loss of her family home in Hialeah. With her family displaced, her father gone, and her mother and sister relocated to a new neighborhood, Lizet feels a deep sense of disorientation. She struggles to make sense of herself and her family outside familiar contexts.
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By Jennine Capó Crucet
