Make Your Home Among Strangers

Lizet is the Cuban-American narrator of the novel. Raised in Hialeah, a poor neighborhood in Miami, she makes an fateful decision to apply to a prestigious liberal arts school in upstate New York. When she gets in, she has to face both the wrath of her family members, who don’t understand and think she’s a traitor, and the institutionalized racism of Rawlings College, where she is surrounded by primarily white, wealthy peers.

Lizet is impulsive, hot headed, and also deeply loyal to her family. She is torn for much of the novel between a desire to recapture her old self—the girl who had sex in cars with her boyfriend Omar, a mechanic who worked at Pep Boys; the girl who went to clubs and got drunk at family Christmas parties—and the aspiration to become a professional, successful woman. As Lizet gets further into her first year at Rawlings, she begins to think she can save her family, especially Mami, who has become obsessed with the Ariel Hernandez case and grassroots community activism in Little Havana.

Lizet is a character at a crossroads between Cuba and Miami, Miami and the rest of the world; between her recently divorced Mami and Papi, her loyalty to her sister and mother and her desire to succeed; and between the world in which she can move ahead and the poor neighborhood where she was born.