It is not often that a book leads inexorably toward a conclusion that effectually undoes and deny its entire thematic premise. Make Your Home Among Strangers is a book about the immigrant experience in America and the immigrant experience in America is all about choices. Unlike the native-born, immigrants are American by choice. The means and methods by which transport and arrival in the United States is a matter of choice. More so than anything connected with the natural-born American, the naturalized American is the result of experiences defined by the choices that have been made.
The twin narrative which make up the book—the stories Lizet and Ariel—are all about choices made them as well as choices made by others. Consequences arrive as a result of dynamic tension which is applied from within and without. The immigrant experience does not come to an end with the planting of seeds in fertile new ground. The push to assimilate is met by the pull to remain true to cultural identity. Lizet is victimized by this in the pressure placed by her family to not betray them by heading off to college. Ariel, of course, becomes a pawn in a grand political scheme to transform a simple story of parental rights into something more meaningful about America. The narrative movement forward in the Ariel storyline is never really in doubt, of course, because it is essentially just a thinly fictionalized version of the Elian Gonzalez tale.
Any actual dramatic tension is therefore transferred over to Lizet’s story and where her choices land her. This divergence represents a significant challenge to the idea of the immigrant experience as one of personal choice. Ariel’s future is going to be decided for him one way or the other and the fact that he is only a child really is just a detail within the larger expanse of his being a political pawn. So it all comes down to Lizet managing to become a shiny beacon and iconic ideal of the reality that the immigrant experience is about personal choice and should be celebrated as such. After all, the decisions made by Lizet are not necessarily all the most popular ones in the eyes of maintaining cultural integrity or within the perspective of the need to assimilate. But they are her own decisions and therein lies the message of the story.
Except, of course, that is not so. Therein lies the message of the story up to the final pages, but those final pages change everything. That is not hyperbole: they change everything. After all the energy put into defining Lizet as the antithesis to Ariel when it comes to the immigrant experience being one defined by person choice, the novels takes a sharp left turn through history to undermine assumption in a truly jaw-dropping way. The novel concludes with Lizet reflecting on the moment when she held the 2000 Florida election ballot in one hand with the infamous little hole-puncher in the other as she considers yet another important choice in life: Gore or Bush. She doesn’t say which of those candidates she ultimately casts her vote for and, of course, that is the whole point. Because that ballot would be one of those not counted, set aside, discarded, made moot and pointless by Sandra Day O’Connor and other members of the Supreme Court working together to fulfill her desperate election-night hope that the early projections of Al Gore being named the winner would be overturned.
By choosing to end her novel on a note bringing to mind the image of Lizet’s ballot buried among thousands of others in some damp, dusty secret graveyard never to be found and recounted, the message of the book is upended and overturned every bit as much as the 2000 election results.
