"Hector Santinio is the youngest son of Alejo and Mercedes, who moved to New York from Cuba in the mid-1940s. The family of four shares their modest apartment with extended relatives in Harlem, where homesickness and nostalgia are dispelled by nights of dancing and raucous parties. But life's realities are nevertheless harsh in the Santinio family's adoptive land. When Mercedes takes Hector and his brother to visit Cuba, to better know her culture, Hector contracts a serious illness that leads to a terrifying period of hospitalizations back in the United States where, isolated from his family, he loses much of his ability to speack Spanish. And it is this fracturing that sparks a lifelong quest to not only reconcile his Cuban identity with his American one, but to also understand his parents' ambitions and anxieties within the country at large." -- Back cover.