When is your culture bad for you? That is the question that weaves its way through , a startling collection chronicling the lives of Cuban Americans from WWII-era Havana to contemporary times in "el norte." Whether they inhabit blue collar neighborhoods in the Northeast, the increasingly Latino-populated South, or Florida, the characters that populate this book—many of whom are the children and grandchildren of exiles, who have been raised in traditional Cuban homes but whose only homeland has been the United States—must decide what to take and what to leave from their upbringing.