How to Leave Hialeah

How to Leave Hialeah (2009), a collection of short stories, draws from American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s experiences living in Cuba and Hialeah, a city in Miami County, Florida. The stories feature characters who suffer some form of marginalization or identity erasure due to their minority status in the tropical American state that obsessively assigns a value to different degrees of “whiteness.” With eleven stories in total, the collection draws a vivid, sympathetic, and at times, both humorous and melancholy portrait of different issues related to race and immigration in the southeastern United States.

The collection begins with a story called “Resurrection, or: The Story behind the Failure of the 2003 Radio Salsa 98.1 Semi-Annual Cuban and/or Puerto Rican Heritage Festival.” Its humorously long-winded title caricatures the Americanization of cultural institutions that purport to fully represent national minorities. It follows Jesenia, a young woman who comes down from a night of drugs at a rave and attends church. Parched, she drinks from a bowl of holy water in front of a nun. It is revealed that Jesenia, a Cuban-American, is concocting a bizarre plan to resurrect her Cuban godmother, Celia Cruz, to salvage her internship at a local radio station.

The collection’s eponymous story “How to Leave Hialeah” concerns a girl whose mother wishes to minimize their Cuban heritage. While the daughter embraces being a Cuban-American in Miami, her mother warns that acknowledging it is tantamount to looking for trouble. Her mother recommends, only partly in jest, that she flatten her hair and stop speaking in order to pass as more white than she is. The girl comes to reject her mother’s views, deciding to celebrate being Cuban. In “And in the Morning, Work,” Crucet’s only story set in Cuba, a young woman gets a job reading to cigar factory laborers as they roll the cigars by hand. The woman yearns to leave Cuba but feels socially and economically tethered to it.



In “The Next Move,” an elderly man Luis refuses to join his wife on her trip to Cuba as long as its people remain unfree. When his wife dies, he deeply regrets his stubbornness, feeling that he has wasted too much of his life denying the Cuba that exists for a Cuba made out of imagination and memory. He refuses his wife’s dying wish to be buried in Cuba in order to have her buried in a shared plot in Miami. In “Men Who Punched Me in the Face,” protagonist Sandra Ortiz recalls an abusive ex-husband named Victor, who was Cuban. The story interrogates the causes of domestic violence and the intersections between marriage and immigration narratives. Ortiz ultimately learns how to sift and winnow through American and Cuban conceptions of morality to fashion her own moral compass.

How to Leave Hialeah is, despite its title, not set on rejecting American or Floridian nationality; nor does it fully embrace it. Crucet provides a nuanced reading of the complex desires and allegiances of Cubans, Americans, and Puerto Ricans as they try to understand themselves through an increasingly globalizing world.