Oye What I'm Gonna Tell You — Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes

When is your culture bad for you? That is the question that weaves its way through Oye What I'm Gonna Tell You, 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.