Jennine Capó Crucet

This first-person non-fiction essay collection features biographical reflections by Jennine Capó Crucet, an author and professor in her thirties. She is the daughter of two Cuban refugees and grows up in Miami, a city with a large Cuban population. Her parents name her Jennine after the 1980 Miss USA runner-up Jineane Ford as an attempt to Americanize her. The book mostly focusses on the period between when she attended college as a student and when she became a college professor, but several aspects of her earlier years are mentioned, such as her childhood love of Disney World, how she did not embody the ideal white femininity her mother wished her to, and how she fell in love with books from a young age. As a first-generation college student, she arrives at the prestigious Cornell University unprepared and disoriented, realizing that outside of Miami, the Latinx population...