The House Where Home Is Held

13200 Old Cutler Road. On paper, these jumbled scribbles are no more than the formulation of a jotted address on an empty page that leads nowhere and houses no one. Plugged into a GPS, these five numbers and thirteen letters formulate a roadmap to a seemingly simple landscape burrowed between many on a 15-mile road in Miami, Florida. To most, 13200 Old Cutler Road is just another address to just another of the billions of houses on this earth. To me, however, the home on Old Cutler Road is a story, an evolution, a defiance. Within its walls, the people I love most in the world built their lives; not only was it where my grandparents raised their family for 16 years, but it is also where my best friend lives and has spent the majority of her time in America. Though generations apart, my grandparents and my best friend, Sabrina, were both forced to flee their countries as a result of political unrest, and coincidentally navigated their new lives within those exact same walls. 

From the outside looking in, the house is seemingly the perfect accumulation of the American Dream: it is where two sets of refugee families built livelihoods, reputations, and successes. The house, though a product of American hands and an American society, is a juxtaposition to the perpetuated stigma that immigrants are solely leaving behind crime, violence, and poverty-ridden countries which they disregard the moment they set foot on American soil.  Within the lavish white house and the resilient people who held onto their homes inside of it, this narrative was shattered through stories of the life they left behind and a refusal to never let their love of their countries die. 

Though the house itself has changed much since my grandparents moved in 2002, one thing remains the same: it is the heart of life, the place where memories fill every corner, every crevice, every seemingly dark place. Just as it was when my dad, uncles, and aunt were my age, the house is where some of our happiest memories lay their rest; though years apart, my family and I will look back on the same home when we reminisce about some of our best moments, even having taken our prom pictures in front of the same wall. Despite the luxurious manner of the home or all of the memories which it harbors, I know both my grandparents and Sabrina would trade the house and all of its riches for the homes they left behind in Cuba and Venezuela. 

One narrative that has been told time and time again is that the United States is the only country in which happiness can be found, that all other lives pale in comparison to the grandiose ones we achieve here. While I may not be able to help falling into this belief should I not have had the privilege of being exposed to the living, breathing contradictions to it, I know that immigrants can and do have patriotism, pride and love for their homes even in spite of the rampant corruption which often leaves them no choice but to flee. 

Through listening to the people I love most tell stories of watching their beloved countries be destroyed day by day and being ripped from the only homes they’d ever known, I have learned that coming to America is just as heartbreaking as it is opportunistic. Though they have learned to love their lives here and have not taken the experience for granted, coming to the United States is not always the exciting, liberating, enthralling thrust from impoverished and crime-ridden countries that it is painted out to be. Just as a glimmering house does not make a home, a country, regardless of the potential it may hold, can never truly replace the one that was lost or left behind. 

More often than not, immigration is depicted by the media as being the instant and complete elevation of one’s life. Oftentimes, we forget that, regardless of where you are born or what circumstances you endure, everyone has the ability and desire to find beauty, joy and contentment within their homes. We forget that, even in what may seem like the darkest of times, there are always rays of light which slip through the cracks; this is what makes a house a home, a country a haven. Within the walls of the Old Cutler house, there is magic in the ways that seemingly simple childhood stories bring entire countries to life. Though many know her home only through pigeon-holed views of crime and violence, Sabrina holds onto Caracas in the ways she remembers every detail, every feeling, every contented moment from her childhood. Similarly, my grandparents, even after decades of seeing their homes or smelling the fresh air of their own countries, shock me in the vivid details with which they describe their homelands. To this day, I have never met anyone more patriotic than the immigrants in my life; the love and pride they have for their countries is the most pure, most genuine of anyone I have ever met. They hold onto their homes not for show and not for recognition, but of an inherent desire to remember where they came from and why they are who they are. 

Inside the house they each called their own, my grandparents and best friend fought to bring life to the homes they left behind through stories told around kitchen tables, pictures hung on living room walls, familiar scents wafting through hallways, and native music booming through back patios: remnants of a life that would have been. Though the house will inevitably become someone else’s home and the people inside of it will someday replace my loved one’s memories with those of their own, the spirit it harbors and the defiance it represents will not crumble, even once the walls of its foundation do. Just as immigrants leave their countries and honor the memories, culture, and values of their homes in everything they do, the house at 13200 Old Cutler Road is a part of my grandparents, a part of my best friend, a part of me. While it cannot and will not replace the homes they were forced to leave behind, it houses the things they carry with them: it is and always will be the house where they held onto their homes with everything they had.