Home(Be)Coming: Context and Conditions in Contemporary American Housing

We sold my family home this year. The home my parents bought when I was born has passed to others. A suburban California lot on Ohlone land stolen by the Spanish.(1) Appropriated from Mexicans after statehood, parcels passed to European settlers who created a speakeasy town during Prohibition.(2) One of those settlers’ farms, with its basement wine barrel stands, landed in the hands of my Mexican immigrant parents. It was the wood for the whittling of their aspiration.

That building was our lives and livelihoods made manifest. My earliest memories are of my father’s constructions—breaking through walls, adding new rooms, modifying pillar and post of that home to transform it into something altogether different, completely ours. The home was a mirror of who we were becoming as much as it was a product of those who had come before. The memories spurred my desire to be an architect, an engineer, any vocation that contemplated how social aspirations become physical places. Long after moving away, I could still distinguish the slightest of creaks from the staircase—a signal my father was walking up to announce that meals were ready. I could fly down the stairs blindfolded, intuitively knowing their number and tread. I can still hear my mother singing in her taller, the bedroom she converted to a sewing room so she could build something of her own.

But I can’t prove my memory correct anymore. My mother’s passing forced us to grapple with the disposition of both the home and its one remaining occupant, my father. His wish to be away from the rooms that reminded him of her conflicted with the potential loss of the only physical evidence of his lifelong work. He moved to assisted “living,” a nursing “home,” euphemistic places with fewer reminders of his memories. There, he laments what his surroundings represent more than the comforts they provide; he tells us, “I can’t even offer you a cup of coffee.” The home, for him, shapes the most basic of social customs. But a house built to withstand California’s earthquakes could not endure my family’s generations.

Americans are taught that our homes are exceptional extensions of our families and, collectively, that they are unique structures on the planet. The immigrant’s aspirational American Dream is as much a part of our national folklore as the Barbie Dreamhouse is part of our children’s fantasies.(3)

NOTES

(1) See Lee Panich, Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020).

(2) See Christopher M. Sterba, “Taming the Wild West in the Late 1940s: Suburban Progressives in the San Francisco Bay Area,” California History 92, no. 1 (2015): 27–52; and Rick Radin, “El Cerrito Era of Gambling, Vice and Racketeers Recounted in Talk,” East Bay Times, March 16, 2017.

(3) See Matthew Wills, “James Truslow Adams: Dreaming up the American Dream,” JSTOR Daily, May 18, 2015, https://daily.jstor.org/ james-truslow-adams-dreaming-american-dream/; Gregory Schmidt, “Homeownership Remains the American Dream, Despite Challenges,” New York Times, June 2, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/real estate/homeownership-affordability-survey. html; and Anna Kodé, “Barbie, Her House and the American Dream,” New York Times, June 23, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/inter active/2023/06/23/realestate/barbie-dream house.html.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)