Life Between the Cracks of History: An Immigrant Family's Story (with Ada Ferrer)

History is often told through revolutions, presidents, and wars. Historian Ada Ferrer tells it through the experience of her own family.

When Ferrer was just 11 months old, her mother fled Cuba with her in her arms, leaving behind a 9-year-old son she hoped to reunite with soon. Decades later, after her parents' deaths, Ferrer uncovered boxes of letters, keepsakes, and forgotten records that revealed not only what happened to her family, but what history can look like when seen through ordinary lives instead of famous names.

In this conversation, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian discusses Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter, a memoir that blends archival detective work with profound personal reckoning. She reflects on exile, family separation, memory, guilt, forgiveness, and the uneasy truth that the people we love most can also wound us most deeply.

The result is a moving conversation about immigration, the Cuban Revolution, and the quiet, complicated lives that history books so often leave behind.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Fellow Traveler Episodes

• Border Separations (with Efrén Olivares)
• Unearthing Family Secrets (with Ingrid Rojas Contreras)
• Little Interpreter, Big Responsibility (with Olivia Abtahi)

About the Guest

Ada Ferrer is a Cuban-American historian and author of the national best-seller, Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter. She joined the faculty at Princeton University as the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History in July 2024. She was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Cuba: An American History.