América's Home

América’s Home is the story of América Sorrentini-Blaut, a feisty Puerto Rican woman in her 70’s and her fight against developers intent on bulldozing her community and her family’s historic home. Her story is one of many tales of resistance against rampant greed, gentrification and displacement taking place all across the American Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and on the mainland. América lives on fixed income in Chicago and struggles to restore her mother’s historic home in Santurce, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of the “new” San Juan. Aided by a group of her contemporaries, the youngest of whom is 65, these “retired” construction workers and artisans painstakingly restore the house and transform it into Casa Sofia, a cultural center named in honor of América’s mother. When developers offered her $2 million dollars to knock down Casa Sofia so that they could build exclusive condos, she refused. As one activist observes, “Not everything of value is for sale.”

Filmed over four years in over a dozen communities from Santurce to Las Gladiolas, Campo Alegre, La Ciudadela, Paseo Caribe and La Perla to Chicago’s Lincoln Park and Humboldt Park, América’s Home is a visually intoxicating, inspiring documentary that is as much about displacement and empire as it is about the transformative power of the cultural arts, community and belonging.