Salem Press

	In Cuba, aging was not such a disgraceful affair. Most elderly women were venerated and sought after for counsel. They were surrounded by their families and often lived to see their great-grandchildren grow up. The abuelitas were the eyes and ears of a clan, the peacemakers, the storytellers and historians. They held each young destiny in their hands.
- from The Agüero Sisters

Notable Latino Writers
Cristina Garcia

Born: Havana, Cuba; July 4, 1958

Long Fiction: Dreaming in Cuban, 1992; The Agüero Sisters, 1997; Monkey Hunting, 2003.

Nonfiction: Cars of Cuba, 1995.

EDITED TEXT: Cubanisimo!: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature, 2003.

Cristina García (krihs-TEE-nah gahr-SEE-ah) is a highly regarded Cuban American writer. Born in Havana, Cuba, she was brought to the United States at the age of two, when her family emigrated after Fidel Castro came to power. She grew up in New York City, studied in Catholic schools, and attended Barnard College, from where she went to the School of Advanced International Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. In 1993, after working for Time magazine as a journalist in Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, García was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. She then moved to Los Angeles.

What to Read: Dreaming in Cuban

Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Cristina García's first novel, chronicles the lives of three generations of women as they strive for self-fulfillment. This bittersweet novel also illustrates the Cuban American immigrant experience in the United States, focusing on the search for cultural identity in exile. In Cuba, for twenty-five years, the matriarch Celia del Pino writes letters to Gustavo, a long lost lover. She never sends the self-revealing correspondence, and stops writing in 1959, at the time of the Cuban Revolution, when the family becomes divided by politics and her granddaughter Pilar is born.

Celia, who believes that "to survive is an act of hope," sublimates her unfulfilled romantic desires by imagining herself as a heroine of the revolution. In need of recognition, she supports Fidel Castro devotedly. As her husband Jorge del Pino leaves her to join their daughter Lourdes in the United States, she spends her days scanning the sea for American invaders and daydreaming about a more exciting life.

Felicia, Celia's youngest daughter, abused and abandoned by her first husband, Hugo Villaverde, suffers from fits of madness and violence. A stranger to herself and her children, she seeks refuge in music and the Afro-Cuban cult of Santeria; after becoming a priestess, she finds peace in death. Lourdes, Celia's eldest daughter, is raped and tortured by the revolutionaries and loses her unborn son. She escapes from Castro's Cuba with her husband Rufino del Puente and their daughter Pilar. Emotionally unfulfilled, she develops eating disorders; while her family dreams of returning to Cuba, she supports the anti-Castro movement, establishes a chain of Yankee Doodle bakeries, and focuses on achieving the American Dream.

Raised in Brooklyn, in conflict with her Americanized mother, Pilar identifies with her grandmother Celia in Cuba. She visits the homeland in search of her true identity and, as she receives Celia's legacy of letters and family stories, she becomes aware of the magic inner voice that inspires artistic creativity. Pilar returns to America with a positive self-image, accepting her double identity as a bilingual and bicultural Latina.

Dreaming in Cuban represents the coming-of-age memoir narrative. Through recollections and nostalgic remembrances, the novel illustrates issues of identity and separation, women's survival strategies, and cultural dualism.

Ludmila Kapschutschenko-Schmitt

As a young adult García read American, Russian, and French novelists. Later she discovered her Latin American literary heritage. She cites Wallace Stevens, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison as particular literary inspirations for her when writing her novels. Perhaps her greatest inspiration, however, was a trip back to Cuba in 1984, where she learned about her family and, as for so many bicultural writers, regained a sense of her own culture of origin and her part in it from the experience of "going home."

As a bicultural Cuban American writer, García is part of a vibrant group of individuals of various ethnicities who draw on the contradictions of being simultaneously both and neither. Other American writers sharing this multiethnic common ground are Julia Alvarez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Diana Abu-Jaber, Oscar Hijuelos, Pablo Medina, and Omar Torres. They too write of the delicate balance, double consciousness, and multiple resonances of living "on the borderlands," as Anzaldúa phrased it. They share an ability to "pass," as well as the knowledge, sometimes painful yet often a source of great pride, of their difference from mainstream American culture. They chronicle intergenerational immigrant experience and displacement, exile and double exile, for even the culture of origin feels like a strange place to the hybrid child who, unlike its parents, has become at least partially identified with the adopted American culture. The formation of identity, in all its complex manifestations, is the overarching theme in this kind of work.

The relativity of perception is another powerful theme in the works of these writers, and García is particularly skillful in the way her narrative structure and chronology reflect this relativity. Given the element of the autobiographical in novels that explore identity formation, it is no surprise that García has experienced this relativity personally, not only culturally but also politically. When interviewed by Allan Vorda in 1993 García mentioned that her parents were extremely anti-Communist, but that her other relatives, whom she had met on her 1984 trip, were pro-Communist if not Party members.

Dreaming in Cuban is set alternately in Brooklyn and Havana, with multiple narrators tracing their memories, their family lines, and their complex interconnections. Granddaughter Pilar and grandmother Celia communicate wordlessly over the years, and only when the grandchild comes to visit do both feel complete again. In her novel García plays with Magical Realism, politics, the diary and epistolary forms, and the accretion of layers of culture. The locations shift, just as do the barriers of time and space, life and death, and García draws on the puzzle that is memory to show how identity is formed. The novel was nominated for the National Book Award in 1992, and in 1994 García received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Agüero Sisters draws upon the pro- and anti-Communist allegiances found in García's own family. The novel contrasts two sisters, Constancia, who fled Cuba when Castro came to power, and Reina, who remained. Each has achieved a different kind of success in her chosen environment. Like Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters is strongly marked by Magical Realism. Monkey Hunting is also about Cuban Americans, but this time Chinese Cuban Americans, tracing the Chen family from 1857 to the present as they emigrate from country to country.

Tanya Gardiner-Scott

Learn More
Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. "Displacements and Autobiography in Cuban-American Fiction." In Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature: From the Editors of Literature Today, edited by Pamela A. Genova. New York: Twayne/Thomson Gale, 2003. Compares García with two other Cuban American writers, Omar Torres and Pablo Medina, and looks at the semi-autobiographical nature of their novels.

Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Brogan analyzes García's Dreaming in Cuban and work by Toni Morrison and Louise Erdich to examine how minority writers use create modern ghost stories as a means of exploring and recreating their ethnic identity.

Davis, Rocio G. "Back to the Future: Mothers, Languages, and Homes in Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban." In Twayne Companion to Contemporary World Literature: From the Editors of Literature Today, edited by Pamela A. Genova. New York: Twayne/Thomson Gale, 2003. Explores the complicated negotiations of mother-daughter bonds in García's novel.

McCracken, Ellen. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. García's work is included in this analysis of writing by Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, Mexican American, and Dominican American writers. McCracken explains how these writers have redefined concepts of multicultural and diversity in American society.

Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Sets García's work in the context of the popular culture created by Cuban Americans who moved to the United States when they were children.

Viera, Joseph M., and Deborah Kay Ferrell. "Cristina García, 1958-" In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, edited by Jay Parini. Supplement XI: Toni Cade Bambara to Richard Yates. New York: Scribner's, 2002. Includes an essay discussing García's life and work, and a bibliography.

Yagoda, Ben. The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing. New York: HarperResource, 2004. Yagoda seeks to define literary style and to learn how a writer develops his or her own unique voice. He interviews García and other writers who explain how they approach style and how their style has been influenced by other writers.