HOW CRISTINA GARCIA LOST HER ACCENT, AND OTHER LATINA CONVERSATIONS

After briefly reviewing some prominent efforts to construct a genealogy of Latino literature, I offer the intertextual relationship of Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban to Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street as a gesture towards building bridges between apparently discrete Hispanic-American traditions and complicating patriarchal conceptions of literary tradition based on nationality and bloodlines. Garcia's novel, by "signifying'' on particular tropes from The House on Mango Street, by recounting the history of the del Pino family in both Cuba and New York, and by showing the conflicted relationships which different Latino groups forge in the United States, positions itself as the inheritor of hybrid versions of Latin American, Caribbean, and North American cultures. Dreaming in Cuban thus paints a portrait of Latina experience and of the Latina novel as what Juan Flores calls "pan-ethnic.'' I will examine the tropological ways in which Dreaming in Cuban theorizes identity and literary tradition through its own textuality and intertextuality.