ABSTRACT

Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Cristina Garcia’s first novel, has settled in as a key text within the cannon of Latinx literature, tracing the narratives of the del Pino family, headed by matriarch Celia, as each member tries to locate an identity among the growing political turmoil, and eventual Communist Revolution, in Cuba. Pilar is posited as the bicultural, connective thread that ties together Cuban identity with the instability of the migratory identity of Cuban exiles to the United States. She is often paired with her grandmother Celia, who tasks Pilar with the job of recording the family’s history within her secret diary. The key site within the text that I investigate further is the importance and significance of the connection between Felicia, Celia’s second daughter, and Pilar. As Halperin has pointed out “Felicia’s figurative language, reliance on imagination, and resistance to gendered, sexualized, and racialized norms mark her as aberrant in the eyes of her community and family[,] … who cannot comprehend Felicia’s enmeshment in ‘the clandestine rites of the African magic’ of santería” (35). As Felicia embraces this occult system of ritual and belief, Pilar is drawn to a similarly pathologized countercultural movement of punk rock in the United States, revealing that these women use these rituals and practices as loci of self-making.