"Marked by genetics and exile": Narrativizing transcultural sexualities in Memory Mambo

GLQ

Volumn 6, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 577-607

  McCullough, Kate ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 75849157415     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-6-4-577     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Achy Obejas, Memory Mambo (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Cleis, 1996).
2. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 26, 6.
3. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 101. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 2.
4. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6.
5. Silvia Spitta, "Transculturation, the Caribbean, and the Cuban-American Imaginary," in Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, ed. Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997), 160.
6. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 102 - 3, 98. "In Cuba," Ortiz continues, "the cultures that have influenced the formation of its folk have been so many and so diverse in their spatial position and their structural composition that this vast blend of races and cultures overshadows in importance every other historical phenomenon" (99).
7. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 22.
8. Memory Mambo press release, Cleis Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1 August 1996.
9. This legacy also inflects the responses to Cuba by the postrevolution Cuban population of the United States. As María de los Angeles Torres puts it, for those who left shortly after the revolution, those constituted as exiles rather than as immigrants, "the desire to reengage with the island was relegated to nostalgia because of the impossibility of returning" ("Encuentros y Encontronazos: Homeland in the Politics and Identity of Cuban Diaspora," Diaspora 4 [1995]: 213). But by the 1970s, with the movement toward dialogue, "the desire of the 'bridge' generation (those born in Cuba and raised abroad) to return to the homeland distinguished the Cuban experience from that of other immigrant groups: For Cuban exiles, 'Americanization,' instead of leading the children away from the homeland, provided the vehicle through which young people could conceive of the 'return home' " (215). Moreover, the relation of postrevolution Cubans in the United States to Cuba has been shaped not only by this desire for the homeland but also by both U.S. and Cuban national security interests (211). Hence, as Sheila Croucher points out, much of what constitutes Cuban American identity or ethnicity is not a simple transfer of Cuban life from Cuba to the United States but rather has "been invented in the context of the exile experience in the US" ("The Success of the Cuban Success Story: Ethnicity, Power, and Politics," Identities 2 [ 1996]: 352). Croucher argues for the centrality of "images that emerge from the public discourses on Cuban immigration to the US" to that process (368). For more on the history of relations between Cuba and the United States
10. see Lourdes Arguelles and B Ruby Rich, "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part I," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9 (1984): 683-99
11. Arguelles and Rich, "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part II," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 11 (1985): 120-36.
12. De los Angeles Torres, "Encuentros y Encontronazos," 214.
13. Croucher, "Cuban Success Story," 352. Indeed, exile as a narrative structure informs both the narrative interests of Cuban writers in the United States and the terms in which literary critics have categorized these writers. While the definitions of categories such as home, the nation, and cultural or ethnic identity have occupied Cuban writers in the United States since at least the days of José Martí's sojourn there, the interrogation of these concepts in literature has become especially pointed in the past forty years. Literary critics have tended to read this literary production in generational terms. While doing so is not unusual for critics of U.S. literatures marked as ethnic and/or immigrant, the specific markers of these generations have been inflected by the Cuban exile experience: the older post-1959 generation is posited as an exile community, while the younger generation is seen as both a U.S. ethnic identity and a transnational subjectivity. Isabel Alvarez Borland, for instance, not only divides authors into first- and second-generation but divides second-generation writers into the subcategories of the "'one-and-a-half' generation" (following Gustavo Pérez Firmat's categorization) and the "Cuban-American ethnic writers" (Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998], 7). Eliana Rivero, meanwhile, tracks a shift from "exile to ethnic minority member" among contemporary Cuban women writers in the United States ("From Immigrants to Ethnics: Cuban Women Writers in the US," in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, ed. Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989], 191).
14. See also Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Rivero's discussion suggests both the excitement and the complexities of a literary-critical project of situating writers of Cuban descent in U.S. literary lineages. It also raises questions important not simply to the study of these writers but to all writers considered ethnic in the United States. How does exile (in place, say, of immigration) transform the category of ethnic? How, indeed, given the conditions of global capitalism today, as well as the neocolonial political and military pressures worldwide, might we differentiate between a "forced" exile and a "voluntary" immigration? Can "ethnic" be said to be an adequate destination category for a subject arriving through an exile's entry into the United States? These questions suggest the importance of factoring in the multiple vectors of both exile and immigration-economic, political, cultural, generational-in any analysis of these issues. I use the term exile rather than immigration here partly in deference to the ways that Cuban communities that formed in the United States during the postrevolution period have represented themselves and partly because the exilic emphasis on the irretrievably lost past/place that paradoxically becomes the longed-for future most usefully illuminates Obejas's novel. When referring to characters who leave Cuba prior to the revolution and for reasons other than a narrow response to the political events culminating in Castro's rise (Juani's Tío Raúl, for instance), I use the term emigration.
15. This is true not simply on the formal level but also on the plot level. If, for instance, Juani's experience of exile and the historical conditions that produced it is more muted than her parents', it is also true that she and her family and community register what is to them a self-evident difference between Juani, the Cuban-born, U.S.-raised child, and her cousin Patricia, the U.S.-born and -raised daughter of Cuban prerevolution emigrants.
16. Ricardo L. Ortíz, "Cafe, Culpa, and Capital: Nostalgic Addictions of Cuban Exile," Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (1997): 64.
17. Juani claims, for example, that she "knows" the location of every bruise on her cousin Caridad's body and asserts that she is the only one who "really" understands her cousin Titi. As to the Las Casas tradition of chronicler, Antonio Benítez-Rojo claims that the many "digressions" in the Historia de las Indias disrupt its "rhetorical unity" (The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss, 2d ed. [Durham: Duke University Press, 1996], 87).
18. See also n. 18.
19. De los Angeles Torres, "Encuentros y Encontronazos," 235.
20. Referring to Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (New York: Knopf, 1992), de los Angeles Torres argues that "exiles are given the role of remembering for the nation" ("Encuentros y Encontronazos," 235), an observation that helps explain Juani's devotion to memory.
21. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 130. Indeed, one might place Obejas's narrative form in a line of genealogical descent from Las Casas's structure of "subversive nodules that eroded the truth and rhetorical unity of the discourse of the conquest" (Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 88).
22. Jennifer Vanasco, "Giving Perspective to Collective Memories," Philadelphia Gay News, 15-21 November 1996, 28-29.
23. De los Angeles Torres, "Encuentros y Encontronazos," 220.
24. Achy Obejas, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress like This? (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Cleis, 1994).
25. Kris Kleindienst, "The Clash of Cuban American Cultures: Talking with Writer Achy Obejas about Her Life and Work," Gay Community News 23 (1997): 14.
26. This choice is significant, given the popular perception that the Marielitos were, in comparison to the emigrants fleeing just after the revolution, poorer, darker, and queerer. Juani represents her family as "trying desperately to stay afloat" economically, although their ownership of the laundromat might suggest better circumstances (78). As my discussion shows, race is a vexed issue in the family, and of course Juani can be read as embodying the alleged increase in homosexuality among the Marielitos. For more on the Marielitos see de los Angeles Torres, "Encuentros y Encontronazos"; and Croucher, "Cuban Success Story."
27. This emphasis on the home or family in place of a lesbian community is echoed in the plot, since Juani's friends and confidants are exclusively her sister and cousins. Gina, the only other central lesbian character, is present mainly through her absence, and, as if to problematize the notion of lesbian community further, her friends ridicule Juani as not political enough, marginalizing her and indeed precipitating the fight that ends Juani and Gina's relationship.
28. Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 85. Las Casas is useful to Obejas also because of the multiple conflicting interpretations to which his work has been subject. Heard as the spokesperson of the Indians within the Spanish colonial system, he was used by other European colonial powers eager to spread the "Black Legend" of Spanish atrocities and "break the Iberian monopoly on American colonialization" (Bill M. Donovan, introduction to Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, trans. Herma Briffault [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992], 2). Subsequently, Las Casas was read as a heroic antithesis to the Black Legend, a moral man. He also has been held up as an "unwitting father of Spanish-American independence" (Anthony Pagden, introduction to Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. and trans. Nigel Griffin [New York: Penguin, 1992], xiii). The contradictory uses to which the man and his work have been put suggest not simply Las Casas's importance but also (and more relevantly to this argument) the importance and flexibility of narrative to the production of colonial and national identities.
29. Las Casas opens A Short Account, for instance, by explaining that he came to the Spanish court "to give our Lord, the Emperor, an eye-witness account of these enormities" and cites his "more than fifty years' experience of seeing at first hand the evil and the harm" of the colonial system (3, 5).
30. Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 109.
31. Benítez-Rojo further contends that "the best-known and most highly praised-most Eurocentric -of the area's [the Caribbean's] literary works . . . refer in one way or another to Las Casas's uncanny and guilty tale" (ibid., 110).
32. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 95, 97.
33. Significantly, Caridad's comment is followed by Juani's observation that "I know the exact location of every single bruise on her body" (58), a juxtapositioning that further links Jimmy's violence to his Americanness. Juani's focus on Caridad's body points to the erotic charge that circulates, mainly through its disavowal, between them. The novel does not develop this theme fully but uses it as one of several points that establish Juani as a double for Jimmy throughout the novel.
34. Of course, Caridad's embodiment of these virtues -Juani describes her as the family member "who always feels the most for the miserable people of the planet, los infelizes . . . the one who won't take the L [el] downtown in the winter because she can't bear the sight of so many cold and homeless people . . . who sends fifteen dollars a month through Christian Charities to a Peruvian orphan" (44)-also attests to her Cubanness because they gesture toward her namesake, the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. As a transculturated embodiment of these virtues, Caridad is a fitting figure for the Virgen, who, Benítez-Rojo points out, is simultaneously the patron saint of Cuba and a transculturated figure based on Taino, European, and African deities. For a thorough and extremely interesting reading of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre see Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island.
35. Roberto Fernández Retamar, "The Enormity of Cuba," boundary 2 23:3 (1996): 184
36. Arguelles and Rich, "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution, Part I," 684. In "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution, Part II," Arguelles and Rich declare that, "given the virulent homophobia of the Cuban enclaves and the right wing in the United States, it is clear that the construction of an anti-Castro campaign predicated on Cuba's repression of homosexual rights is a remarkable achievement" (134).
37. Arguelles and Rich, "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution, Part II," 125. For a discussion of more recent responses by "queers of color" in general, including Cuban American lesbians such as Alina Troyana, see Muńoz, Disidentifications, 119 -41 and passim.
38. This moment of revelation echoes that of Pilar, a protagonist in Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban. The daughter of Cuban émigrés to New York, Pilar precipitates the final action of the novel when, in a moment of existential crisis, she enters a botd́nica in New York and is given a ritual by the owner. He claims that afterward she will know what to do, and indeed she closes her account of the ritual by recalling, "On the ninth day of my baths, I call my mother and tell her we're going to Cuba," a decision based as much on her need for the place as it is on her (conflated) need for the grandmother who still lives there (203).
39. Arguelles and Rich, "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution, Part I," 685.
40. Kleindienst, "Clash of Cuban American Cultures," 12.
41. Arguelles and Rich, "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution, Part II," 130. Obviously, the weight of U.S. historical self-representation supports this pathetic (in both senses of the word) error: ours is, as everyone knows, "the land of the free."
42. The use of the border as a metaphor also implicitly raises the question of the relationship of Cuban identity to the material borders of the island and the Cuban nation. Can and do they include those who have left? Does Juani's framing of herself as an island, as the very embodiment of her lost past/place, link her not only to Titi but also to that lost past/place in both her own and the reader's mind? Might the use of this image thus challenge narratives that contest the Cubanness of those who have left the island?
43. For an interesting discussion of the spatial ramifications of this distinction see Arguelles and Rich, "Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution, Part I," 695 -97.
44. Ramón Grosfoguel, "The Divorce of Nationalist Discourses from the Puerto Rican People: A Sociohistorical Perspective," in Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism, ed. Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 68.
45. Mariano Negrón-Portillo, "Puerto Rico: Surviving Colonialism and Nationalism," in Negrón-Muntaner and Grosfoguel, Puerto Rican Jam, 52, 54.
46. This view, along with Gina's contention that the issue of sexual identity is a "white" thing, articulates a position critiqued by U.S. feminists of color, who since the nineteenth century at least have explored the ways in which race, gender, national, and ethnic identities intertwine, as do the systems of oppression based on them. Contemporary examples can be tracked from the civil rights period forward in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2d ed. (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983)
47. Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983)
48. Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990), among others.
49. Flavio Risech, "Political and Cultural Cross-Dressing: Negotiating a Second Generation Cuban-American Identity," in Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, ed. Ruth Behar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 69.
50. Juani's anger is also, of course, class-based, since she has had to work in the laundromat while Gina and her friends traveled to Cuba.
51. Vera M. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 4, 2.
52. Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 8. Benítez-Rojo also gives a rich, detailed reading of the plantation's importance to and influence on "the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres of the country that nourishes it" (72).
53. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets, 50, 51.
54. Juani's imagery can be traced back even farther than the nineteenth century, for Obejas here draws on the language of a long line of European "inventors" of the Americas. Fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century Europeans like Columbus, Vespucci, and Raleigh "wrote America as a primal world of nature, an unclaimed and timeless space occupied by plants and creatures (some of them human), but not organized by societies and economies; a world whose only history was the one about to begin" (Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 126).
55. This failure calls to mind Pratt's assertion that interracial romances produced as allegories of colonial conquest similarly always fail: "The lovers are separated, the European is reabsorbed by Europe, and the non-European dies an early death" (ibid., 97).
56. Juani and Jimmy also share a desire for Caridad (unacknowledged on Juani's part) and a disavowed desire for each other.
57. Ibid., 196.
58. Ortíz, "Café, Culpa, and Capital," 64.
59. Ramón Grosfoguel, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Chloé Geras, "Introduction: Beyond Nationalist and Colonialist Discourses: The Jaiba Politics of the Puerto Rican Ethno-Nation," in Negrón-Muntaner and Grosfoguel, Puerto Rican Jam, 23.