ALMOST AMERICANS' GENDER AND EXILE/ETHNIC CUBAN AMERICAN LITERATURE By MARIA DEL CARMEN MARTINEZ f A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2005 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT iii CHAPTER 1 PLACING CUBAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: NO TIENENOMBRE 1 Coming to Terms: Defining Cuban American Literature 1 Naming Names: Cuban American Communities 10 Anthology is Destiny 19 Women's Places: National Identity and Cuban-American Literature 32 2 MAMBISA Y (MALA)MADRE: MULA TAS IN CUBAN AND CUBAN AMERICAN LITERATURE 58 Cuban Color 61 La Reina, La Virgen y La Loca 66 Mother of God 71 Dangerous Beauties: Mad Mothers and Bom-Whores 76 La Mulata de Rumbo 79 The Coming-of-Age Novel and the (Still) Tragic Mulata 83 Magically (Real) Mulatas: Re-writing Gender Race and Nation 94 3 CUBAN-AMERICAN IDENTITY AS Ci?/OIIO WHITE 106 Mary Peabody Mann' s Juanita Ill "What Can We Women Do?" 113 "Has Not She Red Cheeks?" 120 Gender, Race and the First Republic in The Agiiero Sisters 127 The Gallego Grandfather 130 Guajiros and Great Men 133 The New Republic or Blanca: "In Death as in Life, Pure Light" 137 A Yardstick in the Dark: Science, Nationalism and Motherhood 142 Cuerpo de Cuba 148 Cada Cosa en Su Lugar 151 4 MASCULINITY AND CUBAN AMERICAN IDENTITY 156 ii Mestizo Mothers and Natural Men 164 City-Bred Young Men and Dusky Straplings 168 "For Suffering Cuba, the First Word" 173 The War of Women 1 75 Militant, Merciless Maternity: Mariana Grajales 177 Again, Exile 182 Imagining Exile or The Masculine Birth of Time 1 88 Milicianos, Memory and Dismemberment 192 Big Mothers, Mean Mothers 195 "Push Her and She Will Kick" or Americanos 202 5 BRIDGE BODffiS/TRANSATIONAL BODIES 209 Literary Fore-Mothers: Claiming a Tradition of Dialogue 216 Writing History on the Body 226 Crossing Over 236 Cross-dressing 241 Estos Americanos lo Tuersen Todo 250 6 CONCLUSION 262 Mother of Sorrows 266 The Law of the Father 272 Elian Nation 285 WORKS CITED 280 BIOGRAPHIC SKETCH 290 iii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ALMOST AMERICANS: GENDER AND EXILE/ETHNIC IDENTITY IN CUBAN AMERICAN LITERATURE By Maria del Carmen Martinez August 2005 Chair: TaceHedrick Cochair: Stephanie Smith Major Department: English This study investigates the gendered dimensions of ethnic identity in Cuban American poetry and prose - a complex body of literature in the process of effecting a transition from an exile-national to an ethnic-minority literature. The primary area of interest includes an analysis of work produced by several generations of writers who arrived in the United States as children or young aduhs and who Avrite primarily in English. They also exhibit a distinct sense of dual cultural identity often marked by the use of bi-lingual code-switching. This study is the first of its kind to locate Cuban American writing literature within a tradition of ethnic-minority literature and the first to attend to the gendered dimension Cuban American identity in a sustained historical manner. This study will also be the first to examine the literature of a nascent group of Cuban American writers ~ those bom in the U.S. Their work reveals a complex body of as yet unrecognized poetry and prose which alternates between exile-identified and ethnic-minority sensibilities. A substantive study of formulations of ethnic identity in Cuban American literature has yet to be published. With few exceptions, extant anthologies and analyses of Cuban iv American literature have, thus far, tended to configure Cuban American identity specifically as a kind of post- 1959 exile identity ~ a historically privileged and problematic category. These a-historical, exile-identified texts and assumptions about Cuba and have dominated literary, academic and cultural productions ~ with disturbing and dangerous results. In this study, however, I define Cuban American identity in more complex terms ~ as fluid, transnational, contested and historically situated rather than grounded in fixed geopolitical or territorial boundaries. Cuban-American subjectivity does not arise all at once after the 1959 Cuban revolution. Rather, I argue, a literature marked by a clearly biculturated sense of ethnic Cuban-American subjectivity can be traced to writing produced both in the States and in Cuba over the last several centuries. I define Cuban American literature not in terms of geopolitical or temporal limits, but as a complex body of work possessing a distinct constellation of characteristics which differentiates it fi-om Cuban national and Cuban exile literature. Exile-identified authors like Gustavo Perez Firmat have tended to dominate the field of publication. Their work, however, tends to continue in the vein eariier Cuban exile literature, particularly in its attempts to distance itself form other U.S. Hispanic writing, its Castro fixation and its attempt to preserve "traditional" Cuban values. A more marginal group of Cuban America writers has recently emerged who have clearly begun the transition from exiles to ethnics. This innovative group of writers includes Ruth Behar, Coco Fusco, Achy Obejas, Rafael Campos and others. They have only begun to publish as substantially as their exile-identified contemporaries, but their work already represents a critical, pivotal point in the emergence of Cuban American literature. Their work articulates a distinctly "ethnic" sense of self that proves transgressive. These authors and artists have done much to disrupt and re-write the exile community's vision of itself, especially in their desire to normalize relations with Cuba. It is the gendered dimension of Cuban American identity that forms the central aspects of my study. vi CHAPTER 1 NO TIENENOMBRE: ALMOST AMERICANS Coming to Terms: Defining Cuban American Literature Before the embargo, Cubans and North Americans routinely populated one another's worlds, often in ways that helped form and deform ideas about one another. My mother once told me a story I had never heard before and that she has never repeated again. When she was a child, she and her younger brother Luis had a little skiff they loved to row into Santiago Bay. Their father, a ship's captain for an American company, had always warned the children not to approach the American naval ships anchored in the port. One day, my mother and her brother, unable to contain their curiosity, rowed near one of the American vessels. They rowed up to the giant ship, wide-eyed with fear and fascination at what seemed like a city made of steel. They were so lost in their amazement that they did not hear naval men in a water taxi settle in behind them. The men, still clearly drunk from their time on shore, grabbed my mother and her brother and dangled them easily over the water, then dropped them back into their little boat. My mother began to cry, all the while shouting in her best English, "My father, my father" and pointing to her father's ship on the other side of the bay, a heart-breaking appeal to patriarchy's empty promise of protection. Her brother took to smacking a soldier on the hand with the tin can the children used to bail water. All the while, the soldiers laughed and laughed. My mother says that she and her brother never spoke of it again, nor did they tell anyone-their sense of humiliation, powerlessness and shame complete. They 1 2 never went near the navy ships again, terrified of the tall, cocksure Americans. And yet, only a decade later, my mother almost married an American boy named Henry from New York. (Her father was supremely pleased with the match, but her brother was inconsolable.) For decades before the Spanish-American War, which temporarily put Cuba under American "protection," American institutions dominated Cuban culture and history. Indeed, American military intervention in Cuba in 1898 represented the fulfillment of long a pattern of "interest" in the island. According to Louis P^rez, Jr., beginning in the early nineteenth century--when North Americans began to think of themselves as a nation-Cuba "became implicated in North American meditations on power" ("The Circle of Connections" 164). In 1808, during the first stirrings of Manifest Destiny, President Jefferson, having just doubled the size of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, sent General James Wilkinson to Cuba to attempt to buy Cuba from Spain. In the 1823, United States acquired Florida from Spain, expanding the territory of the Republic to within 90 miles of Cuba. That year, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams argued that the likelihood of U.S. annexation of Cuba was a matter of natural law. In fact, he described Cuba as a kind of fruit ripe for the picking.' "Cuba was a means of fiilfillment. Cuba was subsumed into the collective national identity, a prism through which North Americans saw themselves and their friture, and linked directly to the North American sense of security" ("The Circle of Connections" 164). For hundreds of years, * In a letter to Minister to Spain Hugh Nelson, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote that "there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain ... can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom" (Franklin 5). commercial, structural, familial, affective and imaginative ties between Cuba and North America were seen as so "natural" that maps of Cuba were included in maps of Florida and vice versa.