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“Multi-hyphenated identities on the road”: An Interview with Cristina García

Cuban American novelist and poet Cristina Garcı́a composes poignant, meandering, and wonderfully absurd stories of families forced from their homelands by war or circumstance. Her characters are often adrift, left placeless in a world she envisions as treacherous as it is magical, seeking an ever elusive “home.” Her fascination with the subsequent identity crises her unrooted characters face stems from her own wayward wanderings, as her family was among the first wave of migrants to abandon Cuba after Fidel Castro’s rise to power. While her family settled in New York City, they nonetheless drifted between predominantly Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods. It is no wonder that so much of Garcı́a’s early work is committed to chronicling the difficulties of establishing a stable sense of selfhood or community for the families of the Cuban diaspora. However, her later work explores characters that she refers to as “multi-hyphenated,” individuals that collect, compound, or shed their identities as often as they move across countries, borders, and oceans. She often credits her multi-hyphenated daughter, Pilar—part Cuban, part Japanese, part American—for the inspiration to write such characters. Drawing on these personal experiences, Garcı́a crafts stories rife with contradiction—worlds grounded in history and touched by magic, populated with believable characters born of impossible circumstance to face absurd adversities and whose lives induce tears, laughter, and joy in her readers. Garcı́a’s work has been translated into fourteen languages, reflective of the global nature of her oeuvre. Among her many accolades, she has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, the Northern California Book Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She achieved immediate literary recognition for her debut novel Dreaming in Cuban (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. This celebrated novel explores the drama of the Del Pino family, divided geographically by the Cuban revolution and ideologically by competing political allegiances to Fidel Castro or life in the United States. Garcı́a continued to explore the psychological and cultural violence enacted on such divided families in her follow-up novel, The Agüero Sisters (1997), which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her third novel, Monkey Hunting (2003), expands her