- Cristina García
-
Cristina García 
Born July 4, 1958
Havana, CubaOccupation novelist, journalist Nationality USA Notable work(s) Dreaming in Cuban Notable award(s) National Book Award nomination Cristina García (born July 4, 1958) is a Cuban-born American journalist and novelist. After working for Time Magazine as a researcher, reporter, and Miami bureau chief, she turned to writing fiction. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), received critical acclaim and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has since published her novels The Agüero Sisters (1997) and Monkey Hunting (2003), and has edited books of Cuban and other Latin American literature. Her fourth novel, A Handbook to Luck, was released in hardcover in 2007 and came out in paperback in April 2008.
Contents
Early life and education
García was born in Havana to a Guatemalan father and Cuban mother. In 1961, when she was two years old, her family was among the first wave of people to flee Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power. They settled in New York City where she was raised in Queens, Brooklyn Heights, and Manhattan, in predominantly Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods. Her family, however, communicated at home in Spanish and shared many stories about Cuba during her youth, and she says that she has always thought of herself as Cuban.
In 1979 she completed a Bachelor's degree in Political Science at Barnard College, where she says a course in English stirred her interest in literature. She earned a Master's degree in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in 1981. During her graduate studies she spent a year in Italy and later returned to Europe to accept a marketing position with Procter & Gamble in West Germany, but left that job after three months.
Career in journalism
After returning to the United States, García pursued a career in journalism, after having worked as a part-time "copy girl" with the New York Times . While at Johns Hopkins, she obtained an intern position with The Boston Globe that she held for a short time before becoming a reporter for the Knoxville Journal.
In 1983 she was hired by Time Magazine. Beginning there as a reporter/researcher, she became the publication's San Francisco correspondent in 1985, and its bureau chief in Miami for Florida and the Caribbean region in 1987. In 1988 she was transferred to Los Angeles. She terminated her employment with Time to write fiction full-time in 1990.
Novelist
García's first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was published in 1992. She has said that it contained ideas that had been percolating inside her throughout the 1980s, especially after her visit to Cuba in 1984. The book received very favorable critical attention and was nominated for the National Book Award. García gave birth to her daughter Pilar six months after its release, and says that her preoccupation with her pregnancy and giving birth had kept her from realizing the impact the book had had until she was doing book tours in 1997.
She struggled to write a strong second novel for two years before abandonning that work to start on The Agüero Sisters, which was released in 1997 and awarded the Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize. She says the inspiration for it was a visit many years earlier by a Cuban aunt to her mother in Miami that ended abruptly and left long-standing negative feelings.
While she is often portrayed as an important Cuban-American voice in American literature, she reports experiencing some unease in relating to other Cubans — both with those still in Cuba and those in exile in Florida. Some question why she writes in English. Others take issue with her lack of engagement in anti-Castro causes. She has said she attempts to emphasize in her novels the fact that "there is no one Cuban exile".[1] In 2007 that she also said that she "wanted to break free of seeing the world largely through the eyes of Cubans or Cuban immigrants. After the first three novels—I think of them as a loose trilogy—I wanted to tackle a bigger canvas, more far-flung migrations, the fascinating work of constructing identity in an increasingly small and fractured world."[2]At this time García described this "bigger canvas" as including, "the entrapments and trappings of gender in my novel", partly because "it would be easy, and overly simplistic, to frame everything in terms of equality, or cultural limitations, or other vivid measurables. What’s most interesting to me are the slow, internal, often largely unconscious processes that move people in unexpected directions, that reframe and refine their own notions of who they are, sexually and otherwise."[3]
While García has expressed these desires to move away from a purely Cuban narrative voice and/or anti-Castro sentiments, the influence of her heritage is made clear when she discusses the symbolism and characters in her work. She has said, about the symbol of a tree, for example:
"In Afro-Cuban culture, the ceiba tree is also sacred, a kind of maternal, healing figure to which offerings are made, petitions placed. So absolutely, for me trees do represent a crossroads, an opportunity for redemption and change. In Dreaming in Cuban, Pilar Puente has a transformative experience under an elm tree that leads to her returning to Cuba. Chen Pan, in Monkey Hunting, escapes the sugarcane plantation under the watchful protection of a ceiba tree…In A Handbook to Luck, Evaristo takes to living in trees as a young boy, to escape the violence of his stepfather. He stays there for years, first in a coral tree and then in a banyan. From his perches, he witnesses the greater violence of the civil war in El Salvador and speaks a peculiar poetry, born, in part, of his co-existence with trees."[3]
Current life
García lived with her daughter Pilar in Los Angeles and taught at Mills College in Oakland, California.
In 2009, Garcia was hired as the Visiting Affiliate Professor and Black Mountain Institute Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she has been hired for one year (Fall 2009-Spring 2010) as a visiting professor.
Bibliography
- Dreaming in Cuban: A novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) ISBN 9780345381439
- Cars of Cuba, essay, with photographer Joshua Greene and creator D. D. Allen (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1995. ISBN 0810926318)
- The Agüero Sisters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. ISBN 0679450904)
- Monkey Hunting (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. ISBN 0375410562)
- Cubanisimo!: The Vintage Book of contemporary Cuban literature, editor and introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 2003. ISBN 0385721374)
- Bordering Fires: The vintage book of contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a literature, editor and introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 2006. ISBN 1400077184)
- A Handbook to Luck (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. ISBN 030726436X)
- The Lady Matador's Hotel: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2010. ISBN 1439181748)
Awards and honors
- Dreaming in Cuban a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award
- 1996 Whiting Writers' Award for fiction
- 1997 Janet Heidiger Kafka Prize for The Agüero Sisters
- 2008 Northern California Book Award for Fiction for A Handbook to Luck
References/Critical studies
- "About the Author" and "A Conversation with Cristina García" in The Agüero Sisters. Random House Publishing Group, 1998. ISBN 0-345-40651-6.
- Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. Cuban-American literature of exile : from person to persona. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
- Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, University of Kansas. "Cristina Garcia". The Literary Encyclopedia. 17 May 2005. The Literary Dictionary Company. (retrieved 14 March 2007)
- Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. On Latinidad: U.S. Latino literature and the construction of ethnicity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
- Cox, Annabel. “Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban: Latina literature and beyond?” Latino Studies 7.3 (Fall 2009): 357-377.
- Dalleo, Raphael. “How Cristina Garcia Lost Her Accent, and Other Latina Conversations.” Latino Studies 3.1 (April 2005): 3-18.
- Dalleo, Raphael, and Elena Machado Sáez. "Latino/a Identity and Consumer Citizenship in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban." The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 107-132. http://www.post-sixties.com.
- Johnson, Kelli Lyon. "Cristina Garcia - b. 1958". VG: Voices from the Gaps. May 9, 2005. (retrieved March 13, 2007)
- Kevane, Bridget. Latino literature in America. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003.
- Luis, William. Dance between two cultures: Latino Caribbean literature written in the United States. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997.
- Paulsen, Sasha, "Napa Valley Register" article mentions Garcia's 2006 move to Napa, California A Handbook to Luck May 16, 2007 (retrieved May 16, 2007)
- Viera, Joseph M. "Exile among Exiles: Cristina Garcia." Poets and Writers. September/October, 1998.
External links
See also
Sources
- ^ Johnson, Kelli Lyon. "Cristina Garcia - b. 1958". VG: Voices from the Gaps. May 9, 2005. (retrieved March 13, 2007)
- ^ Abani, Chris http://bombsite.com/issues/99/articles/2899 “Cristina García” BOMB Magazine Spring 2007. Retrieved August 3, 2011
- ^ a b Abani, Chris http://bombsite.com/issues/99/articles/2899 “Cristina García” BOMB Magazine Spring 2007. Retrieved August 3, 2011
Novels by Cristina Garcia Dreaming in Cuban: A novel (1992) • The Agüero Sisters (1997) • Monkey Hunting (2003) • A Handbook to Luck (2007) • The Lady Matador's Hotel: A Novel (2010)Categories:- 1958 births
- American journalists
- American novelists
- American writers of Cuban descent
- Living people
- American people of Cuban descent
- Cuban people of Guatemalan descent
- People from Napa, California
- Hispanic and Latino American novelists
- Hispanic and Latino American female journalists
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