Pilar's Painting of the Statue of Liberty: Empowering Diverse Women with Punk Culture in DREAMING IN CUBAN

Abstract

After the Cuban-American author Cristina Garc ıa published Dreaming in Cuban in 1992, her first novel received substantial literary critical attention. More recently in The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, which includes an excerpt from the novel, Garc ıa was described as “one of the most widely read and highly esteemed contemporary Latino novelists” (Stavans 2233). Scholars have discussed Dreaming in Cuban’s political and gendered themes as well as the novel’s regional, transnational, and global contexts, such as canonical Caribbean, Latin American, and world literature. These historical, feminist, and comparative approaches have established the novel’s significance and relevance for scholars and teachers of contemporary literature; however, these broader literary critical approaches also can obscure the significant role that visual rhetoric plays in understanding the novel’s themes and characters. A closer examination of Pilar’s painting of the Statue of Liberty and its associations with punk culture clarifies the creative ways in which Dreaming in Cuban negotiates communist and capitalist allegiances to empower diverse women. Dreaming in Cuban explores the divergent perspectives of three generations of women born in Cuba. Whereas the family’s matriarch, Celia del Pino, remains in Cuba throughout the novel, Celia’s daughter, Lourdes Puente, and granddaughter, Pilar Puente, live in the United States after the revolution, which plays a key role in their lives. Celia interprets the Cuban revolution as a means to more equitably distribute wealth on the island. Lourdes develops a pro-American agenda in the United States, whereas Pilar, “who has been read as the author’s alter ego,” tries to bridge her grandmother’s communist allegiances and her mother’s reverence of American capitalism (Pettersson 45). Yet Lourdes continues to try to engage her daughter in her business ventures, such as by asking Pilar to paint a “‘pro-American’” Statue of Liberty for the opening of her second Yankee Doodle Bakery (Garc ıa 138). Pilar honors her mother’s request by painting the Statue of Liberty, but she subverts her mother’s request by using a bricolage of sacred and secular imagery as well as high and low culture. On the one hand, the painting’s large blue canvas evokes the Virgin Mary’s robes, and the canvas’s “thorny scars that look like barbed wire” evoke Jesus’s crown of thorns (Garc ıa 141). On the other hand,