Interventions: An Interview with Cristina García

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• InterventionsAn Interview with Cristina García
• Frederick Luis Aldama

Since Cristina García burst onto the global literary stage in 1992 with her critically acclaimed debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban, she emerged as a singular, significant force in the shaping of our contemporary world letters. Her many novels have been translated and published in numerous languages, reaching a wide international audience. Her diverse body of work encompasses not only celebrated poetry but also children's and young adult books as well as edited literary anthologies. Cristina's consequential creations introduce us to an array of vividly imagined characters that include extraordinary matriarchs, ex-guerilla activists, artists, magicians, and polyglot drag queens as well as bloodthirsty dictators and machista patriarchs.

Cristina possesses an immeasurable talent for vividly portraying a wide spectrum of human experiences and backgrounds. She also dares to powerfully pause, push open, and stretch wide our engagement with oft-cataclysmic moments in world history; great wars and revolutions work as the push-pull forces that scatter, re-root, and unite characters. Indeed, the power of Cristina's pen is precisely her ability to powerfully transport us through portals to grand historical events where we can sink our mind and bodies deeply into the minutiae of everyday sensations, feelings, actions, and interactions of her wondrous panoply of protagonists. Cristina's fiction, like that of other prodigious literary talents who wedge fiction into history, such as Luis Urrea, Sandra Cisneros, Rosario Castellanos, Reyna Grande, Reinaldo Arenas, Ruth Behar, Fernando del Paso, and Junot Díaz, wakes us to the bigness of world-altering events as they resonate in our daily interactions, reflections, sensations, and dispositions.

Cristina's achievements and accolades are legion. She has been nominated for the National Book Award and has received esteemed honors such as the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Northern California Book Award, and the Whiting Writers' Award. Additionally, she has been granted prestigious [End Page 69] fellowships including the Guggenheim, NEA, and Princeton's Hodder Fellowship. Throughout Cristina's career, she has held notable positions at institutions such as UT Austin's Michener Center for Writers, the University of Miami, and as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University– San Marcos.

During the exciting launch of her whirlwind worldwide book tour of Vanishing Maps (2023), I had the great pleasure of learning from Cristina García.

frederick luis aldama:

Cristina, what drives you to write nonfiction, poetry, and fiction?

cristina garcía:

I'm driven by this internal engine of curiosity. My novels—and I mostly write novels—are vast containers of curiosity. They offer opportunities for me to explore different periods of history. I'm currently researching postwar Japan—a period I know little about even though my ex-mother-in-law grew up in Yokohama during the war. She never speaks about this time in her life. And I'm long overdue to learn more about it. I do believe my buoyant curiosity stems from my background. I have an MA in international politics, and I was a journalist for many years. I gravitate toward writing novels with dense, historical contexts. It's not an exaggeration to say that many of my characters emerge from the crevices of history.

fla:

Your characters grow out of historical circumstance, yet you bring to life the minutiae of everyday griefs, sorrows, joys, and loves.

cg:

Absolutely. My characters' experiences are alloyed with their political beliefs, allegiances, divisions, disappointments. My own bitterly divided Cuban family is a constant reminder of how profoundly the personal and the political are intertwined. In my clan, every political stance is a betrayal to someone we love. So, love is never simple for my characters.

fla:

In Vanishing Maps death is not doom and gloom, but rather a state of coexistence that's celebrated.

cg:

In my fictional worlds, people close to us never seem to really die. They're always present somehow—and not only in the supernatural ways ghosts may haunt. I believe that we carry inside of us those who have died. They talk to us. They shape the decisions we make. We carry the forces of the dead within us. [End Page 70]

fla:

You...