Identity In Dreaming In Cuban

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The Struggle for Identity in Neculai Pieptu Dreaming in Cuban Professor Veronica Popescu – Multicultural Perspectives MA American Studies 1-st Year 01/28/2011 Dedication I would like to dedicate this essay to my graduate fellow MA colleagues as all of us are challenged these days to communicate better, appreciate each other, compete in a respectful and honest way and “dream” in a common language. The Struggle for Identity in Dreaming in Cuban This essay represents a humble attempt to understand the struggles an immigrant to a new country and a new culture faces in order to form his/her unique identity. Pilar Puente, the alter ego of Cristina Garcia, is one of the main characters in the touching novel Dreaming in Cuban. Caught between two different cultures, two different worlds and two different languages, Pilar struggles to discover her new Cuban American identity. We are going to take into consideration some of the most important events and factors that contributed and formed her unique bicultural identity. Where do I belong? What does it mean to have a national identity? Is this identity American or Cuban? Where are my roots? What does is feel to be a Latino/a, a bilingual, a hybrid, “being from two worlds, straddling the fence, belonging neither here nor there, belonging here and there, living in the borderlands?”1 How do families adapt to a different political, economic and social system, to something completely new and perhaps weird called communism? How do women cope in a patriarchal society? What is the reality like through women’s eyes? These questions require an honest answer if we are to understand the complicated concept of identity applied to Latino/a immigrants. In an interview about her autobiographical novels, Cristina Garcia, the author of Dreaming in Cuban, explains: I wanted to examine very closely the personal cost of what

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