ROCÍO G. DAVIS

The complex discourse of the mother-daughter
relationship, as well as the imaginative inscrip-
tion of the lost homeland, occupies a prominent
place in the thematics of immigrant literature in the
United States. Ethnic writing in general often reflects
gender conflicts transmitted through culturally con-
structed but frequently misinterpreted roles, specifically
those of mothers. Emblematic novels such as Maxine Hong Kingston's
Woman Warrior and Toni Morrison
Beloved revolve around ambivalent relationships with
the mother or mother figure, as well as other female
members of the family. These texts are frequently narrat-
ed by protagonists who must necessarily deal with the
implications of specific maternal discourse (or the lack
thereof) in the process of self-identification and affirma-
tion. The place of the mother -- personally, socially, cul-
turally -- directs, modifies, and influences the daugh-
ters' responses to both individual and cultural demands.
Ethnic texts such as these highlight questions of identifi-
cation with and differentiation from the mother, empha-
sizing a need for understanding and bonding between
mothers and daughters as a fundamental step toward
self-awareness and mastery of the culture. Often the texts
imply the need for the daughter to take on and continue
maternal stories, transforming them literally and
metaphorically with their own lives and experiences.

Cultural inscriptions by ethnic women offer an inter-
esting analysis of the hermeneutics of female representa-
tion and access to the world, yet cannot be divorced
from forms of orientation toward the mother or fore-
mother. The pattern of the maternal figure as origin and
daughter as perpetuation, extension, or completion
repeatedly appears as a necessary starting point to the
drama of the tenuous negotiation of identity and
difference within the ambivalent universe of filiality. As
Nancy Chodorow has pointed out, "In any given society,
feminine personality comes to define itself in relation
and connection to other people more than masculine
personality does" (44). Emphasis on relationships leads
to a reevaluation of personal and communal tragedies
that oblige the daughters to look back to the mothers,
whose image and personality are often inseparable from
community history and values. These texts often involve
a return to the maternal, which leads to the appreciation
of community history and forging of communal bonds
with, first, the immediate family and then the larger
gender and cultural group.

The novel here analyzed, Cristina García Dreaming
in Cuban, centers on the complicated negotiations of
mother-daughter bonds. Garcia tells the stories of three
generations of Cuban women and their experiences with
revolution and immigration through a blending of first-
and third-person narrations, with epistolary sections
that convey the rich texture of intersecting positionalities
and overlapping worlds. At the center of the novel is
Pilar Puente, born in Cuba and raised in Brooklyn, who
must deal with her antipathetic relationship with her
mother, Lourdes, and her longing for her grandmother,
Celia. Similarly, Lourdes and Felicia, Celia's two daugh-
ters, struggle to unravel their complex ties with their
mother as well as those with their own daughters. The
novel thus presents a composite portrait of diverse
mother-daughter relationships, offering a multiperspec-
tive vision of the possibilities for division and unity,
adaptation and adjustment, separation and bonding.
The mother-daughter dance of approach and withdrawal
is mirrored in the separate and interrelated sections on
each of the characters, the shifts in temporality, geogra-
phy, and narrative voice illustrating the tangled web
of affinity between and among the characters and their
homelands.

In the tradition of breaking silence that has become
one of the shaping myths in ethnic writing by women,
maternal storytelling becomes a medium of self-inscrip-
tion and subjectivity, as well as an instrument of inter-
subjectivity and dialogue. The separate accounts of all
the characters, mothers and daughters, are converted
into chronicles of individual empowerment and self-
affirmation. García opts for a narrative stance that
includes multiple voices, offering individual versions of
events and engaging in complex dialogues. There is, fur-
ther, a sense of collectivity in the text, according to
which the diverse voices that speak discern self-referen-
tial hints at definition through the juxtaposition of the
other voices in the narrative. The concept of the isolated
self is continually questioned, as the individual accounts

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