Consuming Nostalgia: Nostalgia and the Marketplace in Cristina García and Ana Menéndez

In her essay "Eating the Other," bell hooks observes that "Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture" (21). As hooks suggests, consumerism valorizes selected aspects (e.g. cuisine, fashion, music) of cultures and populations that are otherwise marginalized. What happens when racially or ethnically identified subjects commodify their own identities? In this essay, I address this question by examining the representation of marketing culture in two Cuban American works: Cristina Garcia's 1997 novel The Aguero Sisters and the title story from Ana Menendez's prize-winning 2001 collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. Both show how non-Cubans (who "eat the other") and Cubans themselves market, buy, and purchase Cuban American culture. In my analysis, I focus on nostalgia, which is the key to selling Cuban America. A corollary of the exile identity that much of Cuban America has claimed, nostalgia is ubiquitous in Cuban American literature. Nostalgia appears in the widely acclaimed writing of Garcia and Menendez, as well as in the work of other well-known "1.5 generation" (Perez-Firmat 2) authors (1) such as Oscar Hijuelos, Achy Obejas, Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Zoe Valdes, and others. However, few works of the Cuban diaspora have addressed the specific issue of commodified nostalgia. Garcia and Menendez recognize that because nostalgia is central to Cuban American consciousness, it is important to examine all its aspects, including its commodified forms. I show how in The Aguero Sisters and in "In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd," the authors created unique characters, who struggle both with an overpowering sense of nostalgia and with its transformation into a consumer product. Scholars of contemporary culture have critiqued nostalgia's role in perpetuating a consumer culture built on excessively idealizing and politically conservative visions of the past (Appadurai, Jameson, Stewart). For critics, the past that is used to sell products (e.g. in Currier and Ives commercials) is often "manufactured" (Appadurai), that is, not based on experience, and yet evokes longing for the perfection of "the old days." Other observers, such as Marilyn Halter in Shopping .for Identity. the Marketing of Ethnicity, have also suggested that consumers now assume or assert ethnicity and identity through commodities that they buy. Nostalgia is central to identity-for-purchase because it "manufactures" collective history as a bygone, ideal experience of everyday life, community, landscape, and heritage, to which the consumer presumably wants to return. The longing for "return" is implied in the very term "nostalgia": a seventeenth-century doctor sutured the words nostos (return home) and algia (pain) to describe the extreme forms of homesickness exhibited by mercenaries on duty away from home (Davis, Yearning 1). In contemporary times, return to place or past ways of life may be impossible or inconvenient. As a result, the need for strong cultural identities is fulfilled through the purchase of foods, clothes, crafts, travels et al., which are marketed through nostalgic discourses. I argue in this essay that although Garcia and Menendez treat such marketing and purchasing of collective history critically, they do not dismiss nostalgia as a whole. For Garcia and Menendez, nostalgia does not solely enable the sale of identities and the preservation of conservative politics. Nor is nostalgia simply what one critic called "Cuban America's most profound psychic addiction" (Ortiz 73). The authors take care to validate loss, mourning, and suffering evoked in the original definition of nostalgia. What they oppose are the stale, stultifying forms of nostalgia that serve consumerism and dominant exile politics. The characters in the novel and short story experience collective nostalgia in ambiguous and conflicted ways. While disbelieving the idealizing certainties of politicized and marketed nostalgia, they cannot help but be enveloped by the nostalgic link to the past. …