The Routes of Global Nostalgia
 in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban

 Elena Machado Saez

S hit, I'm only twenty-one years old. How can I be nostalgic for my

 youth?": Pilar's question serves as a map for Cristina Garcia's
 Dreaming in Cuban and its labyrinth of journeys and migrations
(198). At her birth, Pilar inherits a mission from her grandmother, that
of recording a family history which will serve as an alternative to the
dominant Historical narrative. The family's exile, however, prevents
Pilar from having direct access to Cuba, the origin and subject of this
alternate historical project. Nostalgia consequently serves as the route
Pilar travels in order to recuperate her family memories as well as a
sense of her own identity and space of belonging. Entrance into a jour-
ney of nostalgia leads Pilar to complicate her relationship to Cuba and
her globalized context. Pilar's negotiation of her identity is neverthe-
less overshadowed and overdetermined by this nostalgia and its own
confused origins. Dreaming in Cuban ambivalently positions Pilar's
nostalgia as both a product of her creative imagination and a product
of globalization.1


 I' define globalization and globalism here as an intensified form of capitalism
that with the development of new technologies has led to an increased and uneven
global flow of products and culture. Obviously an enormous bibliography on
globalization exists, my ideas have been particularly influenced by Empire by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.