THE ROUTES OF GLOBAL NOSTAI.GIA IN CRISTINA GARCIA'S DREAMI; IN CUBAN 93

word-for-word conversations (26). Nevertheless, as Pilar becomes
older, her ability to connect to her grandmother via her dreams fades,
and she is disconnected from Cuba with only her imagination left to
fulfill Celia's request.
 In the absence of this authentic connection to Cuba, Pilar finds her-
self attempting to recapture an alternate history via imagination as
well as developing a growing dependence upon commodities to fill this
void of memory. Pilar recognizes that there can be no access to "au-
thentic" origins precisely because of commodification, the only access
being to commodities or commodified experience. In particular, she
cites the mainstreaming of the punk movement as an example of the
market's workings. In a record shop, Pilar sees "a Herb Alpert record,
the one with the woman in whipped cream on the cover," noting that it
now looks so tame to her (197). The once-provocative cover of the
record album is revealed to be an illusion since "the woman who posed
for it was three months pregnant at the time" and "it was shaving cream,
not whipped cream, she was suggestively dipping into her mouth" (197).
Pilar demystifies the role of music as a counter-culture, but why is it
no longer invested with the same a ability to challenge norms? What
has changed? Pilar points to the entrance of punk music into the main-
stream market as a moment of loss:

 Franco and I commiserate about how St. Marks Place is a zoo these
 days with the bridge-and-tunnel crowd wearing fuschia Mohawks and
 safety pins through their cheeks. Everybody wants to be part of the
 freak show for a day. Anything halfway interesting gets co-opted,
 mainstreamed. We'll all be doing car commercials soon. (198)

 The markers of punk, the piercings, the hair, are no longer emblems
of a fringe movement. Instead, they have become mainstream fashion,
worn in order to fit in. Pilar remarks on the difficulty of being opposi-
tional without having those visual markers commodified, transformed
into a market category that is used in car commercials, for instance, to
reach a specific audience. However, it is not simply the visual aspects of
these movements that have "sold out," but the cultural production, punk
music itself, loses its edge via mass marketing. Pilar laments that in the
initial stages of punk music "you could see the Ramones for five bucks"
but "nowadays you have to pay $12.50 to see them with five thousand
bellowing skinheads who won't even let you hear the music" (199).
 While Pilar states that she wants to be "counted out" of this process
of commercialization, she actually depends upon it to find alternate