Consuming Nostalgia: Nostalgia and the Marketplace in Cristina Garcia and Ana Menendez

Abstract

her essay Eating Other, bell hooks observes that Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up dull dish that is mainstream white (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? this essay, I address this question by examining representation of marketing culture in two American works: Cristina Garcia's 1997 novel The Aguero Sisters and title story from Ana Menendez's prize-winning 2001 collection Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. Both show how non-Cubans (who eat other) and Cubans themselves market, buy, and purchase American culture. my analysis, I focus on nostalgia, which is key to selling America. A corollary of exile identity that much of America has claimed, nostalgia is ubiquitous in American literature. Nostalgia appears in widely acclaimed writing of Garcia and Menendez, as well as in 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 diaspora have addressed specific issue of commodified nostalgia. Garcia and Menendez recognize that because nostalgia is central to 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, 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 past (Appadurai, Jameson, Stewart). For critics, 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 perfection of the old days. Other observers, such as Marilyn Halter in Shopping .for Identity. 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 consumer presumably wants to return. The longing for is implied in very term nostalgia: a seventeenth-century doctor sutured words nostos (return home) and algia (pain) to describe extreme forms of homesickness exhibited by mercenaries on duty away from home (Davis, Yearning 1). contemporary times, return to place or past ways of life may be impossible or inconvenient. As a result, need for strong cultural identities is fulfilled through 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 sale of identities and 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 original definition of nostalgia. What they oppose are stale, stultifying forms of nostalgia that serve consumerism and dominant exile politics. The characters in novel and short story experience collective nostalgia in ambiguous and conflicted ways. While disbelieving idealizing certainties of politicized and marketed nostalgia, they cannot help but be enveloped by nostalgic link to past. …