Mixed Race Studies

“A Whole New Race”: Chinese Cubans and Hybrid Identities in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 7, Issues 1 & 2 (Fall 2009)
14 paragraphs
ISSN 1547-7150

Ann Marie Alfonso-Forero, Dissertation Editor
Graduate School, University of Miami

More so than its predecessors Dreaming in Cuban and The Agüero Sisters, Cristina García’s 2003 novel Monkey Hunting establishes her sense of Cubanness within the broader context of the Caribbean experience. More importantly, it seeks to create an inclusive and diverse sense of what it means to be Cuban that destabilizes the very notion of racial identification, which fails to account for the dynamic nature of identity and the importance of adopted cultural and religious traditions. What Monkey Hunting offers as an alternative is a process of identification through self-chosen cultural and religious hybridities that provides a source of agency in a time and place fraught with various forms of brutal and racialized socio-political oppression.
 
García, a Cuban-born novelist who has spent all but her first two years of life in the United States, addresses issues of race and identity in her previous novels, but does so in a way that makes use of themes and historical events closer to her own experience. These narratives take on Castro’s revolution, the condition of exile, and family politics and division, and are equally concerned with Cuba as they are with Cuban-American culture in the United States. Monkey Hunting surprised critics with its broader concerns and unusual subject matter. When asked during an interview in L.A. Weekly what made her choose to write about the legacy of a Chinese man in Cuba, García answered:

Monkey Hunting probably came from my first visit to a Chinese-Cuban restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, circa 1965. “You mean I get to order the black beans and the pork fried rice?” That blew my mind. Later, I got to thinking more seriously about compounded identities. My own daughter, for example, is part Cuban, Japanese and Russian Jew, with a little Guatemalan thrown in on my paternal grandmother’s side. Traditional notions of identity don’t work for her. I don’t think they work for a lot of people anymore. I wanted to explore this. (Huneven 38)

This response calls attention to García’s preoccupation with hybridity, which is evident throughout the text’s various narrative threads. Spanning over 150 years, four generations, and at least three continents, the novel concerns itself with issues of slavery, indentured servitude, colonization, the sugar plantation, and Cuba’s complex racial and political history, and presents readers with a Cuban identity that is inclusive of the Asian and African presences on the island. This paper argues that through the narrative of Chen Pan and his family, García explores the ways in which self-chosen hybridities allow for the inclusion of both Chinese and African cultures in Cuban identity and function against patriarchal Spanish colonial paradigms that tend to restrict identification along the lines of race and gender. Privileging cultural and religious hybridities over fixed racial identifications, García celebrates her characters’ ability to create fluid and dynamic identities, even if she is at moments ambiguous about the role of racial politics in their choices. Moreover, this preoccupation allows the novel to participate in Caribbean discourses surrounding race since, as Antonio Benítez-Rojo points out, “the Caribbean area… [is the] most extensive and intensive racial confluence registered by human histories” (199), and Cuba is no exception. Reading the novel as distinctly Caribbean, while also acknowledging it as a product of the Cuban-American exile community, requires that due attention be paid to issues of race and hybridity…

Read the entire article here.