2009 ASTR Conference

Kimberly del Busto Ramírez, LaGuardia Community College ( CUNY )

When a displaced community re-forms to preserve a culture, the adjective “little” is frequently used to distinguish between the new location and the place for which it attempts to substitute—”Little Italy,” for example.  Of course, “Little Havana,” describes how a Cuban enclave has reproduced Havana in the district surrounding Calle Ocho in Miami.  “The adjective ‘little,’” Gustavo Pérez Firmat points out, “is equivocal…[w]hat is ‘little’ about little Havana is not only its size…but its diminished status as a deficient or incomplete copy of the original.”[1] The same way the Miami enclave substitutes for Havana, María Brito’s reproductions of her former home in Cuba—often life size and fully functioning—may still be perceived as being smaller.  Ana Mendieta’s process also functions by means of substitution, whether it is a little mound of earth signifying the island of Cuba (La Isla) or one large country (Mexico) standing as proxy for another (Cuba).  Memorials and reproductions are generated as coping mechanisms; they become “little ways” of accessing the homeland.  In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard proposes that larger ideas can be animated by such inversions of size, that by miniaturizing we take possession of a space or object remembered.[2] Both Mendieta and Brito have expressed feeling “uprooted” from their childhood homes—yet they credit exile as the single most significant circumstance for their lifelong careers as artists.  Through their work, they have sought to exteriorize the persistent anxiety that came with the displacement they experienced, making their exile tangible and visible in sculptural performances of home.  Because their childhood was still in progress when they were sent unaccompanied from Cuba to the U.S., sensations of unfinished business surround the lost homes that usually establish firm memorial foundations for exiles. Motherland, Miniature, and Memory… reveals how Mendieta and Brito fashion surrogate dwelling places through installations and site-specific rituals, performing impossible homecomings to an interrupted youth.  In these performances, rather than posing a scene in an imagined reality to be Cuba, a “little Cuba” is represented by environments unframed by a formal stage, potently retaining ersatz status, displaying inferiority to a remote “original.”

[1] Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 7.

[2] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 150.

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Kimberly del Busto Ramírez is Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia CC-CUNY where she teaches Composition, Drama, and Latino Literature. Her writing about the performances of the U.S.-Cuban Operation Pedro Pan Exodus has won a Centro de los Estudios Puertorriqueños Caribbean Exchange Grant, a Monroe Carell Fellowship, the first Elly Chovel award, and was featured at the Martin E. Segal Theatre as part of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs 2008 Immigrant Heritage Week. Her work is published in Cuban Studies Journal, Theatre Journal, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Collages & Bricolages, and she has served as a past Managing Editor of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre. Her plays have been featured at Los Angeles’s Breath of Fire Latino Theatre Ensemble New Works Festival, Met Life Nuestras Voces National Playwriting Competition at Repertorio Español, the Kennedy Center, Teatro del Pueblo, Primary Stages Studios, Arthur Saleen Theatre, 21st Century Playwrights Festival, the Hippodrome State Theatre, Latin American Theatre Today Festival, and Edward Albee’s Great Plains Theatre Conference Featured Play Lab. She is a member of Tribeca Performing Arts Center’s playwrights-in-residence group “America in Play,” holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in Theatre from CUNY Graduate Center, is a member of the Dramatists Guild, International Centre for Women Playwrights, and serves as co-founding Artistic Director of Dos Alas Theatre (www.dosalas.org).

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