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- ixPreface to the Revised Edition The facTs of Life on The hyPhen IkneW i Was on To someThing When, shoRTLy after this book’s original publication, Newsweek used the title of one of the chapters, “The Desi Chain,” for an article on the increasing impact of Latinos on Anglo-American culture. In the years since, Life on the Hyphen has been quoted, imitated, praised, and attacked. It is the criticisms that have interested me most of all, because I agree with some of them, particularly the objection that the book was too sanguine in its description of the dynamics of cultural contact. Playing with words, I say in the introduction that Cuban-American culture is defined by collusion rather than collision. I know now—and I knew then—that my celebration of cultural and linguistic hybridity gave short shrift to the human costs of collusion (hyphens hurt). Although I hinted at these costs by closing the book with a somber poem whose original title had been “Bilingual Blues,” at the time I was content to look the other way and keep my mind on the mambo: abre cuta güiri mambo, as the Cuban soneros used to say. And I still am. Even the driest, most lifeless scholarly monograph has a personal backstory . Mine is this: Life on the Hyphen was a two-hundred-page valentine to Mary Anne Pérez Firmat, whom I had just married when I was beginning to research the book. The idea for the title we came up with together during an afternoon of sunbathing and brainstorming at the Duke University faculty club. I wrote the book for her and for me, to make sense of our life together. Hence the pride of place given to the I Love Lucy show, the great Cuban-American love story. Almost two decades later, still married to Mary Anne, I continue to believe that the healthiest way to deal with the puzzles and adversities of a divided life is, in the words of Irving Berlin, to face the music and dance. Not as young as I used to be, there - x - Life on the Hyphen are times when my meneíto feels more like a limp. But I am still dancing . Cuban wisdom: “A mí que me quiten lo bailao.” Which, roughly but gently translated into the words of another American songwriter, means: “They can’t take that away from me.” This is not to say, however, that the costs of a life on the hyphen do not become more evident with the passing of time. For many Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits, the death of Celia Cruz in July 2003 signaled the end of an era, and not just musically. Before and after becoming the Queen of Salsa, Celia was La Guarachera de Oriente, probably the most recognizable Cuban exile in the world. When Celia left Cuba in 1959, she was in her mid-thirties; by the time she died in her home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, she had lived more than half of her life in exile. In one of the last songs she recorded, “Por si acaso no regreso” (In Case I Don’t Return), she spoke about the sorrow of dying far from her homeland. When she left Cuba, she says, she was certain that she would return at any moment; as the end of her life approaches, she realizes that she’s never going to. Celia Cruz is one of several hundred thousand Cuban exiles who staked their lives on a return that didn’t take place, among them the musicians who were kind enough to share with me their knowledge of Cuban music: Rolando Laserie, René Touzet, Rosendo Rosell, Cachao.Their death—the passing of the first generation—not only has diminished those of us who remain but has changed our place in the community of exiles. Although one tends to think of generational location as fixed—once a one-anda -halfer, always a one-and-a-halfer—this is not entirely true. When the first generation moves on, one-and-a-halfers move up; we become first generation—if not chronologically, existentially. Having spent our lives wedged between vintage Cubans and recent Americans—our parents and our children—we realize that we are now the only Cubans in the room, the only ones who remember. Having inherited our elders’ recollections of Cuba, we have now to perpetuate their memories as well as their memory . Having built a...

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