Abstract
Through an exploration of what can now be called Mariel writing across generations, this essay places contemporary second-generation Cuban-American literature written in English in dialogue with the Spanish-language production of “Generación del Mariel” writers who arrived in the U.S. via the 1980 Cuban exodus. Through an analysis of selected works that revisit Mariel and its inherited memories as key components of the Cuban-American story and of Cuban-American identity, this essay illustrates how diasporic subjectivity—in as much as it is conditioned by repeated intergenerational mediations—is also marked by the consequent interrogations of the past and its generational acts of transmission. The essay closely examines the role of Mariel in second-generation Cuban-American texts by Cecilia Rodríguez-Milanés, Chantel Acevedo, and Vanessa Garcia. Concerned with diasporic continuity and futurity, these writers, distanced or not yet born at the time of the exodus, exercise diasporic postmemory and reparative re-memoration to interrogate the silences and stereotypes that have been passed down about Mariel, and in doing so, reframe, revise, and re-voice the history, stories, and memories of Mariel in the diasporic present. These contemporary Mariel narratives, in their broad range and variability, are presented as ultimately sharing common discursive markings and links with “Generación del Mariel” writing, thus contributing to a collective present-day revaluation and reimagining of the exodus and its cultural production across time, languages, and generations.