Resumen
Like many Hispanic authors writing in the United States, the Cuban-born novelist Cristina García inserts occasional words, phrases, and poems in Spanish into her best-selling novel,
Dreaming in Cuban. Rather than reflecting natural speech patterns, these insertions are highly literary and determine in part the psychological attachment of the empirical reader to the fictitious world of the novel. This essay addresses the ways in which this literary use of Spanish affects both monolingual, English-speaking readers and bilingual readers of English and Spanish. While English-only readers appreciate the open, multicultural aspects of the text, bilingual readers experience a unique level of understanding.
