North Seattle Community College
Beginnings, Fall 2010
Seminar Assignment #5: Due Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Assignment: Read Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia pp. Contents-101
A. Preliminary thinking: Use these first two questions as reading prep before and
as you read the text: [The work you do on this book and seminar assignment
will/could be used in your Essay #2 if you develop a thesis that uses this text.]
1. Have you ever thought about an absent person, perhaps someone far away or even someone
who has died, as if he or she could hear you? Have you ever felt as if you knew what such a person
would say or do about a situation in your own life? What connects people across distance in your
experience? Across time?
2. Have you ever felt that formal education lacked some things you need to know? What sources
do you have for filling these gaps? What have you learned on your own that is important? Would you
try to teach it to someone else, a friend, or a child?
B. As you read this novel: Reflect and connect with the themes from our class:
culture, identity, family, presence, differences, and conflict.
C. Thinking and Writing Assignment: Answer one of the questions below, in PIE
format. You should answer your question using two paragraphs of PIE to back up
your assertions.
Question Choices:
1. Pilar Puente is dissatisfied with the things she learns in school. She asks, “Who chooses what we
should know or what is important?” And she adds, “Most of what I’ve learned that’s important I’ve
learned on my own, or from my grandmother” (28).
Question: What are some ways that people in this book represent the important things people learn on
their own or from a close family member?
2. This book also raises issues of conflict between generations. When Lourdes complains that “[no]
matter what I do, Pilar hates me”(74). Her dead father, with whom she has an ongoing conversation,
reassures her, saying that Pilar doesn’t hate her mother; “She just hasn’t learned to love you yet” (74).
Question: How does this conversation show how two generations in a family develop conflicts and
seek healing as they develop a more adult perspective?
3. What is the importance of the sections containing Celia’s letters? In a letter dated February 11, 1949,
Celia remarks that, reading the plays of Moliere, she has been wondering “what separates suffering
from imagination” (101).
Question: Which characters in this novel represent this statement and analyze why?
4. Different characters believe in different powers. The pious Felicia “remembers how when she was in
grammar school the paraphernalia of faith had proved more intriguing than its overwrought lessons.”
Celia, who is not a believer, is “wary of powers she didn’t understand” (76).
Question: Analyze and talk about other powers that are feared, sought out, or invoked by the
characters throughout the novel?
5. “The familiar,” Celia writes in one of her letters, “is familiar and deadly” (99). Later, the narrator
says that “Celia’s life resumes a stale, familiar air” (158). What offsets deadly familiarity? Is there any
situation in which the familiar is dear or healing? This novel is about those who leave one culture and
take up life in another yet the characters don’t completely leave behind their culture or connections to
that identity and family.
Question: How does Garcia show us—in her characters’ story from the beginning to the end of the
novel— her attitude towards this culture shifting and search for ones own identity.
SEMINAR RUBRIC FOR EVALUATION OF SEMINAR PAPERS:
After completing your seminar paper, take ten or fifteen minutes to review your paper. Does it
meet the criteria below?
CONTENT AND IDEAS:
__________________ 15 POINTS
 Answering a question with PIE (Point/Illustration/Example) paragraphs
 Making statements that analyze and illustrate with direct quotations or close paraphrases how
the text answers the questions
 Providing explanations and explications of the question or ideas
 Including evidence of understanding what the text says, what it means, and why it is important.
VOICE/REFLECTION/RESPONSE:
___________________ 5 POINTS
 Reflection/writer’s reader response to the text
 Experience of reading and connections to the themes of our class: COMMUNICATION
ACROSS
CULTURES/IDENTITY/FAMILY/MEMORY/PRESENCE/DIFFERENCES/CONFLICT
FORMAT/ EDITING/ PROOFREADING:
 Following Assignment Directions
 Using MLA in-text citation correctly
 Editing and proofreading
[23-25= Check +]
[20-22= Check]
____________________ 5 POINTS
[17-19=Check -] BELOW 17=NOT PASSING