Analysis Of How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents By Julia Alvarez

People wonder what it would be like for aliens to come to Earth. Being bombarded with so many new things at once would overwhelm them. It would be difficult for the aliens to assimilate within human society. However, that experience is what immigrants face all the time when coming to a new country. In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a family from the Dominican Republic escapes to the United States as immigrants. In the family, two of the four sisters named Yolanda and Carla have difficulties assimilating into their new environment. The two sisters face the problems of understanding their surroundings. Down the line in their future, they will face sacrifices in order to understand themselves. Alvarez uses Yolanda and Carla’s experience with immigration to demonstrate the difficulties of assimilating and the sacrifices an immigrant must make to completely acculturate.

“Don’t be afraid to start over.” Immigrants are moving from country to another country. They lose almost everything. Life could be so perfect, but then out of the blue everything starts going downhill from perfect. Esperanza Ortega from Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz goes through the same thing. Esperanza had to move from Mexico to California, and lost so much in her past life. Although Esperanza faced many challenges as an immigrant her biggest challenges were Mama got Valley Fever and Miguel lost his job on the railroad.

Growing up with parents who are immigrants can present many obstacles for the children of those immigrants. There are many problems people face that we do not even realize. Things happen behind closed doors that we might not even be aware of. Writers Sandra Cisneros and Amy Tan help us become aware of these problems. Both of these authors express those hardships in their stories about growing up with foreign parents. Although their most apparent hardships are about different struggles, both of their stories have a similar underlying theme.

In the course of reading two separate texts it is generally possible to connect the two readings even if they do not necessarily seem to be trying to convey the same message. The two articles, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, and “Coming Into Language” by Jimmy Santiago Baca, do have some very notable similarities. They are two articles from a section in a compilation about the construction of language. The fact that these two articles were put into this section makes it obvious that they will have some sort of connection. This essay will first summarize the two articles and break them down so that they are easily comparable; also, this essay will compare the two

The novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez, illustrates these challenges. Throughout the novel, we see how different aspects of culture shock impact the Garcia family. In this essay I will discuss how particular events change each family member’s Dominican cultural values and identity.

A dream can push people into the upper level, but dreams do not always come true. The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez is about immigrants who move to America. This is a book of the story collection; also, it combines different emotions, especially love and guilt. Alma loves her daughter, Maribel, more than anything else like every parent does, so Maribel is the only reason they are in America. Alma does as much as she can to Maribel. Although Alma is a newcomer to America, she becomes stronger because of her daughter.

One of the main sources of tension in How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, written by Julia Alvarez, are the sisters search for a personal identity among contrasting cultures. Many of the characters felt pressure from two sources, the patriarchal culture that promotes traditional gender roles and society of nineteen-sixties and seventies America. Dominican tradition heavily enforces the patriarchal family and leaves little room for female empowerment or individuality, whereas in the United States, the sixties and seventies were times of increasingly liberal views and a rise in feminist ideals. This conflict shaped the identities of the characters in Alvarez’s novel and often tore the characters apart for one another.

Cristina Henriquez’, The Book of Unknown Americans, folows the story of a family of immigants adjusting to their new life in the United States of America. The Rivera family finds themselves living within a comunity of other immigrants from all over South America also hoping to find a better life in a new country. This book explores the hardships and injustices each character faces while in their home country as well as withina foreign one, the United States. Themes of community, identity, globalization, and migration are prevalent throughout the book, but one that stood out most was belonging. In each chacters viewpoint, Henriquez explores their feelings of the yearning they have to belong in a community so different than the one that they are used to.

Being an immigrant in the United States is very difficult because many people are introduced to a new language, people, etc. The poem “English Con Salsa” by Gina Valdes explains the struggle of an immigrant in the United States. Gina Valdes was born in Los Angeles, California. She grew up on both sides of the border. Her writing was affected by growing up on both sides of the border. She got a degree from the English and Spanish departments from the University of California. The poem English con Salsa explains her struggle of being introduced to a new country and how hard it was to get use to everything.

New Country, New Me: Taking Back Control in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

The "Public and Private Language", by Richard Rodriguez and "Mother Tongue", by Amy Tan are great examples of how two immigrant families can have their similarities and differences. For a long time, the American people have looked at immigrants through their own eyes and perspectives. Never do people think to change gears and walk in the footsteps of a stranger. In this case, people need to look through the eyes of an immigrant and see that one immigrant family is not the same as the other. The different people may have connections with the same or different cultures, however, they have different obstacles and hardships with adjusting to a new way of living.

““From the Caribbean,” I answered vaguely, for if I specified, no one was quite sure on what continent our island was located. “Really? I’ve been to Bermuda. We went last April for spring vacation. I got the worst sunburn! So, are you from Portoriko?”” (Alvarez). The teacher mispronounced Puerto Rico, and said it the American way. Julia was used to it by now but it still annoyed her that people couldn’t pronounce any Hispanic or Latino names. She wanted people to know her and her family as a normal family and not one with weird names that they couldn’t pronounce, she wanted people to be able to pronounce their names so that she could fit in more than she did and so that she would feel more

The teenage years and transition to adulthood is in itself a very difficult period. Blending or fitting in are omnipresent issues that must be dealt with. For children of immigrants, this difficulty is only intensified through language. Both Amy Tan and Khang Nguyen strategically use narrative anecdotes and employ several rhetorical devices to illustrate this struggle in their works, “Mother Tongue” and “The Happy Days,” respectfully. Amy Tan chooses her childhood home as the primary setting of her work. This allows her to focus primarily on her conversations and interactions with her mother. However, she also gives several anecdotes in which her mother’s background and improper English negatively affected her, outside the home. Through

In her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Dominican author Julia Alvarez demonstrates how words can become strange and lose their meaning. African American writer Toni Morrison in her novel Sula demonstrates how words can wound in acts of accidental verbal violence when something is overheard by mistake. In each instance, one sees how the writer manipulates language, its pauses and its silences as well as its words, in order to enhance the overall mood of each work.

To begin, Esmerelda Santiago and her family immigrated into the United States from Puerto Rico. Immigration means, the movement of persons into a non-native country. At this point in time the family only consisted of Esmerelda, her seven younger siblings, Mami, Tata, Tío Chico, and Don Julio. After moving around from apartment to apartment, they finally settled down in Brooklyn, New York. Esmerelda explains that they came to Brooklyn, “in search of medical care for my youngest brother, Raymond, whose toes were nearly severed by a bike chain” (Santiago 1998: 3). Mami hoped for better medical attention for her child than she would have received in Macún, Puerto Rico. Esmerelda also describes the apartment they currently lived in on McKibbin Street, in New York as, “more substantial that any of our houses in Puerto Rico” (Santiago 1998: 6). This shows her level of living back in Puerto Rico was a worse living