Figurative Language In Julia Alvarez's Essay, All-American Girl

For more than 300 years, immigrants from every corner of the globe have settled in America, creating the most diverse and heterogeneous nation on Earth. Though immigrants have given much to the country, their process of changing from their homeland to the new land has never been easy. To immigrate does not only mean to come and live in a country after leaving your own country, but it also means to deal with many new and unfamiliar situations, social backgrounds, cultures, and mainly with the acquisition and master of a new language. This often causes mixed emotions, frustration, awkward feelings, and other conflicts. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, the author

¬¬¬In Torres Saillant’s article New York Dominican Writers, the number of political writers and the number of female writers call my attention. I was aware Dominican presence in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century (¬¬¬Torres-Saillant 148). Dominican writers come to the United States in the first place because the parents’ desire to be expose their children to “American spirit” or it was to escape Trujillo’s violent regime (¬¬¬Torres-Saillant 147). To Dominican Republic, United States was considered freedom and riches. For example, in Pedro Henriquez Urena’s poems about live in New York, he writes how having the ability to take vacations back to Dominican Republic in the summer show class privilege (¬¬¬Torres-Saillant

Junot Díaz’s “Fiesta, 1980” relates a story of Yunior, a young Dominican boy, and what he experiences in his family trip to a party. In narrating the story, Yunior employs a unique choice of a cultural shift in diction; there is a continuous change between English and Spanish words, which creates both a sense of familial intimacy and cultural struggle in adjusting to the United States. Additionally, Yunior tells the story in a past-tense narrative, thereby allowing himself the room to express a scene both in an immature perspective as a child, as well as a mature one as an older, more reflective version of himself. Altogether, the integration of two different languages and two different perspectives work together to portray a more holistic picture of Yunior’s childhood experience.

America is characterized as a country of endless opportunities and freedom. People risk their lives to escape their countries searching for a diversified and opportunistic nation in search of a better quality of life. However, foreigners face a possible likelihood of being unable to escape poverty due to their immigration status and the disadvantage of lacking educational accomplishments. Numerous Americans have become outraged over time due to the decreased employment opportunities and have placed their blame towards non-citizens. Due to the vast majority of these aliens belonging to Mexico, the racial assumption continues to be directed at Mexicans when referring to immigrants. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem, “So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans,” centralizes on the misconception of Mexicans commandeering positions in the workforce from native-born American citizens. Baca imposes his belief that non-citizen workers are not imposing themselves in the workforce and creates many visualizations for his audience through his experiences on the racial stereotype. This literary piece creates an emotional topic between the speaker and the audience which allows people who oppose to understand the struggles that immigrants go through. Baca emphasizes and verbally illustrates the irrational accusations directed at aliens using mockery to battle with the truth towards their ideology and to connect with his audience deeply.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz tells the story of a family of Dominican immigrants, focusing primarily on the life of Oscar de León, a descendant of the diaspora that directly experienced the horrors of the Trujillo regime of the mid 20th century. The de Leon family can’t seem to escape the fukú, the seemingly eternal curse that has afflicted the new world for centuries. In order to tell Oscar’s story, Diaz uses the postmodern narrative to weave a story that is not only emotionally potent, but most importantly as a tool to depict the unique, nuanced perspectives of a generation of youths whose identities are both divergent from their parent culture, while simultaneously deeply rooted in its ideals and inescapable

Reinaldo Arenas’ love for Cuba is metaphorically illustrated throughout the story. He allows the readers to imagine that his “mother” has died, when in reality, the narrator’s mother is a symbolic representation of his once beloved country. For instance, he demonstrates his love for his "mother" when he melancholically recalls how his mother gathered him and his siblings together at Christmas time or other traditional activities (Arenas 315). That is to enunciate, when he remembers all the past experiences

Alfonso Arau’s Like Water for Chocolate (1993) can be read as an allegorical examination of the Mexican Revolution, tracing the effects of the conflicting ideologies underlying the revolution through the displacement onto the family structure. At once removed and central to understanding the narrative, this portrayal of the Mexican Revolution valorizes and romanticizes the contributions of women. It both informs the spectator that this is at once a historical reenactment of the Revolution at a microcosm level, the family, and through the family constructs a

In 1963, accompanied with her family, Tanya Barrietos migrate to the United States Of America at the age of three. As Tanya’s parents settle in West Texas they invoke a rule of not speaking nor reading Spanish in the house. She demanded her parents to speak to her in Spanish, but they believe their daughter had a better chance to be successful in America if she could only speak Engish. They felt Barrietos would be portrait by her peers as “true American “. During that stage in her life she was dismissive of being a latina. My comprehessive examination about the author feelings towards her ethnic language was negative due to the fact that she saw a lot of Hispanics as waitress, and cleaning hotels which in those times were one of the few jobs they could get due to the fact they could not speak English.` .

In 1999 Marjorie Agosín a spanish professor at Wellesley College wrote, “Always Living in Spanish: Recovering the Familiar, through Language,” for Poets and Writers Magazine which was originally written in spanish. The author wrote about how she had left her country as child and migrated to the United States. She talked about the things she had to face every day for simply being a foreigner. Throughout her story she expresses the actions she took to survive living in a new country, and to keep the connection towards her country alive. Writing poems in spanish was Agosín’s way of soothing the sorrow she felt for what she had left behind, it was also her way of staying in touch with her culture and her way of making the unfamiliar more familiar.

In “This (Illegal) American Life,” by Maria Andreu states that she was an Argentinian immigrant who went through difficult times in order to get to America. She considered herself as an American, and didn’t want to ruin her assumed role. To start off, Andreu’s parents went to New York to make money with the visa they received, but their visa expired and they decided to stay. When she was six years old, her grandfather died. She and her mother attended his funeral in Argentina. Her father planned for them to come back in a month, but they got stuck in Argentina for two years. Even though Audreu had the chance to experience her native culture, she still missed her lifestyle in America. Her father found smugglers who helped them cross the Mexican

Reyna Grande is an award winning novelist and memoirist whose writing is deeply rooted from her experiences and Latina heritage. In her memoir, The Distance Between Us, Grande distinctly recounts her early childhood to her present day life, focusing on her journey from Mexico to America. Grande’s father left the family when she was only two years old to “El Otro Lado,” the United States. Her family was immensely poor and in order to build themselves a house, her father moved to America for a better job and opportunities. Later, he calls for her mother to join him and both leave Grande and her siblings to their overburdened household and abusive grandmother. Grande saw the United States as a higher power that mercilessly stole her parents and caused them to live miserably as “orphans” for years (17). Grande and her siblings suffered much torment after their parents left. Later, Grande persuades her father to bring her to America despite being very young. She then endures to fulfill her father’s expectations and make him believe that bringing her to America was a good investment. Grande’s memoir is heartbreaking as it exhibits her grieving over her parents’ absence and initially not comprehending why they left. Immigration creates countless rifts in families, but there are situations where people simply cannot stay in their home country.

The lack of inclusion of the work of Dominican women authors into the literary curriculum has served as one of the catalysts of my academic career, which began at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD), in the Dominican Republic, as I pursued a Licenciatura en letras. A concentration in Spanish and Latin-American Literature at CUNY’s Hunter College allowed me to delve into the works of writers from the Hispano-Caribbean. Nonetheless, the majority of these writers were men. As I near the end of my second year of study in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies PhD program at the University of Chicago, I look forward to the opportunity of conducting preliminary research for my dissertation at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, from

Alvarez is always rooting for the underdog. She despises hierarchies and always imagines a world of equity and unity. She says happily, “everybody is part of la familia” (Heredia page 5). She is not a mother. Alvarez felt her childless life was a disgrace to her identity as a Latina. She pondered and questioned, “what does it mean to be a childless woman?” (5). That question induced her to an introspective state of mind. Consequently, she answered the questions she was seeking in her groundbreaking essay, “Imagining Motherhood.” Conversely, she did not get married until she was much older. Similarly, to her characters, she always felt out of place. She never had an attachment to any place or thing. The only attachment she had was to her own

This story reflects the story of a Dominican family’s life in New York after they were force to flee from their homeland. The family discovers their father’s involvement in a plot to over through the country’s leaders. This Pura Belpre awarded book reflects a cultural experience for portraying the author’s outstanding work.

Throughout my years of living, I have lived in various houses but my grandmother’s house in the Dominican Republic is the one most significant to me. Indeed, this house wasn’t the most lavish nor the most spacious one in the neighborhood but it occupies a special place in my heart, because this is the house where I grew up at. I left my grandmother house fourteen years ago and some details are out of my grasp. The memory of my grandmother Beatriz’s house now serves as a symbol of my childhood. When the only things that I was worried about was having fun with my friends by also being free of responsibilities.