How 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.

The United States of America has been known to be a land of opportunity and freedom with the persisting idea of the “American Dream”. The "American Dream" is defined as the equal opportunity for all citizens to become successful through hard work and determination. This guarantee of a better life has inspired many generations of immigrants to move to America in order to be included in the dream. Julia Alvarez, the Latina Leader Award winning author, reflects on her own personal experiences of immigrating and assimilating into American society in her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. The novel is about the Garcia family’s life in America before and after they fled from the Dominican Republic to escape the tyrannical dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Alvarez depicts the persistent struggles of racism, inability to find work, cultural identity, and rebellion of which all immigrant families faced while living in America. These struggles as a result can influence one’s perception of the meaning of being an American citizen. Alvarez accomplishes these changing perspectives within the Garcia family by writing the story in a form of a reflection within itself by the characters. The characters share their own perspectives of the meaning of being an American citizen, which indicates that outside influences have shaped each character differently. The Garcia Family 's views of being an U.S. citizen is divided individually based on the

Symbolism can be used in many different ways. Julia Alvarez uses it very well in her writing. Alvarez was born in the Dominican Republic and since she lived there it gives her a special connection to the girls in: How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents because they are based off real people. Alvarez uses symbolism very well in all her writing especially in How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents Julia Alvarez uses symbolism effectively in order to allow the reader to see deeper into the character's personality. Although Alvarez uses symbolism all throughout How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents there are only a few that a truely worth noting.

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

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.

In Reyna Grande’s memoir, The Distance Between Us, Grande explains how difficult it was for Reyna to grow up with many parental figures in her life. Reyna’s parents left Iguala, Mexico for the United States in search of work to build their dream home in Mexico. As a result, Reyna and her two siblings were sent to live with their cruel Abuela Evila. The living conditions (living condition in US and mexico) Reyna had many parental figures in her life that affected her identity, Tia Emperatriz, Mago, Mila, and Natalio, but Diana Savas had the greatest impact by mentoring and encouraging her to go to school and become a writer. Although Tia Emperatriz, Mago, Mila, and Natalio had an impact on Reyna’s identity, Diana Savas had the greatest parental effect on her because she was there when she

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.

She also talks about how she meant to be unimportant to the families so that she can to be treated as guest. Eventually when the author and her team get used to within the families they were studying, they have literally got the real life scenarios and

The main conflict of the novel stems from Dana’s transition and how it impacts her relationships, as well as her overall societal perception. The novel examines multiple relationships, but perhaps the most compelling is Dana’s relationship with the Banks family. We are first introduced to Dana through teenaged Carly Banks, daughter of divorced parents Allison and Will Banks. Carly is in the

Lastly, her family betrayed her by not listening to her side of the story after her sister told lies about her, and they betrayed her when they acted as if they did not care if she moved out of the house. In all of these actions, the family itself and certain members of the family are portrayed as uncaring, unsupportive, disrespectful, conniving, deceitful, and hateful to Sister. Through every action of the family, Sister is treated harshly, and she tries to not let this bother her. Yet, anger and bitterness build up inside of her until she cannot take it anymore. Consequently, it built up so much inside of her that it severely affected Sister so profoundly that she moved away from her home to get away from her family.

Unconsciously, we all speak different languages; we categorize the way we speak by the environment and people at which we are speaking too. Whenever a character enters an unfamiliar environment, they experiment with language to find themselves and understand reality. For immigrants, language is a means to retain one’s identity; however, as they become more assimilated in their new communities their language no longer reflects that of their identity but of their new cultural surroundings. When an immigrant, immigrates to a new country they become marginalized, they’re alienated from common cultural practices, social ritual, and scripted behavior. It’s not without intercultural communication and negotiation

In Gloria Anzaldúa article “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” she shows us how different worlds so close can be so different. Anzaldúa shows that people have restricted freedom in society by the social norms set in them. Anzaldúa pressed her awareness and distraught on how people treat her depending on the type of language she uses. She also explains some of her emotions towards the way people are like with speaking and listening to accents. The article is how Anzaldúa explains how culture and accent shapes a person’s identity by being controlled and oppressed to fit into the social norms, which is how she creates cracks using language and code switching.

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.

Collectively, the Mexican immigrants in this novel align their behaviors and their ambitions to those of American status. An example of this is when the young women attend school and excel and academically, and when their parents sustain well paying employment opportunities; hence, assimilation (Thorpe 2009). Assimilation allows society to sustain its symmetry as long as all societal members, despite the consequences of deviating from their ethnicity and racial identities, mutually embrace one dominant culture, the American culture (Leon-Guerrero 2016). Case in point, collectively, the characters in this novel avoid the anomie that surrounds them and instead fosters modalities that intrinsically motivate them to adapt to their captivity

The resentment within the young girl’s family is essential to the novel because one can understand the young girl better as she makes her decision.