How Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Essay

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.

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.

Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue is divided into five sections and an epilogue. The first three parts of the text present Mary/ María’s, the narrator, recollection of the time when she was nineteen and met José Luis, a refuge from El Salvador, for the first time. The forth and fifth parts, chronologically, go back to her tragic experience when she was seven years old and then her trip to El Salvador with her son, the fruit of her romance with José Luis, twenty years after she met José Luis. And finally the epilogue consists a letter from José Luis to Mary/ María after her trip to El Salvador. The essay traces the development of Mother Tongue’s principal protagonists, María/ Mary. With a close reading of the text, I argue how the forth

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.

The book Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, focuses on the immigrant experience in America and how people make the hard choice to leave their homeland in search of a new life. The main character Eilis, makes the hard of decision of leaving her small town in Ireland for Brooklyn. Eilis struggles with feelings of homesickness and ponders weather or not she made the right choice. Yet, she begins to make new memories in New York and meets Tony, a kind Italian-American boy. Eilis soon becomes excited about her future in America. However, tragedy strikes and she is suddenly called back to Ireland. When she returns, she remembers the beauty of her old town begins to question why she left in the first place. Eilis faces the dilemma of the migrant and reaches

Moving to any new place is scary and life changing. Try moving to a new country. In the novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, the Garcίa family does just that. The family of six make a huge transition by moving from the Dominican Republic to the United States of America. The four daughters feel left out of the decision to move. Of the four girls, Sofía García seems to be the most independent. Sofía takes control of her life and rebels against her parents by: flaunting her sexuality, doing drugs, and dropping out of college.

The Southwest United States is an area of great diversity. It is located on the border between the US and Mexico. In this region there are four main ethnicities represented: Hispanics, African Americans, Anglo Americans, and Native Americans. These groups interact daily working in the same offices and going to school together. Youth of each ethnicity face risks as they grow up. By focusing on the Hispanic adolescent girl the extent of the possible risks to one ethnicity can be explored. These risks will include motivation at school, the risk of dropping out of school, the at-risk classification, which includes gang involvement, and teen pregnancy. The results of studies focused

her younger brother Jonas, and her head strong mother are separated from their father and deported to

Many young second generation daughters of Mexican heritage has grown up with a distinctive gender norm. In the midst of the second world war, the expression of freedom and equality spread throughout the country. This initiates for women to become more tuned to the social affairs the men had left behind. Thus, immigration brought a lot of Mexican families into Los Angeles. Double exposure to familial expectations and the American way of life brought in a sense of desperation of trying to balance both. The second generation daughters who have been exposed to the loudly spoken

The mediocre speakers are tasked with translation between their family and the rest of the world. They learn about handling adult responsibilities and protecting their families from the world's criticism before they even finish elementary school. These children learn that there is an unspoken dynamic of us and them, with their families being the underdogs. The world is pushing them to adapt to this new society. Their surroundings preach conformity to this new nation. All the while they try to maintain connection with their past world and rich culture. They endure torment from ignorant peers, are labeled terrible names, and constantly face underestimation from those who view non-native speakers as incompetent. This kind of environment feeds their insecurity and requires repeated effort to disprove the assumptions of others, but where most would give up their efforts, immigrant children persevere. They learn to use their environment to their advantage. For them, the media is now an interesting way to pick up on the language and slang the other kids use. With these newfound words and knowledge the children have more confidence to approach new people and attempt to make

Just Like Us by Helen Thorpe is “The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America.” The story revolves around four high school students; Marisela who is a gaudy, driven, dramatic girl who wears “twice as much makeup as anybody else in her circle.”(8) Yadira who is a strong and reserved girl who “never gave away anything important with her facial expressions.”(8) Elissa is a star athlete and Clara usually dresses like a tomboy. They are all eighteen years of age and top students at Theodore Roosevelt High School together in Denver, Colorado, whose parents all came to the United States illegally from Mexico. All four of the girls have grown up in the United States. They

    America is a country that was created and settled by immigrants from many different lands. These immigrants came to America in search of the "American Dream" of freedom and a better way of life, and their narratives have been recorded by various authors in both fiction and non-fiction stories. But can the fiction genre be considered a reliable source for studying the immigrant narrative? If American immigrant literature is to be used as a reliable source for understanding the immigrant experience, one needs to justify that this literature properly tracks the history of the immigrant narrative.

Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia and Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas share compelling stories that detail the struggles of identity formation in Cuban and Puerto Rican Americans. Both novels describe the social and generation differences that surround common issues faced by Latinos in America. Thomas’s memoir focuses on the perspective of Piri, a young man, that gets involved in the streets of the ghetto that eventually lead to a complex path in his search for his identity. Garcia’s novel takes a similar stance, but from women that vary in age and experience. Throughout both pieces, location becomes an important factor that influences the recollection of past memories and social class. Piri concludes "Spanish Harlem" as his only