How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents By Julia Alvarez Summary

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 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.

You can see how Maria’s El Salvador is empty of people, full only of romantic ideas. Jose Luis’s image of El Salvador, in contrast, totally invokes manufactured weapons; violence. Maria’s “self-projection elides Jose Luis’s difference” and illustrates “how easy it is for the North American characters, including the big-hearted María, to consume a sensationalized, romanticized, or demonized version of the Salvadoran or Chicana in their midst” (Lomas 2006, 361). Marta Caminero-Santangelo writes: “The main thrust of the narrative of Mother Tongue ... continually ... destabilize[s] the grounds for ... a fantasy of connectedness by emphasizing the ways in which [Maria’s] experience as a Mexican American and José Luis’s experiences as a Salvadoran have created fundamentally different subjects” (Caminero-Santangelo 2001, 198). Similarly, Dalia Kandiyoti points out how Maria’s interactions with José Luis present her false assumptions concerning the supposed “seamlessness of the Latino-Latin American connection” (Kandiyoti 2004, 422). So the continual misinterpretations of José Luis and who he really is and has been through on Maria’s part really show how very far away her experiences as a middle-class, U.S.-born Chicana are from those of her Salvadoran lover. This tension and resistance continues throughout their relationship.

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.

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

First of all, the setting of this novel contributes to the Rivera family’s overall perception of what it means to be an American. To start this off, the author chooses a small American city where groups of Latino immigrants with their own language and traditions, lived together in the same apartment building. All these immigrants experienced similar problems since they moved from their countries. For example, in the novel after every other chapter the author

Rafael Trujillo, a Dominican dictator, developed a harsh reputation as being one of the most violent and domineering leaders of South America in his thirty-one years of power. In The Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez provides insight into the effects of Trujillo’s infamy by sharing the stories of three Dominican sisters and their struggles to gain independence and speak their truth. The Dominican-American author dramatizes the lives of the Mirabal sisters, three historical women who were assassinated in 1961, for their involvement in the anti-Trujillo movement. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, a Cuban critic of Latin American literature, provides a bias insight with regards to the novel.

Alvarez's attitude about her and her family being different changes throughout the story when a series of events happen and change her perspective on her and her family’s names. In the beginning of the text Julia is not happy about how people pronounce her name. They say Judy or Julia (J-oo-l-ee-a). She finds it frustrating that people couldn’t pronounce any of her families name right because they were hispanic. “It took me awhile to get used to my new names. I wondered if I shouldn’t correct my teachers and new friends. But my mother argued that it didn’t matter. “You know what your friend Shakespeare said, ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’.” My family had gotten into the habit of calling any famous author “my friend” because I had begun to write poems and stories in English class. (Alvarez)” Julia wanted to correct her teachers and friends but didn’t because it would not change that it was her. She was tired of people getting her name wrong so much just because it was from another culture. Julia Alvarez wanted to have people call her the name that was given to her from the

One of the books that describes almost the whole entirety of the typical Hispanic household and the obstacles the women in the Hispanic household face would be the book written by Julia Alvarez called “How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”. The book is mainly about four Garcia sisters named Sandra, Yolanda, Carla, and Sofia which are from Dominican Republic. Alvarez starts the book by telling us what occurs currently in the sisters lives, then takes us back to their childhood. It ranges around the year 1989 to 1956, to when the book ends, but yet it was the start of the sisters lives.

The novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents focuses on four sisters and their attempts to fit in after moving from the Dominican Republic to the United States. The third sister, Yolanda, returns to the Dominican Republic at the beginning of the story to visit family and finds that instead of fitting in as she always had, she instead felt like an outsider in the land that she loved so much. Throughout the story, Yolanda continually tries to do things the way she always had, even though she experiences pushback from people around her. Yolanda is used to life in America, which is significantly safer than life in the Dominican Republic at the time. Instead, she

    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.

As the story progresses, Suzette’s mother becomes increasingly critical of Suzette for being “too American” and questions the authenticity of her “Haitian-ness.” Her mother’s criticism seems to be justified when she sees Suzette distancing herself from her Haitian values, “Would you get up and give an old lady like me your subway seat? In this state of mind, I bet you don’t even give up your seat to a pregnant lady. My mother, who is often right about that. Sometimes I get up and give my seat.

Esmeralda Santiago chronicles her beautiful life growing up in Puerto Rico and her early life in New York in When I Was Puerto Rican. Throughout her book she shares a number of these experiences which play significant roles in shaping her as an individual. She describes many of her trials and tribulations from the earliest part of her youth through to her life as a young adult. As her story progresses we watch Negi physically and emotionally grow into the woman she becomes. The transitions in Esmeralda's relationship with her mother, Monín, mirrors her coming of age over the course of her reflective memoir.

Peoples reactions towards others in their community emphasizes how influential the past has affected their lives both physically and psychologically. In an attempt to regain past experiences and memories to maintain their sanity, the characters in Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban slowly begin to deteriorate into a society that remains stagnant in economic development. The disjointed family of Celia and Jorge Del Pino attempt to live life through their own fantasies to either escape or embrace the overpowering effects of the Cuban revolution. These fantasies coerce the minds of each character into a period of exile, but despite this ambiguous harm inflicted upon themselves, their persistence to attain their idea of success blinds them