How The Garcia 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.

Identity is a group of characteristics, data or information that belongs exactly to one person or a group of people and that make it possible to establish differences between them. The consciousness that people have about themselves is part of their identity as well as what makes them unique. According to psychologists, identity is a consistent definition of one’s self as a unique individual, in terms of role, attitudes, beliefs and aspirations. Identity tries to define who people are, what they are, where they go or what they want to be or to do. Identity could depend on self-knowledge, self-esteem, or the ability of individuals to achieve their goals. Through self-analysis people can define who they are and who the people around them

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.

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.

Identity is defined as “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is” (Oxford University Press). Personal identity deals with questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people. Some of these questions are familiar that happen to all of us every once in a while: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? There are many different categories that define us as people (Olson). Our Race, Class, and Culture define who we are so much that it affects how we should live our life.

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

Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American that documents her Hispanic experience in her novels, essays, and poems. Alvarez rose to fame with her most prominent semi-autobiographical novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, along with the sequel Yo and In The Time of The Butterflies for their importance to postcolonial literature because of their exploration of the Caribbean diaspora in terms of the presence the United States had in the Dominican Republic. She is best known for her novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, which redefines the U.S. Latino identity with a mix of fiction, fact, and autobiography related through the perspectives of multiple narrators. She is awarded with the Pura Belpré award for writing for her portrayal

‘How the Garcia girls lost their accents’ by Julia Alvarez talks about the four girls fleeing to the united states after their father’s attempt to overthrow dictator is undiscovered. They arrived in Brooklyn, New York to a life totally different from the one back home where their name inspired respect and had dozens of maids serving them fine foods in silverware, but had to live in fear of uncles disappearing by the hand of the secret police. In the new world their parents try to hold onto their old traditions, but the girls have a different idea and instead try to find new lives for themselves but find themselves caught between the old and the new world. The novel tells their struggle to fit in and to express/communicate themselves. The story is all about one of the many aspects of the immigrant experience; language barrier and the power of word/being able to express oneself. The book is extremely popular among Hispanic immigrants for its relatableness. Although an unpopular opinion, I wouldn’t recommend Millennials to read the novel because its complex storyline, poor transitions between stories, characters difficult to

When the Garcia Girls immigrated to the United States and established a place to live in an apartment in New York, an old tenant that also lived in the apartment complex made complaints to the manager claiming, "the kids [were] too loud" and the halls reeked because "Hispanic food [smelt] bad" (Alvarez 170). In America when children live in apartments, they are expected to behave and refrain from making a ruckus. The Garcia girls whose parents were wealthy and owned several acres of land didn't have neighbors, so they could be noisy when they played unlike in American cities. The Garcia's had fled their homeland for fear of being prosecuted as political terrorists, not realizing they could be prosecuted in the States for their legal status. For example, the Garcia girls were also in constant fear from "the unexpected knock on the door" that they knew was happening to other Hispanic immigrants (Jacques). In the Dominican Republic it was the S.I.M on the hunt for those against Trujillo but in America it was ICE agents after undocumented immigrants for illegally entering the country. At school, one of the Garcia sisters, Carla, was bullied by her white peers, being taunted as a "spic" and being told to go "back to [her] country" along with the rest of her family (Schaefer and Alvarez 153). The color of their skin and the language they spoke made them stand out as outsiders among their peers who were white. Additionally, Sandra (Sandi) and Yolanda suffered from "mental affliction[s]" because they were confused about their identities ("Julia Alvarez" Contemporary). This was a parallel to Julia Alvarez's life, because from a young age she was told to consider herself "American and therefore different from the rest of her extended family" ( "Julia Alvarez" Contemporary). Sandi and Yolanda were

All throughout history men have suppressed and controlled women. In this novel by Julia Alvarez, she brings to light that not only in the Dominican Republic, but also in America that women are continuously subjected by man no matter age or culture. In the novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez shares the lives of 4 sisters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia as they assimilate to American culture after leaving the Dominican Republic. In this reverse chronological order book, the four sisters take turns sharing their stories and experiences, starting with adulthood in America and ending when they are children in the Dominican Republic. In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez uses

Many people from all over the world migrate to the United States for a variety of reasons, education, work, freedom, or for crimes like selling drugs, violence, terrorism , etc. Yet, after typically coming to the United States at a young age, they call it home. It being the only place they know, since they never return to their native country. For instance, Julia Alvarez in her novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, refers to the immigration experience, because after their initial struggle, immigrants feel more at home in the United States than in their own countries.

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 utilization of style makes How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez an arduous book to read. “John’s right hand played piano on her ribs, and his mouth blew a piccolo on her,” Alvarez writes, using metaphor to describe a sex scene between Yolanda and her husband, John (76). The author’s vivid description is frivolous and supports neither the plot nor the specific event within the story. Next, Alvarez’s syntax is emphasized in the excerpt:

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.

Self-identification is when individuals reclaim their own heritage and demand recognition and respect for what they identify as. Through self-identification a person gets to decide what terms they want to use to describe themselves such as the specific name of their nation.