Julia Alvarez

In the excerpt from “ALways Living in Spanish,” Marjorie Agosin uses a upset tone to Convey a powerful message. WHen Marjorie Agosin says “But here in the united states, where I have lived since I was a young girl, the solitude of exile makes me feel that so little is mine.” I believe that she is trying to say that she feels like she doesn’t have the Same freedom or Opportunities as how she had them when she was in chile. Marjorie Agosin also says “(...) that not when the Sky has the same constellations, the trees and the fauna the same names or sounds, or the rubbish the same smell.” Marjorie is comparing the way she feels living in the United States and the way she feels living in her home country in chile.

Living in Mexico throughout her teen years was very rough. Unlike other teenagers where their parents constantly provide for their children, Marisela’s life was a lot different than the usual parent- child relationship. She lived with her Abuela ( Grandma) Lupe, along with her 3 brothers and sister. She constantly had to take care of her brothers and sister at such a young age, that she became the mother-like figure of the

Reyita tells the story of Maria de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, a black Cuban woman living through several pivotal moments in Cuban history as a member of perhaps the most disenfranchised group of people in Cuban society; Reyita was poor, she was black, and she was a woman.

Enrique’s journey from Honduras to the U.S. unveils the innate loyalty of a loving child to their mother and presents the dangers that a migrant faces on the road with consistent angst; nevertheless, it supports the idea that compassion shown by some strangers can boost the retreating confidence within a person. In Sonia Nazario’s “Enrique’s Journey,” he seeks the beacon of light that all migrants hope to encounter; “El Norte.” Like many children before him, it is the answer to the problems of a hard life. While being hunted down “like animals” leading to “seven futile attempts,” he is

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.

In the film “Mi Familia,” we follow the story of the Mexican-American Sánchez family who settled in East Los Angeles, California after immigrating to the United States. Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas introduce the story of this family in several contexts that are developed along generations. These generations hold significant historical periods that form the identity of each individual member of the family. We start off by exploring the immigrant experience as the family patriarch heads north to Los Angeles, later we see how national events like the great depression directly impact Maria as she gets deported, although she was a US citizen. The events that follow further oppress this family and begins separate identity formations. These

Being an immigrant of another country in a new country can change someone drastically.How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a novel by Julia Alvarez, about how 4 sisters started their lives in The Dominican Republic and then had to the move to the United States and adjust. Yolanda moved from the Dominican Republic to the United States at a young age and it changed how she saw herself and how she defined herself. Yolanda being a Dominican Immigrant changed her name, made her have an early loss of innocence, and eventually made her lose control of herself.

The novel Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande is a story about two young girls and their struggling journey to find happiness between two conflicting and distinct worlds: the United States and Mexico. Juana on one side wants to get to the United States, or “el otro lado” as mentioned in the novel, to find her father who abandoned her and her mother after leaving to find work in the US. On the other hand Adelina escapes from her house in California to follow her lover to Mexico. The girls form a bond in the most unexpected of places, a Tijuana jail, and quickly form a friendship that will connect them for the rest of their lives.

Junot Diaz, in his novel “This Is How You Lose Her”, tells us the story of a Dominican inhabitant of New Jersey, Yunior, as he attempts to fix his love life through several anecdotes. There is clear use of worldbuilding to help pull the reader into Yunior’s world and portray unknown environments to those who have not seen them before. It’s something most visible in science fiction and fantasy writing, genres that Diaz had writing about better and heavily used in his realist fiction. Here he allows for us to better experience the life in Central Jersey and all the other locations Yunior is described to have been. With this he conveys the ideas of foreignness and the feeling of being an outsider far away from his home country of the Dominican Republic. As a fiction writer, it helps him accomplish the most important thing for an author which is to allow the reader to understand and immerse himself in the writing while not delving into total fiction. His use of worldbuilding isn’t one that tries to be overly dramatic or descriptive, he more so just attempts to push out the facts in an understandable way.

Between 1960 and 1986, more than 400,000 Dominicans migrated legally from the Dominican Republic to the United States, especially to New York and New Jersey, and many thousands more, illegally. By the 90 ́s they had become the second-largest Hispanic group in the Northeast this has generated important consequences for the Dominicans migrating to the US, for their families in the Dominican Republic and for Americans in general. Today, with the Hispanic community being the largest minority in the U.S. and with projections of growth at a fast rate, the Dominican diaspora is another example of the “integration” of a Hispanic subgroup into American life and society. I would like to focus on a specific aspect of this event, namely the self-consciousness of racial identity in this community of migrants. To do so, I will use the literature of Junot Diaz. …Diaz’s Drown is composed of ten short stories that follow the pattern of a quasi-chronological narration of the story of a Dominican family. Each story is a chapter presenting different moments in the lives of the characters and the narrator, Yunior, who grows over the course of the novel. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is similarly a Dominican-family story centered on a young but disoriented Dominican-American man in search of love in a hostile world. My intention with this examination of the two sociological and statistical studies about the Dominican community in New

In the short story, “My First Free Summer”, the author reveals an main part of her childhood that creates an drastic turning point in her life. “Day after day, I kicked a deflated beach ball around the empty yard, feeling as if I’d been tricked into good behavior by whomever God put in charge of lives of ten year-olds” (P.248). Alvarez describes her childhood as a Dominican that converts an dramatic change into her life. She expresses her sentimental emotions within the story of her young childhood life. In “All-American Girl” , Julia Alvarez expresses her young adolescent years of struggling to fit in with the other girls at her age.

“I’M HUNGRY!” Secunda groaned irritably. “When will supper be served, Mother? My stomach is grumbling again.”

The feelings are mostly related to displacement in a new world (Miami) , which is different from their homeland (Cuba). In “In Cuba,” the characters of four elderly men, two Cuban and two Dominican (the last two clearly have the same suffering resulting from being exiles), meet in a Miami park to play dominoes. As the Cuban Máximo tells his jokes and chafes at the stares of tourists, the narrative of the Cuban suffering and displacement is revealed, resulting in emotions of anger and longing. The author portraits the weight of these forced exiles’ frustrations and unrealized dreams—the dreams of their social class, (the middle-class) and professional Cubans whose lives are filled with the fear that they may lose, indeed may have lost, the memory of what life was like back in Cuba (the theme of memory will be handled in more detail in the following

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