Summary Of How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents By Julia Alvarez

Identity crises are common problems for immigrants coming into any country. Deciding whether to stay true to their roots or to assimilate to a new culture puts pressure on many immigrants and their families. Both Jake and Babbitt, from Hester Street and Babbitt respectively, define what means to be American on superficial terms, even though they both believe that being an American does not merely stem from racial identity. They both become obsessed with being as seen as Americans through their social status, physical appearance, the pursuit of wealth, and freedom. While both Jake and Babbitt try to assimilate to American culture, only Babbitt truly succeeds in achieving this goal.

The author shows that in order to act the part of being rich white girls they need to change their hair color which is in some way a part of their identity.Also Martinez shows us that the Mimis would purposely pretend to not understand spanish “you no puedo-o hablar-o Españal-o,”(3) This proves that when they acted like rich girls it harmed them since it affected the mimis interactions with other family

In the book, How the García girls lost their accent, by Julia Alvarez, who utilizes rhetorical devices in the passage chosen to develop the conflict that Yolanda is facing in the story by using imagery, simile, and anaphora in order to evince how Yolanda’s conflict with her husband John plays a role in her horrible breakdown and her journey to revive the love she had for her native language and culture.

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.

The guava fruit from the prologue, plays a central role in When I Was Puerto Rican. The guava symbolizes the end of Esmeralda’s childhood and the beginning of adulthood. She states “I push my cart away, toward the apple and pears of my adulthood, their nearly seedless ripeness predictable and bittersweet”(Prologue, pg.4). From the beginning, Esmeralda signals that she considers unhappiness to be an essential part of adulthood. Guavas, the fruit she links to her childhood are unpredictable in their color, taste and ripeness. For Esmeralda, coming of age brings sadness.

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

Identity not only mean your name and sex but it also means what and who you are as a person and how you act as a person. In “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” – Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Gendered Interaction: Masculine and Feminine Styles...” – J.T. Wood, and “The Confidence Gap” – Katty Kay and Claire Shipman identity is a major theme that is talked about. In “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” the main argument is that Hispanic women often struggle being identified. In “Gendered Interaction: Masculine and Feminine Styles...” J.T. the main argument being made is that women and men have different ways of communicating. In “The Confidence Gap” the main argument being made is that women’s lack of confidence affects their work life in a negative way. Identity is related to the three reading passages because it states how women and men are identified in certain aspects of their life.

Yet Moraga writing style is very difficult to comprehend at first, due to the barrier that she create by using Spanish and English. Moraga’s choice of words force the reader’s flow to be caught off guard and roots it to focus on every details. She blends both languages together that challenge the reader to understand the multiple categories of her. As she write her struggles to define herself in relation to others, (mainly in the Chicana/o community), she also makes it a challenge for the readers to fully access her trials at first read. In the article “Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios: Auto-ethnography of the “New Mestiza,” Cloud states that “the placement of her own personal experiences within the context of her community enables Moraga to capture successfully the struggle of an entire people for individual and collective autonomy” (86). Clouds argue that Moraga purposely writes for an “all in one” perspective that can be very challenging for reader to understand. She admits that, “Loving in the War Years first part speaks to the confusion and personal struggle that characterized its author’s formative years, no more so than in its poetic parts. Much of the inner turmoil that pervades Moraga’s self-portrayal revolves around the collision course that is the confluence of her two ethnic identities: Chicana and American” (91). With this reason, the only way that Moraga could have directly and explicitly share her

The story of a political exile, the Garcia family, comes into the U.S. and their efforts to merge into the mainstream culture. A tension in the family, to some extent, emerges, as the four daughters begin to experience their American culture. This novel deeply explores

Analyse the use of language and popular culture in Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás and Rosa Montero’s Te trataré como a una reina. How do they influence identity (and specifically gender identity)?

In the novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, The girls have a hard time with assimilation. Because of this it has the girls confused on how to adapt to America. In America, the girls cannot ask for as much as they use to in the Dominican Republic. The reason for this was because Carlos cannot find a job so they were short on money. Because of the Garcia girls moved back and forth between two places, they tend to struggle to fit into America.