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

Immigration affects families in many different ways. In the book “Enrique’s Journey” by Sonia Nazario, family is a core element. After Enrique’s mother leaves for the U.S., the whole concept of their family gets distorted. The walking out of Enrique’s father and the abandonment of his grandmother help to disband the family even more. Enrique also threatens to repeat the same mistakes his family made with his daughter when he considers leaving her behind in Honduras. Family is the central theme in Enrique’s Journey because of his relationship and resentment with his mother, the rejection of his father and grandmother, and Enrique’s decision to leave his daughter, Jasmin, behind.

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.

In the story “Antojos’” by Julia Alvarez, the main character, a wealthy Dominican woman named Yolanda, travels to the Dominican Republic in order to search for her cultural and personal identity. Her difficulty interacting and relating to her old family members before she immigrated to America reflects the emotional hardship of immigration.

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.

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.

In the Foreword, she brings the reader to a day in 1997, when her cleaning woman Carmen reveals that she has four children in Guatemala, whom she has not seen in twelve years. Nazario is stunned. She cannot understand how a mother could so walk away from her young children, but Carmen then presents a reality the author will soon investigate and know to be ordinary. Since the 1960s, untold numbers of Central American mothers, often abandoned by their husbands, come to America to take any work available (Nazario xiii). In the late 20th century, then, and as American women were entering the workforce more and more, supply met demand and the illegal immigrant mothers found work as house cleaners and nannies. As Carmen expresses, nonetheless, the distance is almost unbearable and these mothers intensely feel the distance from their children. As the novel also reinforces, the children similarly experience the pain of separation, which goes to another form of “immigration”; basically, and often at very young ages, they risk their lives to join their mothers. Most importantly, then, and as Nazario is further moved by the true tale of Carmen's son Minor, Enrique's Journey actually documents an ongoing situation based on inequality and injustice. The novel is then completely based on the realities researched by the

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 first story made me go back to my childhood. I hardly remember how I came to United State but one thing I do remember is my mom had the same reaction as Alma Rivera. All character made me feel like if I was coming back to the US. In the first couple pages, it caught my attention of how is actually telling what we the people that migrate go through. I enjoyed reading this book I can make some connection with the characters.

I never expected Enrique’s Journey to be such a personal work. Being a journalistic book, I expected a lot of research in it, but not to the level Nazario’s gone to. Definitely, the way she introduced herself into the enduring situations that migrants go through when they try to reach the US gave me a new perspective of what to expect from the book. She comes from a migrant family too, so she can sort of relate to the characters in the book. However, as she confesses herself, her journey was nowhere as arduous as what these children go through to find their mothers. And the way in which she involved herself into the situation increases her empathy for Enrique en other numberless children.

I started this essay off with a quote one of the characters mention in the book because it basically gives us the main idea the author is trying to get readers to understand throughout the book. By looking at the title of this novel, “The Book of Unknown Americans” and by looking at the author’s name- Cristina Henriquez, we can already get an idea of what this novel is going to be about. When someone first takes a look at the title and author of this book they would assume that it is going to be about immigrants who moved to the United States and struggled to fit in. After reading this novel, I now understand how difficult it was for these Latino immigrants to leave everything they have in hope for better lives here in the United States. Each person has their own meaning of what it means to be an American and their own reason of what most immigrants come here for. The Rivera family came here in hope for better resources to help treat Maribel because they didn 't have the resources they needed back in their country.

‘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

The Character of Yolanda Garcia in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and !Yo!

Julia Alvarez also uses language to show how the four Garcia girls adjust to living in a new, and to them alien, culture. The protagonist in this novel is the family Garcia de la Torre, a wealthy, aristocratic family from the Santo Domingo, who can trace their genealogy back to the Spanish

Dinaw Mengestu, Richard Rodriguez and Manuel Munoz are three authors that have been through and gone through a lot of pain to finaly get accepted in their societies. They are all either immigrants or children of immigrants that had trouble fitting in America’s society at the time. They struggled with language and their identities, beucase they were not original from the states and it was difficult for others to accept them for who they are. They all treated their problems differently an some tried to forget their old identeties and live as regulalr Americans others accepted themselves for being who they are, but they all found a way to deal with their issues.