Julia alvarez5/12/2023 It’s a great example of that culture clash people experience when coming to the United States. The sisters are becoming one with their new society and are taking advantage of the new life America has brought them. It’s through these sisters Alvarez tells her readers the differences between the two cultures. In an interview during the Scott Fitzgerald award conference, Alvarez talks about How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents showed how “being bullied by boys at school was no different than being controlled by Trujillo” (Alvarez, 2009). The novel also touches on the difficulties of being different from your peers in terms of culture. By the end of a couple of years away from home, we had more than adjusted” (Castillo, “Why Julia Alvarez’s Classic Novel Still Resonates With Today’s Latinas”). “Island was the hair-and-nails crowd, chaperones, and icky boys with all their macho strutting and unbuttoned shirts and hairy chests with gold chains and teensy gold crucifixes. We began to develop a taste for the American teenage good life, and soon, Island was old hat, man,” Alvarez writes in the novel. We could smoke and no great aunt would smell us and croak. In this novel, three sisters flee to the United States when their father becomes more involved in the revolution to overthrow Trujillo. Through her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, she talks about Latinas finding those comparisons between their Latino heritage and American society. This makes her one of the most important Latin American writers because her literary themes contradicted the patriarchal system within Latin American cultures. She brought in feminist ideas that women could also achieve scholarly success as she did. Alvarez told stories in which connected to the difficulties she endured when going to school in the Dominican Republic. Reading was not something that I recall being encouraged in my family or in the culture around me…it was books, as in censored, bland, lifeless texts, that I hated” (Blachman, p. ![]() Alvarez explains, “Growing up in the Dominican Republic, I hated books, especially because they delivered stories via the solitary act of reading, of separating yourself from others…I should add that it was also a dictatorship, where the act of reading was subversive, branded you an intellectual, a troublemaker. When Alvarez was in school in the Dominican Republic, women who read or were educated were unacceptable and what was offered in the classrom was manipulated by Trujillo’s regime. Her inclusion of women in her stories and historical context makes her even more important.Īlvarez was not afraid to have gender issues in education be one of her themes in many of her works. With her personal experiences of being the outcast at school and seeing her family try to fit into the American society, Alvarez creates more stories in order to help educate and bring about the importance of Latin American culture. The Domincan-American author took advantage of her new discoveries, whether it was English or the public library, and turned her whole experience around. It took coming to this country for reading and writing to become allied in my mind with storytelling” (Alvarez, 2018). ![]() Since ours was an oral culture, stories were not written down. Not understanding the language, I had to pay close attention to each word…As a kid, I loved stories, hearing them, telling them. “When I’m asked what made me into a writer, I point to the watershed experience of coming to this country. Alvarez’s experiences in coming to America as a child has influenced her work in a way that comments on the emotional struggles of immigration and trying to fit into American society.
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