How The Garcia Girls Lost One's Identity?

In both Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the characters were put in a situation where they were exposed to a different setting than where they came from and it interfered with their identity. Changez had trouble finding aspects from his home, Pakistan to keep with him in his new country, America. The sisters struggled to balance characteristics from Dominican Republic and America because of the huge difference in the cultures. Identity comes in many forms; from personal to social to cultural. It’s something that you create and what makes every individual unique. It may also interfere with the struggle to wanting to belong. Immigrants tend to experience a sense of nonidentity when put in an unfamiliar environment that could lead to assimilation and rejection. When coming in contact with an …show more content…
The relationship between assimilation and one’s identity can have a significant impact on immigrants. Cultural assimilation could mean that you may lose characteristics from your dominant culture and edure new ones to fit into the society. This is strongly seen in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. The four sisters were able to keep their native language, Spanish and still at the same time manage to learn English. Their relationship between their father gets complicated because of him not being fluent in English. As I mentioned earlier, mixing two languages can cause difficulties with assimilating. It’s this struggle that complicates one's identity. Their in betweenness forms a divergent among who they are and who they are becoming. Immigrating means change. A change that will take time to adapt to the new setting. Some tend to forcefully assimilate rather than to slowly accumulate into the American society. The Garcia girls were trapped between adapting to the new culture yet still embracing