Accent

In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, one of the main characters, Yolanda, finds herself in a mental institution after experiencing what she describes as a word allergy during the chapter “Joe.” It’s explained that “she does not know which [words], until they are on the tip of her tongue and it is too late, her lips swell, and her skin itches, her eyes water with allergic reaction tears” (Alvarez 82). The words that we see her have this reaction to most often are “love”…

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez is a novel that follows four sisters -- Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia -- through various points in their lives. Throughout the story each Garcia sister narrates their lives as United States immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Forced to flee from their homeland due to their father’s actions against the dictator of the Dominican Republic, the Garcia girls tell their stories of assimilation into the United States culture. With parents…

America has been known as the world that makes dreams come true since the early 1600s. America was the New World and everyone wanted a bite of the big apple. Founded on the hopes of being a fresh start the voyage to America became great. In a sense, America is a fresh start. The variety of people that immigrated into the states was incredible. In the early 1900s, there were neighborhoods upon neighborhoods of any culture you could think of all in the small area of New York City. America was an…

Case Study 9 / Carlos In the story How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Carlos, Gracias, father of the four girls, Carla, Sandra, Sofia, Yolanda and Laura the spouse meets with hardship coming to the United States. There were various concerns that Carlos encounters while being dragged between two cultures. As the head of the household, especially in his culture, the father responsibility was to provide income to ensure at least the basic needs of the family, food clothes, and shelter.…

and is not something most immigrant children are exposed to (they are more familiar of the general statements of “..not until after your married”, and the classic “ Did you go behind the palm trees”). In her novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents”, Julie Alvarez narrates the difficulties the Garcia girls face growing up bicultural in the United States and the transitions they made as they strive to create an identity that is both Latina and American. Alvarez uses the theme of sexuality…

Have you ever been judged on how you look or act? How you were raised or where you were born? In the book How the Garcia Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez writes the story of four siblings Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia who throughout their life have a hard time with immigrating to the US after their father got into trouble with their dictator in the Dominican Republic. Throughout the book, they struggle with bullying a school, peer pressure from men, and relationship issues with every man…

Where’re Y’all From?: A Brief History of the Southern United States Dialect Southern American English, more commonly known as the Southern drawl or the Southern accent, is one of the most immediately recognizable of the United States’ many dialects. The dialect can bring many different connotations to mind depending on the preconceptions of the hearer. Those with positive ideas of the South may conjure up images of hard-working, hospitable, family oriented people, whereas others may prejudge…

Short Critical Response “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” In the book, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”, by Julia Alvarez shows the lives of four sisters who struggle with finding their own identities in American culture. The four girls named Carla, Sandra, Yolanda and Sofia were forced to move out of the Dominican Republic when they were young girls and now struggle to adapt to a new culture that is much different from their social norms. The elements of the text that I…

“I think that when I write, I write out of who I am and the questions I need to figure out” (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents 169). Everyone has a way to escape reality, some draw, some listen to music, some take a nap, while others merely read and write, such as Julia Alvarez. The self proclaimed Dominican- American explains so in the Bloomsbury Review as her early life has consisted of many hardships that her writing addresses at one point or another throughout her poetry and novels.…

The book “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” by Julia Alvarez, is a novel structured episodically as a series of inter correlated stories told in reverse chronological order. From part I to part 3 in the story, Julia Alvarez does a great job of showing the changes in life styles from the Dominican Republic to the United States. As we look at the individual parts of the story, characters, and Immigrant experiences, we can see these life changes. The characters inside the story are the key…