Search For Identity In Julia Alvarez's 'Yo ! The Mother'

It sometimes is quite difficult to find one’s voice when no one is truly listening or understands. Yolanda, or "Yo", a Dominican immigrant, has grown up to be a writer and in the process infuriates her entire family by publishing the intimate details of their lives as fiction. “¡Yo!” is an exploration of a woman's soul, a meditation on the writing life, as well as a lyrical account of Latino immigrants’ search for identity and a place in the United States. Julia Alvarez divides her novel ¡Yo! into chapters to distinguish the perspectives of each member of the Garcia family. Through the stylistic, subtle homage to the Spanish language as well as speaking on the horrors that occurred during the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez showcases storytelling in the first chapter of her novel titled “From ¡Yo! The Mother” to show how Yo and her entire family used it to cope with their struggles as immigrants in America. By telling stories, Yo’s mother Laura, battles between her Dominican and American identities to ultimately redefine not only who she is, but also who she and her family will be.

When Laura and her family arrived in the United States, they carried with them the fear of not having a voice. Accustomed to living under the brutal regime of Rafael

Laura compelled Yo to promise to tell no one, except her, of her findings. Laura promised Yo that anything she said to her “will be our little secret” (Norton 1080). The demand for silence was apparent even in the confinement of the Garcia home. Additionally, Karen Cox, a City College of San Francisco English Professor, states in her article “A Particular Blessing: Storytelling as Healing in the Novels in Julia Alvarez” that, “In ¡Yo!, Alvarez interrogates the full measure of what her fictional family’s escape and survival has cost each of them, but especially the writer, whose inheritance from growing up in a