How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent by Julia Alvarez

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Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American writer and poet, the author of “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent,” a novel that some critics might say is autobiographical opposed by Alvarez’s opinion of it applying to any culture or background. This story narrates the growing-up ventures the Garcia Girls go through as the family abruptly moves from the Dominican Republic to the United States. Julia Alvarez experiences a similar process of a childhood in the Dominican Republic, being an immigrant in the United States, and finding her identity as an adult between two countries.
Julia Alvarez was born in the 1950’s in the city of New York, but at three months old the family moved to the Dominican Republic as her mother was growing homesick of the island. This is the first difference between Alvarez and the Garcia Girls, as they were all born in the Dominican Republic. She is the second daughter of four, the two oldest born in the U.S. and the two youngest born in the D.R. In her essay “An American childhood in the Dominican Republic,” Alvarez expresses that her mother nicknamed the oldest “americanitas,” the Spanish word for little American girls, and the youngest “criollas,” meaning native from the island, referring to the places they were born (Alvarez). The Garcia girls also encounter a similar situation as their mother calls all of them by “cuquita,” which stops being a sweet name, and becomes an undesired word between the sisters.
The Alvarez lived in a compound on a respected neighborhood surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and the grandparents, and were a very well establish family as a result of “benefitting from their support of the people in power” during the revolution against the Haitians (“Julia Alvarez”). In her novel, ...

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...immigrants that come to the United States looking for a new start to a new life.

Works Cited.
Alvarez, Julia. "An American Childhood in the Dominican Republic." American Scholar 56.1 (1987): 71. Academic Search Premier. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.
Alvarez, Julia. How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. North Carolina: Algonquin, 1991. Print.
Alvarez, Julia, and Juanita Heredia. “Citizen of the World: An Interview with Julia Alvarez.” Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers. Contemporary Literary Criticism 274 (2009). Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.
“Alvarez, Julia.” Literature Online Biography (2004): n. pag. Web. 2 April 2014.
“Episode 4: The New Latinos.” The Latino Americans. Prod. Jeff Beiber & Dalton Delan PBS, 2013. Web. 8 April 2014.
“Julia Alvarez.” Hispanic Heritage. Gale Cengage Learning. 2 Aug. 2017. Web. 11 April 2014.

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