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

Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the Garcia family always felt that it was necessary to be silent. At the very beginning of the chapter, Laura is recollecting memories of when she and her family were in the Dominican Republic during the dictatorship. She talks about a mink coat her mother had given her years before and states that she, “Kept it at the back of the walk-in closet, thinking maybe someday we would escape the hell we were living in, and I’d get to wear that coat into freedom” (Norton 1077). By using the word “escape” and “hell” it is evident that Laura saw her beloved country as something she now wanted to flee from. Also, the word “freedom” is what Laura identifies as the United States. Furthermore, through her remembrance of her mink coat and walk-in closet, Laura reveals that also in that walk-in closet stashed was “a serious-looking gun” (Norton 1078) that both she and her eldest daughter Yo had discovered accidentally. This gun belonged to her husband Carlos, who was involved in the underground resistance movement. To keep both her husband and children safe from the SIM, otherwise known as Trujillo’s secret police, Laura told no one of her findings and expected Yo to do the same. Laura stated shortly after finding the gun that, “It was hell on the wheels of our marriage having me down so much of the time” (Norton 1078). Laura struggled deeply with keeping this secret that could ultimately have her entire family executed and thus took a toll on both her sanity and marriage.
Moreover, the battle to keep silent did not come easily for Yo either.

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

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