Julia Alvarez

Through the mediums of poetry and prose, Julia Alvarez recreates the feelings of loss she experienced after her immigration to the United States, when she was ten years Old. Although born in New York City, she spent her early years in the Dominican Republic until political insurrection forced the Alvarez family to flee the country. After their arrival in New York city, she and her sisters struggled to find their place in a new world, an experience that the writer now uses as a starting point for her exploration of culture. Her most notable work, the critically acclaimed How the Garcia Girl lost their Accents, fictionally discuss being torn between two cultures and the hardships faced by her immigrant family. The culminations of many years of effort, the fifteen stories that make up the novel feature numerous memorable characters and offer entertaining insights. Hispanic women particularly find that How the Garcia Lost Their Accents voices many of their own concerns.

"Although I was raised in the Dominican Republic by Dominican parents in an extended Dominica family, mine was an American childhood" Alvarez noted in American Scholar. According to the writer, her father's once-wealthy family had supported the wrong political faction during the revolution; because her mother's parents, on the other hand, benefited from their support of the political victors, Alvarez and her parents lived on her mother's family compound. Life among so many relatives was somewhat communal; the writer and her sisters were raised alongside their cousins by her mother, maids, and many aunts. While seemingly an ideal arrangement, Alvarez's grandmother made life difficult for her daughter and son in law, a doctor who ran the nearby hospital and whom the revolution had now reduced to poverty.

Although not as well off as her relatives, Alvarez did not feel inferior. After all, she had born in America, something that none of her cousins was allowed to forget. While extravagances like shopping trips to America were beyond their financial means, her family was highly influenced by American attitudes and goods. If her mother could not buy her daughters American clothing, she made sure that Alvarez and her sisters were as fashionable as their cousins. The children ate American food, attended an American school, and, for a special treat ate ice cream from an American ice parlor. American cars were bought, shopping was done at American-owned stores, and American appliances were flaunted in the compound. The entire extended family was obsessed with America; to the children it was a fantasyland.

Actually, her family's association with the United States may have saved her father's life. The members of her mother's family were respected because of their ties with America. Alvarez's uncles had all attended Ivy League colleges and her grandfather was a cultural attach„ to the United Nations. The brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, would not dare to victimize a family with such strong American ties; he made no move against their wealth and hesitated to struggle with them for political reasons. But when Alvarez's father secretly joined the insurrectionists attempting to oust Trujillo, the police began surveillance of the compound. In 1960, just as they were preparing to apprehend him, an American agent warned the doctor in time for him to usher his family into an airplane headed out of the country." All my childhood I had dressed like an American, eaten American foods and befriended American children", Alvarez wrote in American Scholar, describing the scene as their plane finally landed in her fantasy land" I had gone to an American school and spent most of the day speaking and reading English. At night, my prayers were full of blond hair and blue eyes and snow·all my childhood I had longed for this moment of arrival. And here I was, an American girl, coming home at last"

Alvarez's "homecoming" was not what she expected it to be. Although she was thrilled to be in the United States, she soon faced homesickness, feelings of alienation, and prejudice. She missed her cousins, her family's large home in the compound, and the respect accorded to her family name in the Dominican Republic. Alvarez, her parents, and her sisters squeezed themselves and their possessions into a tiny apartment. As she related to Brujula Compass, the experience was emotionally crushing. " The feeling of loss caused a radical change in me. It made me an introverted little girl." She became an avid reader, immersing herself in books and, eventually, writing. Alvarez went to college, earning and undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature and writing.

By 1987 she was hard at work on a collection of stories; the 290-page How The Garcia Girls lost their Accents" was published in 1991, to considerable critical attention. The previous decade had seen a surge of ethnic novels, of which Garcia Girls came to be known as an exemplary example of this new literary genre.