A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez's How the GarcÍa Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract

The displacement of Caribbean people from their islands to the United States, for political or economic reasons, has produced a tension between the culture of the country of origin and that of the adopted homeland, one representing the past and the other the future of the immigrant. As time passes, for the immigrant, the rupture with the past, strongest in political exiles, is transformed into a desire to recover a lost moment in time. But the past ceases to exist as an island reality and is interpreted from the perspective of the mainland culture. The political migration of Dominicans from their island of origin to the United States is contemporaneous with the fall of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo and the first wave of Cuban exiles at the beginning of the 1960s. During his dictatorship, Trujillo had absolute control over the military, the economy, and the people and, except for a select group, he prevented anyone from leaving the island. During this stage of Dominican history, those who did abandon the island with or without the dictator’s consent sought political exile. The situation changed radically after the dictator’s death and the U.S. invasion of the island, which foiled any attempt to restore Juan Bosch to the presidency or convert the Dominican Republic into another communist Cuba. With the direct U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of the Dominican Republic and the support of Joaquin Balaguer’s presidency, the number of Dominican exiles increased and their conditions changed in character, from political to economic. The Dominican migration to the United States has steadily risen, making Dominicans, second to Puerto Ricans, the largest Hispanic group in New York. 1 However, as with other immigrant groups, Dominicans found themselves looking back to understand their present and future. If writers on the island were trying to come to terms with the Trujillo dictatorship and the U.S. invasion of their country, those who traveled to the mainland wanted to recover a lost origin. The Puerto Rican economic migration associated with Operation Bootstrap, after WWII, and the Cuban political exodus, related to the Castro takeover in 1959, produced a generation of Latino writers born or raised in the United States. The Dominican migration, which was first political and later economic, would also count among its members a significant number of writers. And just as the other immigrants or sons of immigrants have documented their experiences mainly in the cities in which they live, Dominican-American authors would also do the same, some of them writing in Spanish and others in English. 2 In her How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,