Julia Alvarez and the Anxiety of Latina Representation

Abstract

In this essay, I propose a meditation on the anxiety of representation caused by broken memories that intersect Julia Alvarez's national identity(ies) and self-presentation. I look at select moments in Alvarez's writing practice to ask: How does the Latina writer perform (that is, present, re-present, as well as exaggerate or underplay) individual and national memory and history through fiction and personal, reflective essays? How can the seams between fiction and history, and imagination and fact be examined? And, how do Alvarez's characters mediate this process? Alvarez's writing exposes her plight of identity, caught between assimilation into U.S. mainstream culture and contestation of the very mechanisms of assimilation into mainstream culture.1 Mediating the tension between these two poles, Alvarez undergoes a process of selfinvention through writing that situates her in the center of Latina literature and defines her as a Dominican and diaspora writer par excellence. I suggest that a novel such as How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) can be studied as a testimony of the complexity of memory. With this essay, I elaborate on the ways that migration, loss, and trauma are central themes that inform Alvarez's creative and personal process, exploring memory and recontextualizing history. My analysis reveals more than the dissonances experienced by children who migrate and are bicultural; specifically, it foregrounds the deep psychological problems that manifest themselves through memory, or lack of it, for those who are both challenged by bicultural and bilingual experiences and haunted by a silenced, and escaped, past of state repression.