Loss, Language, and Latina Identity in Julia Alvarez s How The García Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract

This article analyses the articulations and effects of cultural dislocation and trauma on the sisters’ construction of their female cultural identity in Julia Alvarez’s How The García Girls Lost Their Accents. This paper focuses primarily on Alvarez’s Sandra and Yolanda, those sisters whose sense of cultural dislocation and its consequences are arguably the most pronounced within the novel. Exploring the text’s concern with the disavowal of cultural heritage, a return to cultural practices and ways of life, and the sisters’ attempts to cope with extreme physical and psychological violence, this article seeks to examine how the women negotiate their unstable or fractured identities and demonstrate how, through the use of thematic and formal properties, the novel imagines routes toward healing, resistance, and reconciliation with the self.