I’m enjoying Julia Alvarez’s book. I can relate to it a lot. One thing that stands out to me in this book is “el juego de las palabras”. This is enhance in chapters specially dedicated to Yolanda/Joe/ Yo since she’s a poet/writer/not. I like he play with the Slash thing as well. I thing this is significant when you she says maybe “I should get rid of the slashes between mind, heart/soul, and just right Yo” looking at the body as a whole, as an interlinked system. Mind, heart, body all make Yo. It’s also interesting how one person can have different nicknames, ones that they like and ones that they dislike and ones that one wishes to be called but is never called, in Yolanda’s case “sky”.

I was filled with rage when the grandpa paid more attention to the little born baby boy and no attention to his grand daughter. I can so relate to that, because I know a lot of traditional conservative family friends that wish all the best careers for the little boys and a good husband (with money) for the girls. I have feel Sofia’s pain and I get so mad a the father, even though I don’t dislike him, cause it’s not his fault that he’s is the way he is. It has to do with the way he has been brought up and the principles they were thought as a young boy. I admire Sofia for leaving the house and not obeying his father’s rules. Sofia didn’t try to change her father and she accepts him as the way he is, and understands why he was made at her. She still respects him and loves him and tries to regain his love. However the father doesn’t try to rebuild his relationship with his daughter and has not accepted her as she is.

So far, I am really not convinced about this book. Perhaps, I was expecting a bit more from this book, partially because I am writing about her on Wikipedia and have read many rave reviews about her work, but I am liking it less than many of the other books we have read in the class. I find her style to be rather immature, resembling young adult fiction a little more than I would chose to read at this point in my life. I also find it her style flatter than the other writers…Rivera, Marti, and Cisnernos wrote with a conviction that kept my interest and captivated me. They all brought a certain poetry that I really enjoyed reading that I find lacking in this book, while I simultaneously havn’t found the story that interesting. Lastly, and this is my last complaint, I have found the characters to be both unrelatable and unlikable. I am not fond of the father, nor am I fond of any of the daughters so far.

I have not written this book off yet however, and am willing to continue with it with an open mind. I hope that as I get into the story more, the insights that it offers will become a bit more apparent to me. I really wanted to like this book, and based on what I had heard previously, had heard nothing but good things, and premtively thought it was going to be one of my favorites of the class. My dislike at this point could be a result of high expectations and for this reason I will be curious to know how it unfolds.

How the Garcia Girls Lost their accents

I really liked this book I haven’t finished it but so far I’ve been enjoying it a lot. I think compared to the other book it cover issues that affect more people that move to USA. Especially those who are young enough, to assimilate the new culture. I believe that those that move a little older don’t lose much identity they know who they are, either Mexicans, Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, Cubans… and so on they have an identity. In this book it focuses more on those that come younger to the USA and are no longer one nationality but a mixture of two, and how they battle between roots and influence of the new culture. We see this a lot in the story about Yolanda who refuses to sleep with Rudy, in this story we see a battle with the new culture which does not condemn this type of behaviour versus her roots which influenced by catholic beliefs condemns sleeping around. She says “ I would never find someone who would understand my peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles.” She feels like she does not fit in and I think one of the major themes of the book is finding one’s own identity. And the fact that they keep on traveling back and form the USA to the Island shows that they have not found where they belong, because they keep on doing it even, when they are not forced to.
In the style of writing I found very interesting that Alvarez besides writing both in English and in Spanish he also incorporates a lot of Spanish sayings like “with patience and calm even a burro can climb a palm”(135) In general I really like this book.

I am not going to lie, I read this book before this term started, and I am not going to lie, I fell asleep re-reading it last night.

I enjoyed this book the first time I read it, and I am enjoying it the second time around as well. Alvarez’s words are fluid, but also strong. For me, this is my favorite work so far. I like that it is both fragmented and connected at the same time, with each sister’s experiences and amount of adaptation and assimilation being different though their core-experiences remain inter-twined.

Alvarez’s reverse chronological order also makes sense to me. It is as if each character speaks to their situation now, and then looks back and reminisces to their past in relation to who they are now and how their past molded and influenced them. This almost makes you think, in these snips of narration, what made Sandra-Yolanda-Sofia-Carla act the way they do in this passage?

I find a profoundly large gap between what I see as the “north-American” importance of family and the Latin-American one. I grew up in the US, and yes I love my family, and I also respect my elders. My three siblings and I do talk, we keep in touch, and we joke and share memories, but I still feel that this is to such a minor extent compared to the Garcia girls. “We took turns being the wildest.First one, then another of us would confess our sins on vacation nights after the parents went to bed, and we had double-checked the hall” (85). The closeness of family and their importance through good and bad times really astounded me and left me in awe. It made me pine for my own family being like that.

Perhaps, however, the sisters were so close because they were uprooted,imported, and planted into foreign soil. I guess I would also stick with those and to those who had something in common with me, who understood me and the way I acted. And in many cases, this would be your family. It really makes me wonder…

if I would have moved to another country at a young age, would my siblings and I be any closer than we are today? Or is it just “the culture” I was raised in?

I have just finished the first of three parts to this book. I am not completely sold on it but I think I can account that to the fact that I am only a third of the way through and nothing has really come together yet. 

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is most definitely a novel that I would read of my own accord. I thoroughly enjoyed reading every page and got to really take my time with it, as I began reading weeks ago. Alvarez has a brilliant way with words that is not the least bit pedantic. She has an ability to create countless similes and metaphors that fit perfectly with the feeling she aims to evoke in the reader. This is evident in the story where Rudy Elmenhurst’s parents approve of his relationship with Yolanda because they felt it “should be interesting for him to find out about people from other cultures. It bothered [Yo] that they should treat [her] like a geography lesson for their son” (Alvarez 97). Alvarez’ style is so wonderfully modern, casual and comfortable that the reader can not help but b captivated. It is truly comforting to read, in that I found the characters to be exceedingly relatable. It is interesting that although I have never experienced anything close to the hardships of immigration, I felt such a strong connection with these girls whilst reading, particularly with Yolanda. Perhaps it is the incredibly strict and overprotective Catholic parents we have in common, but on several occasions during Yo’s stories I felt as though I was reading the story of my own life.

Although I loved every story, I believe the two that struck me to the core were “Joe” and “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story.” The former for its brilliant metaphorical use of language and the latter because I have encountered men exactly like Rudy Elmenhurst, way back when I was almost as sheltered and naïve as Yolanda. I really loved the manner in which Alvarez remarks that as John handed her the irises “she could not make out his words. They were clean, bright sounds, but they meant nothing to her” (Alvarez 76). Yolanda goes on to reduce their verbal communication to the word “babble” and only then does she believe that they can attempt a fresh start: “maybe now they could start over, in silence” (Alvarez 77). This ironic presentation of language as something that complicates communication to the point of no return was, I thought, a fantastic insight. So often we rely on language, words created by others that can never completely and truly express the intricate specificity of the feelings we intend to convey. I believe that in “Joe,” Alvarez intends to express the futility and insufficiency of borrowed words to mend the personal issues that stem from places much deeper than the surface upon with language floats.

I enjoyed reading the first part of Garcia Girls. Maybe I wasn’t as captivated as with Cisneros’ stories, which were more forceful and had a more varied narrative style, but Alvarez has a lot to offer. It’s so easy to read these stories, with their endearing characters and familiar situations that happened to you or someone you know, but you are always aware of their backdrop commentary on immigration, ethnic and class relations, and gender inequality. I like how Alvarez transports the reader to a variety of settings, from a guava grove in the Dominican Republic, to maternity and psychiatric hospitals, to 1960s-era college dorms. The characters are varied; at first they seem like stereotypes (the revered Latino family patriarch and the irresistible college bad boy for example) but they are actually nuanced with internal contradictions which round out their personalities (the father wants his girls to fit into American society by attending the right schools and speaking without an accent but he won’t permit that they act like Americans, the boy that is intelligent and sensitive enough to write love sonnets for class but can’t understand why his virgin girlfriend doesn’t want to get screwed, laid or fucked.)

The most interesting characters I find are the two we know least and most about. The character of the mother intrigued me, and in some ways reminded me of Mrs. Norval. Despite the fact that these women invest the most work into their families, the father steals the limelight in the form of everyone bending over backwards to please Papi or praising Mr. Norval for being a beloved and kind-hearted father when he essentially left everyone to fend for themselves. Although the Garcia girls’ mother is not as greedy or duplicitous as Mrs. Norval, both mother their many daughters with a great sense of order and discipline, and their personal desires are deeply hidden from their families. For much of the first part of the book we don’t even know “Mami’s” name, much less about who she is or why she acts as she does, though this reveals itself sometimes in roundabout ways.

The second interesting character, and the one we know most about, is Yolanda. She lives her whole life negotiating between life as it was taught to her and life as she experiences it, between the Latino culture she was raised with, Catholic and Spanish-speaking, and the American culture she interacts with at school and in personal relationships. “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story” is interesting because it is apparent that Yolanda must work to interpret her surroundings, not only as a sexually inexperienced young woman but one in a foreign culture. She is also the character where the theme of language is most important, from her nervously babbling in English before the Domincan field workers, to taking refuge in Spanish with her American boyfriend John, to actually getting psychosomatic rashes when certain words are mentioned. As I listed in the title of this post, Yolanda goes by, sometimes against her will, a variety of names. Out of all of these, her real and full name is almost sacred to her, it is an expression of what she perceives to be her real self instead of the other names which refer to compromised versions of this real self, or perhaps roles she is forced to take on.

I haven’t started reading the novel yet because i cannot justify buying a second copy of it from the bookstore when i own a copy already at my parents house.  so i will mention that i enjoyed this novel the first time i read it a few years ago.  the book stood out to me in chapters one day while book shopping with one parent or another and i picked it up read the back and bought it.  this is one of the first books that opened me up to chicano literature.  i love the culture and the story and the characters.  from the time i started taking spanish classes in high school, i have enjoyed chicano literature… some of the only literature where i will willingly try just about anything sans gender prejudice.  although i am a firm believer that books are not feminist or non-feminist novels, but novels about PEOPLE, i tend to lean towards female authors/lead characters because i am female – it is just easier to put myself in their position.  i also really enjoy reading about the culture and being put into the middle of it all via strong characters and i feel that many latino/a authors do that better than lots.  i do wish that we could have read some allende or garcia marquez – even though i can see that they may be a little over read – but i find their stories to contain a pivotal element of latino/a literature being magical realism.  maybe this is more of a south american aspect than a mexican-mexican american view.  anyways, i suppose we have seen a little ‘magic’ in some of our readings (like the ‘witch’ in Cisneros’)

This book really hit me close to the heart. As an immigrant from a latin country, I can relate to the things being mentioned in the story. Its hard to describe exactly how I feel at home reading it, but I think that is what is so distinctively south american. The descriptions of the dad’s birthday parties sound like my family’s birthday parties. That feeling of being around all of your family members and enjoying their company is something I miss profoundly. My family of 4 people is the only contact I get, as I have family all around the world but we never actually see each other at the same time.