Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Yitah, Helen Atawube

Titel

"Inhabited by Un Santo": The "Antojo" and Yolanda's Search for the "Missing" Self in "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents"

Ist Teil von

• The Bilingual review, 2003-09, Vol.27 (3), p.234-243

Ort / Verlag

San Antonio: Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe

Erscheinungsjahr

2003

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• For indeed, the profound linguistic dislocation and the resultant disorientation that the young girls experience in the United States combine to erode their self-assurance and deny them any stable sense of self. [...]in spite of their father's wish that they lose their accents without losing too much more of their cultural heritage, with the disuse of their Spanish in an English-speaking culture and their fumbling attempts to adapt to their host culture, an essential part of their identity is lost. [...]works that have been interpreted as classic documentations of successful Americanization of immigrant women such as Mary Antin's autobiographical novel, The Promised Land, for example, often contain subtexts that interrogate ideological and gendered models of Americanization and subvert traditional narratives of immigrant gratitude and success (7). Luis does not seem to make a distinction between American consumerism, which is what the Garcia de la Torre family is introduced to while on the island, and Americanization, which implies the full assimilation of the immigrant into the host culture. [...]his claim that in the Dominican Republic the García daughters "live a North American existence" is based on the privileged life they lived before their exile (being enrolled in a school for American children and provided with toys from FAO Schwarz). By beginning at the chronological ending of the story, Alvarez offers her reader the opportunity to read the narrative's beginning against the grain of subsequent episodes. [...]by the time the Garcia girls tell us that after a couple of years in America they had "more than adjusted" (109) to teenage life, we already know that Yolanda has not, perhaps cannot, adjust to life in the New World.