Identity Crisis or Nonexistent Identity?
Amid the journey of life, an important distinguishing within oneself is finding identity or how to define oneself. This can easily be impacted by difficult experiences, such as being an immigrant in a foreign land. In the novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, author Julia Alvarez expresses the struggles that character Yolanda feels from migrating for the Dominican Republic to the United States with her family at a young age and the effects that translate all the way to adulthood. The book spans over all of Yolanda’s experiences as a foreigner. She gets a taste for both the Dominican Republic and the United States. The exposing of two cultures shapes how Yolanda defines herself. The fact that …show more content…
Yolanda feels part Dominican and part American, stuck between two worlds, where she does not quite fit into either because she is exposed to two completely different cultures at a young age without the chance to find her place in either. When she returns to the Dominican as an adult, she feels highly extrinsic and alien to her former culture. Her cousins dress colorfully and she feels plain in comparison. She has lost her ability to recall most spanish words and phrases. She views her happy relatives as a representation of her failure to find what they all have, roots in their culture. All in all, she does not feel at home in her birthland. In the same fashion, Yolanda is viewed as exotic in the United States. Her appearance alone causes a barrier between her and others because physically she doesn 't look like she fits in with the group. She struggles as a child when being called a spic and is stereotyped as a hot blooded spanish girl. When in college, she still sticks out like a sore thumb when her english teacher attempts to say her name: “He called roll...stumbling over my name and smiling fakely at me, a smile I had identified as one flashed on ‘foreign students’...I felt profoundly out of place”(89). Because Yo is so familiar with being treated like an isolated outsider, it is not hard for her to identify the smile flashed by her professor in attempt to smooth over him stumbling over her name. Due to her Dominican roots, she never found her place in America. The tug of war game between her two cultures is a constant battle for Yolanda. She has not been able to find a balance. If she had been born and grown up in one place, perhaps she would not feel so
Amid the journey of life, an important distinguishing within oneself is finding identity or how to define oneself. This can easily be impacted by difficult experiences, such as being an immigrant in a foreign land. In the novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, author Julia Alvarez expresses the struggles that character Yolanda feels from migrating for the Dominican Republic to the United States with her family at a young age and the effects that translate all the way to adulthood. The book spans over all of Yolanda’s experiences as a foreigner. She gets a taste for both the Dominican Republic and the United States. The exposing of two cultures shapes how Yolanda defines herself. The fact that …show more content…
Yolanda feels part Dominican and part American, stuck between two worlds, where she does not quite fit into either because she is exposed to two completely different cultures at a young age without the chance to find her place in either. When she returns to the Dominican as an adult, she feels highly extrinsic and alien to her former culture. Her cousins dress colorfully and she feels plain in comparison. She has lost her ability to recall most spanish words and phrases. She views her happy relatives as a representation of her failure to find what they all have, roots in their culture. All in all, she does not feel at home in her birthland. In the same fashion, Yolanda is viewed as exotic in the United States. Her appearance alone causes a barrier between her and others because physically she doesn 't look like she fits in with the group. She struggles as a child when being called a spic and is stereotyped as a hot blooded spanish girl. When in college, she still sticks out like a sore thumb when her english teacher attempts to say her name: “He called roll...stumbling over my name and smiling fakely at me, a smile I had identified as one flashed on ‘foreign students’...I felt profoundly out of place”(89). Because Yo is so familiar with being treated like an isolated outsider, it is not hard for her to identify the smile flashed by her professor in attempt to smooth over him stumbling over her name. Due to her Dominican roots, she never found her place in America. The tug of war game between her two cultures is a constant battle for Yolanda. She has not been able to find a balance. If she had been born and grown up in one place, perhaps she would not feel so