At the end of the novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yolanda shares a story that is rather disconnected from all of the other stories. She shares a story of her finding a litter of cats in a barrel, and how she takes one of them only to throw them out of the window when she becomes annoyed with his meowing. Because of this, Yolanda becomes haunted with the kitten’s mother at night. The black cat that haunted Yolanda for so many years is a symbol to her past life, and the violence she created and endured. Yolanda first started seeing the mother cat after the incident when she threw the kitten out of the window. While her mother told her she was just imagining the mother cat and it would pass, Yolanda continued to see the cat for
One of the two books I read over the summer is How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez. This story took place in the late 1960s in the Dominican Republic. The four sisters Carla, Yolanda, Sandra, and Sofia learn to adjust in their new surroundings in New York after their family was forced to leave the Dominican Republic due to their father’s dilemma with the government. Throughout the book, the four sisters told stories that were very memorable to them. The second book that I read was October Sky, by Homer Hickam.
Julia Alvarez and his three teenage sisters discover the “key” to assimilating into their new country. Their stereotypical understanding of what it means to be an American is defined by one’s appearance. Comparing themselves to the women featured in the Miss America contest, makes the Alvarez girls long for the “American look”. It narrows down to a caucasian, hourglass shaped figure with long seamless straight hair. “Although we wanted to look like we belonged here, the four sisters, our looks didn 't seem to fit in.”
There are several reasons why men and women walk around in the typical patriarcal world, society plays a major role. Women feel the need to conform to such sextist ways not because they genuinly feel as though they are less than, but because the ideas that the civilization holds makes it seem like being matriarcal is deficient. This is proven through the characters in both This is How You Lose her a fiction novel written by Junot Diaz and How The garcia Girls Lost Their Accents a fiction novel written by Julia Alvarez. In both books men complying with sexit stards are very much so present along with consequences that women face due to this ideology. There are several ways in which sexism is portrayed in This is How You Lose her, but one way
I’m not your perfect Mexican daughter by Erika L. Sanchez was a book that discussed conflicting topics. This book was a young adult fiction novel with 354 pages. It was about Julia Reyes and her life after her “perfect” sister died and her journey in finding out how imperfect she actually was. Consequently many opinions can be made for this story. In this book I liked how honest the story is.
Just as the kitten was forced away form its mother too soon, so too was Yolanda forced to leave her homeland and culture and too young of an age. Yolanda was too young to make such a drastic move which lead to her having difficulties later in life. Her cultural guidelines of how to act were no longer there and eventually when she got a little older she was free to become whoever she wanted. Even she was free to be whoever she chose they would never truly assimilate with the average American. For instance when Yolanda was in boarding school she met a boy name Rudy Elmhurst who she started seeing for quite a while.
The black cat seems to me to symbolize many different things. I feel that the everytime she sees that cat it’s a warning that something bad is soon to happen. I feel that the black cat also represents reincarnation and when Sophia is not there as a ghost or in spirit she is secretly a lonely, dark cat that tries to scare everyone around her. Another piece of symbolism that I noticed while reading the book is Sophia's doll and dress. When Florence where’s the dress and carries the doll around her room she seems to symbolize Sophia when she was alive.
Yolanda was a 14 year-old who had grown up catholic and conservative. She left home and moved in with her boyfriend after problems with her parents (Doan, Williams). When she moved in, Yolanda and her boyfriend, Mario, began to engage in sexual intercourse. After a couple months of living together and having sex with sporadic use of birth control pills and incorrect use of condoms, Yolanda became pregnant (Doan, Williams). For Yolanda, “her parents had never talked to her about sex.
No one lives alone in the world. From the beginning of life, we have someone around us. Watching and talking with our surroundings, we learn many important life lessons. Depending on the people who are around us, we will grow up differently because we interact each other and influence one’s personality. The Pulitzer Prize – winning author Junot Diaz depicts the pattern of human involvement in them in his novel, “This Is How You Lose Her”, shows the readers specific examples of their relationships.
In Sandra Cisneros “Mericans” she creates a young character named Michelle who faces cultural differences and nonunderstanding, gender roles and culture stereotyping which can be exhibited in the real world. The author introduces Michelle as a foreigner with in her own culture, with this being said throughout the story Michelle seemed to be uninterested in her Grandmothers ideals and the principles of the Mexican heritage. The evidence behind this statement is; throughout the passage Michelle refers to her grandmother as being “awful” (Cisneros 93). I think a big reason for this is the fact that the grandmother has the children wait outside the church doors as she goes and say her daily prayers.
For as long as people can remember, the stereotype that men have “more power” than women in a relationship has been a relevant argument. In the novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents the Author, Julia Alvarez, writes about four girls and part of that revolves around their relationships with men. In all of their relationships with men, he has the power in the relationship which means he makes the decisions for them. When they lived in the United States the girls and their mother had more say in the society. When they lived in the Dominican Republic men just saw them as submissive housewives who bear their children.
Everyday people are judging and being judged by others with unique criteria that we, as inhabitants of Earth deem necessary checkmarks to be met to afford and be afforded tokens of civility. In Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “The Myth of the Latin Woman” the memoir is brimming with personal accounts of fetishiztation and discrimination the author experiences as a Latin woman that have vast influence on her life. Throughout the text Cofer conveys the significance of how deep the status “exotic” to describe Latina women is held inside the minds of people which the author alludes to on page 879, “I thought you Latin girls were supposed to mature early,” [1] after being given a sudden, non-consensual kiss at a dance by her date. The author expresses the cultural dissonance between
Names/Nombres written by Julia Alvarez is a short story regarding a little girl, Hooleetah, moving with her family from the Dominican Republic to New York City in the 1960s. It is extremely clear within the beginning of the story that the girl absolutely despises it when people pronounce her, or her family's’ names wrong, this is proven when she corrects the customs officer under her breath when he mispronounces her family’s last name. “At Immigration, the officer asked my father, Mister Elbures, if he had anything to declare... but I said our name to myself, opening my mouth wide for the organ blast of trilling my tongue for the drumroll of the r, All-vab- rrr-es (Alvarez 1). As the story continues each member of her family is assigned with many different American names, as people found it hard to pronounce their actual names.
Stereotyping is defined as fixing or oversimplifying an image or idea of individuals of a certain race, gender etc., however, those assumptions may or may not be true. Stereotypes are hazy generalizations influenced by a number of sources such as, past experiences, media, friends and family. The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met A Girl Named Maria written by Judith Ortiz Cofer offers a philosophical reflection and personal insight into ethnic stereotypes. The author 's assertion- that the media promotes stereotypes- still applies today and is justified through her personal experiences told with logos, ethos, and pathos as well as through my personal experiences.
“How has the author implemented stereotypical gender roles to reflect the society at the time?” Love in the time of cholera is a novel written in 1985, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The novel was written to expose the society during the time. This was done through a range of different techniques. One method is the implementation of the honour system and stereotypical gender roles.
Every literary work has its own purpose of existence and no literary is the same. There is always literary work for someone to be interested in. the authors use different techniques in order to attract the readers, such as rhythm, rhyme, characters, settings, characters, theme, and conflict and other techniques. One of the elements that literature allow the readers to use is the imagination in order to visualize what the author message is in his story or poem. Some stories, poems or drama are based from the writer’s personal experience, such as the conflict with they have with society because of their race, gender or ethnicity.