How the García Girls Lost Their Accents Research Assignment (Essay Sample)

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Immigration: How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Ascents
Introduction
The question if an individual can have a corresponding multicultural identity remains unanswered. Mumera Afridi tries to answer this question by contemplating on her experience as a child since departing her motherland Pakistan at the age of twelve and the impacts it has on her identity. It comes to her attention that despite her being shifted to many places later in her endeavors, her early memories about Pakistan still keep up with her and shape her identity. Similarly, the Garcia sisters in the novel by Julia Alvarez ‘How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,' also depart their motherland, the Dominican Republic, at a tender age and fight to identify their real cultural individualities (Alvarez). Their immigration to the United States renders them to undergo a series of changes to adjust to the new environment.
Yolanda’s Experience
Yolanda strives to be an expert in English and the connotations associated with it for her to be able to fit in the American society quickly and ascertain a new self. However, her ambition to understand the American culture through English left her trapped in-between the two cultures. Through scrutiny of the relationship between identity and language, one can see the bigger picture of English globalization and examine its impacts on non-English speakers (Alvarez). Yolanda experiences Americanization to some extent after learning English, but it has little effect on her sense of belonging in the United States since, in a similar way like Afridi, she cannot abandon her roots.
New insights have grown in Yolanda since her learning English, and her old perception gets reshaped resulting in her gaining the American voice of her desire. Before Yolanda migrated into the United States, she lived in a male-controlled society where women did not have any choice but submit to men (Alvarez). The desires by Yolanda has led to her ideal self, making her change her perspectives on being a woman and gender equality. She obeyed her father and all men in the household for the entire time she lived with them. However, her struggles were aimed at detaching herself from the Dominican standards for women. Her new ability to read and speak English is not only teaching on its application but also unintentionally instills her with American values such as independence, intellectual liberty, and gender equality (Alvarez). The traits have contributed to reshaping on her world interpretation, brought her closer to her true identity, and made her an independent and courageous person who own equal right as those of men; different from the obedient and humble woman seen in her background culture.
The impact of Americanization on Yolanda acts as a significant move towards her assimilation in the United States and make it her second home. However, a change in one’s culture is likely to leave an individual torn in between two cultures. Yolanda’s incorporation of her identity in America makes her lose a sense of belonging in the states since her history in the Dominican Republic is intensely embedded in her in the same way Afridi’s first years in Pakistan get ingrained in her (Alvarez). Yolanda gets trapped in between the Dominican and American culture, between the past and the present. Her powerlessness reveals itself after her broken relationship with Rudy. She states that a lonely and cold life awaited her in her home country. She further cites that she could not find an individual who could understand her peculiar mix of agnosticism and Catholicism and her American panaches (Alvarez 99). When Rudy stresses them to make love, she gets offended by the insolent act and thwarted by his failure to understand her mixed contextual.
Although Yolanda left her home country at a tender age, her first perceptions cannot get ignored in building her identity. Despite the amount of foreign culture an individual consumes, their background memories will always trap them in the past that was not ready for the present. Yolanda annihilates too much of American culture, yet she is not able to entirely forget the traits she attained from her motherland. Afridi recalls an alike experience in ‘Gentle Madness (Alvarez). She states that the single memory is the basis that made her orientation notwithstanding the time taken or the place. Memory plays an essential part for a person who migrates from one county to the other. Afridi and Yolanda get affected by the issues since they got shifted from their homelands at an age when their identities had just begun development and their associations with their origins were just at its beginning (Alvarez). An individual's first language is vital to shaping preliminary perceptions which are bound to become central to one's identity and cannot get altered by new foreign values. Yolanda's initial perceptions play had to get eliminated by the new American values.
The challenges aim at changing her perception. However, they end up d...