When Immigrants Speak: Diasporic Voices in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents

Abstract

As an immigrant and diasporic intellectual writer, Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist Julia Alvarez makes use of the language of the geographic place she inhabits, English, to speak about her condition as “other” in the hegemonic cultural context of the United States. Thus, Alvarez gives voice to her ethnic group when choosing the English language to write about the experience of the García sisters in her novel How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991). Her writing grasps as well as assumes all the responsibilities of her silenced past, which constantly seems to haunt her present, and, for that matter, Julia Alvarez provides a dialogue with her present as she establishes new concepts and, more importantly, talks about her difference.