Analysis Of How The Garcia Lost Their Accents By Julia Alvarez

Who am I? Who are we? Where do I belong? What is self identity? These are a few questions that people will ask themselves within their lifetime. Self identity is the way in which one person identifies themselves within a social environment. In How the Garcia Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, we are able to see four girls who move from the Dominican Republic to the United States where they begin to lose their heritage and values of being Spanish women, and create new lives. When moving to a new country one recreates their identity through language, they endure the struggle of not fitting in, and they also become isolated from society. Four girls moving from their home, language becomes a vital role in their lives, in the United States.

She was not allow to sleep with her boyfriends over night, so in order to enjoy some privacy between her and her lover, she would skip town for a few days. In a particular incident Sofia went out of town with one of her boyfriends and after having sex with him she dumped him and left. “When you go to a new place, such as a new country or even a new city, you often enter a culture that is different from the one you left. Sometimes your culture and the new culture are similar. Other times, they can be very different, and even contradictory” (“Teens Health”). Moving to a new it is difficult for some individuals to adapt to their surroundings because they are not familiar with the social values of that culture. Teens in a new culture may find it hard to fit in or do things that were possibly easy to do back in their culture, than in the host culture. Sofia, having so many boyfriends became a problem for her family, especially her dad. Sofia’s father felt that her sleeping around with different guys would ruin his reputation, but here in America a dad might have a different stance on that topic. A father in America have different social values than Sofia’s father, his daughter could sleep around with guys and he would have never thought that it would ruin his

In college she sees how she begins to get less attention from guys than she did in high school, the reason being is she does not allow the them to take her virginity and her purity away from her. Yolanda meets a guy by the name of Rudy, one night Rudy goes to see Yolanda at her dorm room to return a pen before he leaves he gives Yolanda a kiss behind the ear. Yolanda states, “By the time the kisses had migrated from behind my ear to my neck I shivered when he put a necklace of them around me before departing” (Alvarez 94). Being sheltered and a virgin, she does not understand when Rudy tries to insinuate that he wants to have sex with her by being flirtatious. Writer of Lost Angels Times, Kang concludes that, “Smiling, saying “hello”, and shaking hands may be natural to most Americans, but they are not for Korean immigrants in whose culture, a smile and small talk are usually reserved for friends and families--and from their point of view, not to be squandered on strangers.” This shows how here in America a greeting with a smile is a friendly gesture, but over in Korean that gesture is used with only family and friends. This explains how one culture might do one thing and in other culture it can mean the complete opposite. Similar to how, the Americans and Dominicans