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Analysis Of Something To Declare By Julia Alvarez

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Julia Alvarez’s “Something to Declare” leaves all readers feeling a sense of familiarity with His-panic Americans, particularly Dominican Americans, and their struggles. While Julia Alvarez and her siblings were fortunate enough to make it into the United States, it is not a walk in the park for even them to assimilate into American society. Thus the question becomes is the United States Alvarez’s real home or is the Dominican Republic her real home? Whatever the real answer is, the technical answer is that the United States is her home. Also, Alvarez manages to make English her own, conveying the stories she wishes to in the world’s most popular language while never really improving upon her native tongue. Alvarez and her siblings never …show more content…

The road to critical literacy in English was not an easy one, however. Also, due to rac-ism as well as sexism, Alvarez had barriers towards her education as well as towards her future job prospects. Males were able to go out of the house and do what they wanted, which could en-tail getting higher education and staying up late (135, 155). Meanwhile, women’s primary goal was to be good wives and good mothers (135). Also, the vast majority of the characters in the books Alvarez read for school were not people of color, which is why Alvarez jumped at the op-portunity of reading about books with people of color as characters (134, 168). Her peoples’ sto-ries obviously were made up of people who came from her country, but here we see that while they may have had a sufficient literacy to speak about stories, they did not even have functional literacy sufficient enough to write the whole stories in a book. For news, Alvarez said Domini-cans relied on the radio or word of mouth (138). Many Dominicans could not even read street sign, so they had to associate certain landmarks with streets (138). The fact that the Dominicans have found a way to get by through life is fortunate, but the fact remains that when written texts are involved, Alvarez has implied that most of her people do not even have enough functional literacy in order to read or

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