Garcia Girls

People thrust into environments where they know they will stand out. In Julia Alvarez’s bildungsroman novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1992), Junot Diaz’s short story “Ysrael” (1996), and Morris Louis’s painting Alpha-Pi (1960), all talk about the idea of trespassing and intruding into unknown territory. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents discusses issues pertaining to an immigrant family who recently migrates from the Dominican Republic. The Garcia family struggles to assimilate to the American culture and encounters difficulty raising their young daughters in a foreign environment. In Junot Diaz’s “Ysrael,” a boy with a damaged face is harassed and assaulted by his peers. He wears a mask, and the people around him are curious

All three of these works examine the word “trespass” through three unique lenses. Morris Louis, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz’s goal is to show how commonly humans tend to intrude onto unfamiliar settings, how it happens in different situations, and the importance of considering its effect on everyone. In Julia Alvarez’s novel How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a Dominican family struggles to find what it means to fully belong to a foreign setting. The parents, Mami and Papi raise four daughters in an environment where someone’s uniqueness was never appreciated by the general population. Even as kids, the daughters realize that they are different as it is constantly highlighted by the teasing of their peers. In the short story “The Floor Show”, the family is invited to dinner by an American family. Sofia, one of the four daughters is aimlessly thinking when she notices a trend about the people near her: “She watched the different tables around theirs. All the other guests were white and spoke in low, unexcited voices, Americans were white and spoke in low unexcited voices”(179). Sofia feels as though she is intruding

Ysrael draws attention from most of the people in his town for a distinct feature that sets him apart from everyone else. When he was younger his face was mauled by a pig, and ever since he faced constant ridicule for his unsightly appearance: “Ysrael was a different story. Even on his side of Ocoa people had heard of him, how when he was a baby a pig had eaten his face off, skinned it like it was an orange. He was something to talk about, a name that set the kids to screaming”(212). Diaz’s choice of words alludes to how people, especially immigrants stand out in environments foreign to them. These types of people tend to become alienated in a setting where people’s differences are not always embraced: “Roll him(Ysrael) on his back, my brother said, and we did pushing like crazy. Rafa took off his mask and threw it spinning into the grass”(218). Diaz also points to how people have fascinations with people who look different than them. It is similar to the quote: “the only green apple in a basket of red apples”. That one green apple gets all the attention, and people why wonder it is there. However, it is able to warp the regularity of the red apples behind to change the whole view of the basket. Diaz is able to successfully show how Ysrael trespassing onto the land not only affects him but the people around him. Interestingly, all