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Summary Of An American Childhood In The Dominican Republic By Julia Alvarez

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To understand the works of Julia Alvarez, the reader most understand where she comes from and how she became so successful. Julia Alvarez wrote about what she knew best and that is her own life. Julia Alvarez was born on March 27, 1950, in New York City (Schaefer). Julia's family lived in New York for just three weeks, before they returned to the Dominican Republic, where Alvarez lived until she was ten years old (Schaefer). In the Dominican Republic she attended an American school where she first learned English; it was her mother’s idea for Julia to go to an American school (Adams). She would get picked on how she spoke her own native language which was Spanish. In her autobiographical essay, "An American Childhood in the Dominican Republic," Alvarez understood that she had a relationship to the Dominican Republic as well as to the United States (Adams) Alvarez lived a comfortable upper-class life within the safe margins of her mother's family. …show more content…

Being unsuccessful the father moved his family to New York where they settled in a neighborhood where they were the only Hispanics in the neighborhood. The story “¡YO!” picks up with Alvarez using her alter ego Yolanda to tell the story of being between two different cultures. Julia Alvarez makes it possible for the reader to understand the story by having main culture, but also having her own culture (Gallo). “¡YO!” has different chapters of how different characters view Yolanda, and the chapter “The Mother” explains the struggle of being a mother of a family of immigrants. Julia Alvarez shows three main themes on the chapter “The Mother” false identity, freedom, and being caught between two

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In Julia Alvarez’s novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, a young, naïve girl transforms into a prominent figure in the revolution against Leonidas Trujillo as we read page after page of her most private thoughts. This character is Maria Teresa (Mate), the youngest of the Mirabal sisters. Alvarez weaves Maria Teresa’s story as a coming of age story under a dictatorship, and slowly, but thoroughly, shows us how it corrupts childhood innocence and forms revolutionaries. Mate’s chapters in the novel are solely journal entries. In Julia Alvarez’s words, “Techniques are just tools on the wall to help you get at what best reflects the stories in your heart to tell.

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Throughout her life, Julia has had a family that has tried to protect her and help her understand what is going on around them. Anita, the main character, has an older sister just like Alvarez more helpful with trying to make her understand situations going on around them. “” Why are you whispering?” In fact, everyone has been talking in whispers and

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The last discovery Alvarez makes is breaking out of her shell and can focus on who she wants to become. These tools help us to reach the same insight as the author, and experience the growth with her as we read. The tone emits a mutual relationship between the author and “The Blue Estuaries.” Julia Alvarez says “They had discovered you had it in you before you even knew you had it in you.”

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Lola takes advantage of her deteriorating mother whose illness represents the declining hold of the norms over Lola. Since her mom “will have trouble lifting her arms over her head for the rest of her life,” Lola is no longer afraid of the “hitting” and grabbing “by the throat” (415,419). As a child of a “Old World Dominican Mother” Lola must be surrounded by traditional values and beliefs that she does not want to claim, so “as soon as she became sick” Lola says, “I saw my chance and I’m not going to pretend or apologize; I saw my chance and I eventually took it” (416). When taking the opportunity to distinguish herself from the typical “Dominican daughter” or ‘Dominican slave,” she takes a cultural norm like long hair and decides to impulsively change it (416). Lola enjoyed the “feeling in [her] blood, the rattle” that she got when she told Karen to “cut my hair” (418).

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