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

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.

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