Bilingual Sestina Julia Alvarez

     As a young child, Rodriguez finds comfort and safety in his noisy home full of Spanish sounds. Spanish, is his family's' intimate language that comforts Rodriguez by surrounding him in a web built by the family love and security which is conveyed using

The Poem Bilingual was written by Julia Alvarez. Bilingual is about a woman telling us her struggles of being bilingual-”speaking two languages”. She is from Dominican Republic. The bilingual sestina is about the feeling you have when there are two languages in your head and words won’t translate fast enough. The two-languages & two-cultures are ultimately mixed together and changes on both sides. The stanza line that says -“Gladys, I summon you back with your given nombre”…reflects a lonely, longing feeling. The author doesn’t understand English Languages as well as the Spanish Languages. She yearns for that connection and understanding that she got with the Spanish language which Is dear to her heart.

Since the beginning of time, people have immigrated from their home country to all over the world. Immigration has been influenced by many factors in society like war, lack of resources, and tyrannical government. The United States has been the hotspot for centuries and has been named the “Mixing Pot” by many. This novel shows how immigration plays a big part in shaping the people’s lives and how it affects them personally. In How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez uses an autobiographical character managing two cultures at the time of Trujillo’s dictatorship to dive into the complexities of self-image, gender roles, and the challenges of assimilation.

As she was continuing to grow into a young adult, she could no longer recognize the girl she was becoming. This made her feel lost, as if she were losing a part of her that she left back home while moving to the United States. In an article about cultural identity in How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents, critic Bridget Kevane writes, “‘The title of Alvarez’s first novel is symbolic and significant to the narration itself. Although the title specifically refers to the ‘loss’ of a Spanish accent, it is symbolic of the larger cultural losses suffered by immigrants as they struggle to survive in the United States’” (17).

The use of these metaphors and fantasy style writing has a cultural basis in Latin America, but they also serve another purpose. The mystical imagery is a way to code information that would be too dangerous to be explicitly written, to hide it from institutions of power that may pose a threat to the authors. These metaphors serve as a secret language that will be able to speak about the facts of the current political climate without running the risk of explicitly speaking about it. In the novel’s case, images such as the ‘paginas en blanco’, the faceless men, or the science fiction style speech all serve to express ideas that may seem dangerous if they were blatantly spoken outright. The ‘paginas en blanco’ describe information that is lost or erased by the Trujillo regime. To mention outright that the Trujillato had expunged certain details is history, in this case about Oscar’s family past, would lead an author to the same fate that Abelard had in the prison. The faceless men are avatars for the free-flowing power that belongs to the current dictators or structures of rule. This metaphor shows the key essential fact about the Trujillo regime, that while Trujillo was the puppet in this ruler ship, he was not responsible for the rise in power. That responsibility belongs to the government that seeded him in power to prevent communist insurgency in the Dominican Republic, in other words, our own government. This is alluded to when Yunior first mentions Abelard’s manuscript, the historical documents that planned to reveal the truth about the Trujillo administration. By using science fiction style speech, Yunior tells us “That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!” (245) The most prominent use of a mystical

Hernandez takes her audience through her childhood as she develops complicated relationships with the languages she speaks, whereas Machado details the adolescence and early adulthood of her narrator and her autonomy in her marriage. These two pieces break down these women’s relationship to formative experiences regarding family and girlhood into two sections: the initial response to these experiences and how they will affect them in the greater span of their lives. In their

Each short chapter story written by Junot Diaz presents different key ideas and themes that can easily be identified when reading and analyzing important details contained in his short personal fiction. To begin with, language is one of the important key themes that Junot Diaz focuses on his story. Throughout the chapters, one is able to see a combination of words that contain a mixture of slang in both English and Spanish. Likewise, in his short stories, Diaz includes a variety of Spanish words that are used in his home country as well as other Latin American countries.

She explains what her Chicano language means to her and how it identifies who she is, first she discusses overcoming tradition of silence, second she explains the importance of her Chicano language, and third, she explains Linguistic Terrorism. 4. After reading Gloria Anzaldua’s narrative it made me notice what my first language means to me, which is Spanish and how it makes me who I am. 5. The authors’ purpose is to enlighten the reader on the stigma attached to speaking in

Pat Mora is an award-winning writer that bases most her poems on tough cultural challenges and life as a Mexican American. She was born in a Spanish speaking home in El Paso, Texas. Mora is proud to be a Hispanic writer and demonstrates how being culturally different in America is not easy. She explains this through her experiences and the experience other’s. In her poems “Elena”, “Sonrisas”, and “Fences”, Mora gives you a glimpse of what life as a Mexican American is; their hardships, trials, strength that make them who they are.

During his childhood, he felt English was an obligation to fit in. As his family’s proficiency with English increased, their close ties with being solely Spanish speakers diminished: “We remained a loving family, but one greatly changed. No longer so close; no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness,” (lines 127-130). Growing apart from his family illustrates native Spanish speakers lose bonds because their shared identity no longer separates them from American

Soon after his first opinion is stated, Rodriguez dives into another story, this time detailing his mother and father’s struggle to speak English in public: “In public, my father and mother spoke a hesitant, accented, and not always grammatical English. And then they would have to strain, their bodies tense, to catch the sense of what was rapidly said by los gringos. At home, they returned to Spanish. The language of their Mexican past sounded in counterpoint to the English spoken in public. The words would come quickly, with ease” (Rodriguez 572). This is the sad fate of many immigrants, as well as many people learning to speak a second language. The fact that this young boy noticed that his parents struggled is touching and sweet, while

Growing-up in a predominately Mexican/Mexican-American community as a first-generation girl, like I did, is no walk in the park. Not only was I to uphold my parent’s traditional Mexican values such as: learning to cook and keep to a household, as well as a marriage, but also to uphold my new American values of independence and success measured in money as well as in property. At school I was taught to forget my first language, Spanish, and speak only in English, reminding me that: “You don’t want to speak with an accent.” At home I was reminded that Spanish, was and still is my first language and to leave English for school use only, reminding me that: “We can’t understand you in English.” Through this tug-of-war, between both cultures expectations of who I was to be/become, there was a desperate need to find my own identity, away from either culture. Sandra Cisneros’, The House on Mango Street, documents the need and struggle to find one’s own identity, through the narrator Esperanza’s experiences growing-up in a predominately Latino community in Chicago. Throughout the book Esperanza tries to understand the many different factors that influence her life and identity: in particular ethnicity and gender. Although, Esperanza suggest that she doesn’t want to be identified by either her Mexican identity or her sex; both of these factors play a major role in her struggle to find her own identity, by the way that they are intertwined in her own thoughts and in the descriptions of

As a result, Anzaldua illustrates her hardship to the attention of an English speaker as an audience. Throughout the reading, she consistently switches from English to Spanish in many paragraphs forcing a non-Spanish speaker, such as myself, to look up translations an order to make sense of the story. An example of this would be when her mother expresses her disappointment saying, “I want you to speak English. PA hallar buen trabajo hablas ingles con un accent” (206). By forcing this task on the audience, this allows a sense of empathy and understanding of author’s struggles of what she had to go through growing up. She had spoken English but is still sadly looked upon from her mother due to having Spanish “accent”, that with this accent putting her through school is pointless.

Rodriguez considers that the community anyone lives is in is who they are. In the essay by Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue” she demonstrates how immigrants help shape American identity, by the way, speak to people and language

Because there are no "true" Hispanics, the author concludes that racial categorization, not only of Hispanics, is unfit. Americans, explains the author, do not speak English but "American English" (115). Americans have taken the English language and transformed it into their own property. While becoming a hybrid, the language has also devoured other languages as well, causing boundaries, whether literary or racial, to mesh together.