Who would have thought it would end with a body to remember with

As a Language major, the number of English literature classes I can take is limited and I already took them all last year! I am glad that this course did not fall under the same category. I enjoyed being in this class!

Who Would Have Thought It? almost scared me away but I ended up writing about it for Wikipedia and reading a lot of the critiques gave me a sense of appreciation of Ruiz de Burton’s work. Sometimes, when I edit the article on Wikipedia, I feel somewhat of an anonymity that I think Ruiz de Burton initially wanted. Maria Ruiz de Burton would use Mrs. Henry S. Burton in the publication of her books and we use different names to sign into Wikipedia.

As I was writing on the book’s portrayal of religion and how it was used to distinguish Lola from the Irish Catholics, I realized that Alvarez too finds the need to distinguish the girls from the Irish population. Although this course is about Chicana identity, reading the novels gave me a sense of an overall immigrant experience.

There seems to be a lot of motivation for immigration as well such as the constant renegotiation of the demarcation of borders in Who Would Have Thought It? the harvest in … y no se lo trago la tierra, political motivations in El Puente de Brooklyn, marriage in Woman Hollering Creek and Pinochet’s dictatorship in and a Body to Remember With

I think it was such a treat to have Carmen Rodriguez come and talk about and a Body to remember with and share her insights on why a writer chooses to write a work of fiction instead of an autobiography.

and a body to remember with

I think that each author has an interesting description for their ambiguous hybrid position. Alvarez embeds the motion of a yoyo in one of Yolanda’s names and Rodriguez describes the “moving back and forth” as “teeter-totter” in her foreword. As I read Black Hole, I noticed that the conversations were one sided. Estela’s letter to her mother has no response and only one voice can be heard in the phone conversations. The voice of the other person is embedded with what the other one decides to repeat.
My eyes widened when she used the identifiably Canadian pragmatic marker “eh”, spelled “color” with a “u” and mentions Vancouver landmarks such as Stanley Park, City Hall, the seawall at Burrard, etc. I was enjoying reading about the landscape I live in. And I found myself relating to Estela’s dreams. She dreamt of Vancouver landmarks within the Chilean geography. I would often dream of being inside our Manila house here in Vancouver. It was almost as if there was no clear dividing line between the two countries and I would wake up confused, wondering where I was for the first few minutes. I guess my position too is ambiguous even though I am not an immigrant, being sent to Vancouver to study.
The way Rodriguez wrote is more direct and less descriptive than Alvarez’s style. I find it to be effective in the first person narrative. I am finding it difficult to put the book down!

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

I have noticed that novels we read in this class are increasingly resembles something poignant to the one we read previously. The fragmented structure of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is similar to Woman Hollering Creek and other stories but the vignettes of this novel explicitly state the perspective from which the story is told in the beginning of the chapter. Sometimes, all four of the girls are the protagonists of a story, offering multiple perspectives on life in the United States and Dominican Republic. Similar to Woman Hollering Creek and other stories whose characters straddle the line between the United States and Mexico, having one foot on each side, Alvarez’s novel (unlike Rivera) also names the characters of the story. Each of the sisters have a name and a pet name and the people around them are distinguished with unique names such as Illuminada and Altagracia. The names seemingly function as an indicator of class and the pet names of the girls, such as Yo for Yolanda explicitly refer to the first person.

Although each of the girls each have names, their mother confuses them and attempts to resolve the situation by assigning a particular color to them almost as like how the colors of a flag are representative of a nation. The attention to color seems to be an important aspect of this novel. It begins with visual descriptions of Yolanda’s coming home party.

That story also hints at a matriarchy, indicating that the widowed Tia Carmen was the head of the clan. I am interested to see if this turns out to be a feminist novel. One of its similarities to Cisneros’ novel is a daughter’s defiance to a father’s wishes. Sofia packs her things and flies to Germany after her father confronts her about the letters from her German boyfriend. One of the women in Cisneros’ novel also defied her father to be with her husband. Alvarez’s character more explicitly feels exiled. He only goes to her house to visit his grandchildren and although Sofia threw his seventieth birthday, he mentions all her sister’s names but fail to mention her’s during the games.