Blog Post #1

"Simply wonderful." (Los Angeles Times) By just looking at the cover of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, written by Julia Alvarez you can already get the sense of a cultural background and a culture clash as one of the big motifs in the book. By the front cover, I can make a guess that the girls love to dance and that is something they lose themselves in when bored in the new world. I can already make some relations to the book, The Bonesetters Daughter because the characters, like LuLing, have to adjust to a new world when they already have customs to their native culture. It is going to be a hard time for them and around the time of the Civil Rights, they will feel persecuted for many things and have to live at a lower standard due to the vicious, racist Americans. Living in the Dominican Republic, they seemed to have many privileges growing up based on the family tree. Having some relation to the Conquistadores, they must come from wealth and power due to their ancestors. While growing up, they experienced many things that came to their advantage such as: having maids that adore them, getting manicures and relaxing, and a loving family. When they move to the US, they endure hardships and have to come up from many obstacles and troubles. After reading the first chapter alone, it is already captivating in that it shows the difference between the two worlds. She dreams of coming back to her native land and gets caught up in a risky situation. She runs into two military soldiers, and they approach her with machetes, but they just wanted to ask her if she needed help. Already, she is running into some difficulties such that Yolanda can't even remember how to speak Spanish anymore. I predict that when she returns to the US, she is going to dream of her home and her extended family living in their royalty-like lives.