Loss, Language, and Latina Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How The García Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract

Julia Alvarez’s novels represent the disavowal of cultural heritage, unfulfilled cultural practices, assimilated ways of life, and profound struggle with psychological violence and adopt a critical perspective of Bhabha’s concept of cultural dislocation. This article analyses the articulations and effects of cultural dislocation and trauma on the characters’ construction of their female cultural identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). Using the terminologies offered by the dislocation theory, the study examines the elements and signs of linguistic assimilation and draws on the sense of loss through protracted rootlessness. The study examines how cultural dislocation and its consequences are arguably the most pronounced element in Alvarez’s non-linear narrative. The present examination shows how culturally dislocated characters develop fragmented emotional distractions and insecure states of consciousness. The study concludes that the female characters negotiate their unstable or fractured identities and demonstrates how these characters imagine routes toward healing, resistance, and reconciliation with the self through thematic and formal properties.