The American Century: Literature since 1945 761center of her own story. América’s Dream, as its title implies, is a novel that
reconstructs the American dream as an act of resistance to both the machismo of the
old culture and the neocolonial oppression of the new.
The largest source of new residents in New York City for the past several decades,
has not, however, been Puerto Rico but the Dominican Republic. Dominicans, in
fact, accounted for one out of every five immigrants to the city in the 1990s. They
have also been the subject of two remarkable novels by Julia Alvarez (1950–), a
Dominican who emigrated to the United States in the 1960s: How the Garcia Girls
Lost Their Accents (1991) and Yo (1997) (Alvarez’s later novels include Finding
Miracles (2004) and Saving the World (2006)). The narrative of the earlier and finer
of these novels centers on political turmoil and flight, with the Garcia family escaping
to the United States after being implicated in a failed plot against the Dominican
dictator Trujillo. Its tripartite structure, in turn, moves back in time: from 1989 to
1972, then 1970 to 1960, then 1960 to 1956. The Garcia family arrive in America in
a condition of “abrupt exile” and soon encounter an alien culture. “At home there
had always been a chauffeur opening a car door or a gardener tipping his hat”; here
in the Bronx, by contrast, they live in a rented apartment and survive for a while on
the generosity of others. Dr. Garcia, the father, never shakes off all the residues of his
former life as a prominent member of the Dominican community, such as his accent
and his assumption of patriarchal authority. He is enough of a realist, though, to
assimilate himself to the American work ethic and an agenda of social mobility. He
is also sufficiently successful in his new clinical practice to move the family out to
Long Island eventually. Very soon, he is proudly proclaiming his new identity as “un
dominican-york,” and takes out American citizenship. The real center of the family is
not Dr. Garcia, however, but his wife Laura. Her abrupt exile may initially lead her
to recall her old home “through the lens of loss.” But she soon becomes the “daughter
of invention” in America. She rejects the chance to return to the island of her
upbringing, declaring “better an independent nobody than a high-class house slave.”
And although she remains devoted to her husband, she loses much of her deference.
“This is America, Papi, America!” she tells Dr. Garcia during a moment of
confrontation. “You are not in a savage country anymore!” To her four daughters,
she is “their Thomas Edison, their Benjamin Franklin Mom,” the emotional matrix
of their lives and their role model. Gathered together in an “invisible sisterhood,” the
four Garcia girls learn independence from her. Acculturating rapidly, they also reject
the notions of female subordination associated with the island nation from which
they have fled. “Island was the hair-and-nails crowd, chaperones and icky boys with
their macho strutting,” the narrator tells us. “By the end of a couple of years away
from home, we had more than adjusted.” One of the daughters, Yolanda, who turns
to writing as a vocation, does find adjustment difficult. The central consciousness of
the novel, as her nickname “Yoyo” implies, she finds herself yoyoing, oscillating
between the old culture and the new in a way that the other Garcias do not. She even
returns “home” to the Dominican Republic for her birthday, after an absence of five
years, and she reflects that she “is not so sure she’ll be going back.” But, as the
narrative makes clear, her reluctance to become simply American is not a sign of herGGray_c05.indd 761ray_c 05 .indd 761 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM