Garcia Girls Blogpost #2

     In the last post, Garcia Girls Blogpost #1, I wrote about how this book had a theme of innocence. Now that I've read the second part of the book (1970-1960), I realized that America has stolen a lot of what all the girls used to be. It changed them, matured them, scarred them, and forced them to adapt to life in America In the second part of the book, we get to see who Mami was when the family first moved to America versus the first part of the book where we see Mami exposed to America for a long time.
     In the vignette Daughter of Intervention, the author, Julia Alvarez, shows the power and influence that America had on Mami. Here, Mami is very excited about being in America and even describes herself that she had exerted her power as an American woman's freedom and had shed her old position in the Dominican Republic:

"She did not want to go back to the old country where, de la Torr or not, she was only a wife and a mother (and a failed one at that, since she had never provided the required son). Better an independent nobody than a high-class houseslave." (144)

      Because of living in America, Mami represents the differences in the majority of the countries other than America at the time: where women were constantly under the men and no matter what class they were, they would never be treated as equals. When Mami realizes that she holds this kind of power to be equal to her husband, she exerts this power in order to be the woman she has always wanted to be.
     In this specific vignette, Mami shows her power through helping her daughter, Yolanda write a speech and even defends Yolanda when her husband yells at Yolanda. This brings me to my next point. Yolanda has also gone through a lot of change from her typical culture into her new one in America. At the beginning of the vignette, Yolanda demonstrates her power as a child in an American family by talking back to her parents with less respect than she would have to in the Islands.
     In Yolanda's speech, she writes things like "I celebrate myself. The best student learns to destroy the teacher." In her old tradition, Yolanda would have probably been severely punished if she had said that in a speech to her teachers, but in America, Yolanda feels like she could say anything she wants to because she is living in a place where freedom and equality is encouraged for any race and any gender.