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.

Garcia Girls Blogpost #1

I think I want to write and analyze more about Yolanda. At this point in the book, Yolanda is shown to be the smart child of the family in her mother’s eyes. In her sister’s eyes, Yolanda is the “bad one” because of the experiences that she’s had in college and other relationships she’s been in afterwards.  
Because the book is written in reverse chronological order, the beginning of the book represented the last part of the story and the end of the book represented the first part of the whole story. So starting from the beginning of the book or the end of the story, Yolanda was coming back to Dominican Republic after five years of living in the US. She talks about how she doesn’t want to go back to the US and gives a perception on the dangers and the situation that the Dominican Republic is in at that time.
Before Yolanda goes back to the Dominican Republic, she was respected by her mother for being the smart, poetic one and by her sisters as the fearless one. Yolanda’s stories in Part I helped build her character. In the vignette, Jon, Yolanda is having trouble with her husband John because all he wants to do is have sex while she finds him more and more unattractive. She goes to a therapist and falls in love with him. In the vignette, The Rudy Elmenhurst Story, Yolanda is a college student who falls in love with a boy named Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst the third. All throughout this vignette, Rudy wants to have sex with Yolanda, but she does not give in and Rudy leaves her for another girl who will sleep with him. Yolanda is described in this vignette that she is very innocent and that she is very devoted religiously. She has a sense of what is right and what is wrong and no matter what, will not give into the demands of a boy she loves if she doesn’t feel right. Yet, in Jon, Yolanda is not innocent at all. In fact, she has an affair with her therapist because she no long loves her husband John. She changes from a very innocent girl to what seems to be a self centered woman.
I’m not sure what her real character is and I want to see how she progresses through her life to end up in America and become what she is at the beginning of the book/ end of the story.