“Ni de aquí, ni de allá”: Memory, the Hyphen, and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

One of the intellectual and emotional labors undertaken by children of immigrants is having to negotiate their place in between two different cultures. Existence in this in-between space is understandably challenging and is explored in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, as the protagonist Yolanda and her sisters struggle to find themselves in between American and Dominican cultures. This article argues that memory plays a key role in navigating this space, as Alvarez constructs her semi-autobiographical work in reverse chronology, allowing Yolanda to work through the decision of where she believes she fits best using a series of flashbacks and memories from her own eyes and the eyes of other members of her family. While Marianne Hirsch theorizes that postmemory affects generations following those that experienced trauma, what Yolanda experiences differs. The trauma of navigating the “hyphen” of Dominican-American identity is her own, and it is through these memories, in addition to a focus on linguistic differences between English and Spanish that the girls struggle with, we follow Yolanda on her journey of self-discovery. What works such as Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents prove is that individuals have to find peace in an identity that is neither here nor there, ni de aquí ni de allá.

Exploring HIV concern in a population of Dominican American women midlife and older

Background The feminization and ethnic diversification of HIV infection, has resulted in a call for gender- and culture-specific prevention strategies for at-risk groups including Latinos in the United States. The steadily changing demographic profile of the AIDS epidemic challenges prevention strategies to remain relevant and up-to-date, particularly in populations of women midlife and older where an understanding of risk remains under explored. As the CDC requests country-specific HIV risk profiles for Latino communities in the US, understanding the socio-economic, behavioral and personal risk reasons of HIV risk for older Dominican women is critical for prevention. Methods We conducted focus group discussions informed by the Theory of Gender and Power (TGP). The three constructs of the TGP: 1) Affective influences/social norms; 2) Gender-specific norms and. 3) Power and Authority guided the thematic analysis and identified themes that described the socio-cultural and contextual reasons that that contribute to perceptions of HIV risk. Results Sixty Dominican American women ages 57–73 participated in our focus group discussions. Sexual Division of Labour: 1) Economic Dependence; 2) Financial Need and 3) Education and Empowerment. Sexual Division of Power: 4) HIV Risk and 5) Relationship Dynamics. Cathexis: Affective Influences/Social Norms: 6) HIV/AIDS Knowledge and 7) Prevention and Testing. Importantly, participants were concerned about partner fidelity when visiting the Dominican Republic, as the country accounts for the second highest HIV rates in the Caribbean. Conclusions Our results confirm previous findings about perceptions of HIV risk and provide additional insight into aging-related aspects of HIV risk for Latino women midlife and older.

A tradução como mediação cultural: as traduções da obra de Junot Diaz

This article has as its object the translations of the Dominican American writer Junot Díaz to Spanish, with special emphasis on the work of the Cuban-born translator Achy Obejas. Author of a short but remarkable work, Díaz elaborates his narratives in a variety of English that often incorporates elements of Spanish. His writing poetics includes the lexicon of Caribbean Spanish and syntactic structures and proper rhythm of his native language, which results in a strongly hybrid text. The translation of this text into a language that is so intensely present in the original is a challenge. To understand how the construction of this translation is processed, this article tries to analize the strategies used to try to keep up with the translinguistic character of these narratives. In order to reach this objective, some theoretical references are used, concepts such as the foreignizing translation, by Lawrence Venuti; translingualism; and D'Amore's considerations on translations of texts originally written in Spanglish. The analysis makes it clear that the work of Achy Obejas was largely able to give the texts in Spanish the same hybrid character present in the original ones.

Currents in Dominican American Literature

Dominican American literature comprises the body of creative writing in various genres by US-based authors of Dominican ancestry. Here, “Dominican” refers to people who trace their origins by birth or descent to the Dominican Republic, not to the island of Dominica in the Anglophone West Indies. “Dominican American,” in turn, applies to writers born, raised, and/or socialized in the United States, who received their schooling in general and, in particular, their literary education in this country irrespective of the extent of their involvement in the life of their ancestral homeland. Writing by Dominicans in the United States has a long history. Its existence reaches back at least to the first half of the 19th century, shining forth meaningfully in the 1990s, and showing little sign of abatement in the early decades of the 21st century. While this article concerns itself primarily with Dominican American writing, it seeks to answer predictable questions regarding the rapport of this corpus with the literary production of Dominican Republic-based writers and Dominican authors who have settled in the United States largely as immigrants, using Spanish as their literary language. The article distinguishes Dominican American literature from the writings of people who, beginning in the 19th century, came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as travelers, adventurers, and individual settlers, having left home for political or economic reasons. They could be exiles escaping danger or immigrants seduced by the possibility of enhancing their lives in the proverbial “land of milk and honey.” They tended to regard their time in the United States as temporary and yearned for the change of fortune—political or economic—that would bring them back home. However, having had their return either thwarted or delayed, they would often build families or raise any offspring that came with them to the receiving society. Their children, US-born or brought to the land while young enough to be socialized as US citizens, became Dominican American by default. US-born children of foreign parents who have pursued writing as a vocation have been able to vie for recognition in the American literary mainstream. English speakers by virtue of their US upbringing, they would have their ears attuned to the rhythms of US literature writ large. Dominican American writers in the 21st century have shown their mettle, making themselves heard in the ethnically partitioned map of the country’s letters. As with other Caribbean-descended American writers, they typically inhabit their US citizenship with an awareness of the contested nature of their civic belonging. Family legacies, personal memories, and their own process of self-discovery keep them reminded of the effects of US foreign policy on the land of their forbears. As a result, their texts tend to reflect not only an ethnic American voice, but also a diasporic perspective.