Julia Alvarez and the Anxiety of Latina Representation

In this essay, I propose a meditation on the anxiety of representation caused by "broken" memories that intersect Julia Alvarez's national identity(ies) and self-presentation. I look at select moments in Alvarez's writing practice to ask: How does the Latina writer "perform" (that is, present, re-present, as well as exaggerate or underplay) individual and national memory and history through fiction and personal, reflective essays? How can the seams between fiction and history, and imagination and fact be examined? And, how do Alvarez's characters mediate this process? Alvarez's writing exposes her plight of identity, caught between assimilation into U.S. mainstream culture and contestation of the very mechanisms of assimilation into mainstream culture.¹ Mediating the tension between these two poles, Alvarez undergoes a process of self-invention through writing that situates her in the center of Latina literature and defines her as a Dominican and diaspora writer par excellence. I suggest that a novel such as How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) can be studied as a testimony of the complexity of memory. With this essay, I elaborate on the ways that migration, loss, and trauma are central themes that inform Alvarez's creative and personal process, exploring memory and recontextualizing history. My analysis reveals more than the dissonances experienced by children who migrate and are bicultural; specifically, it foregrounds the deep psychological problems that manifest themselves through memory, or lack of it, for those who are both challenged by bicultural and bilingual experiences and haunted by a silenced, and escaped, past of state repression.

I contend that a particular anxiety of personal representation comes into play powerfully in Alvarez's struggles to overcome the gaps of unknown history. For example, her writing foregrounds what cannot be known of the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship. The problematic of unknown (or could we say denied?) history is further reflected in a pervasive ambiguity over racial/ethnic identity throughout her personal essays. This ambiguity is consequential to the history and politics of the Dominican Republic, which has repeatedly negated a strong and important African heritage. Alvarez's national history includes the 1937 massacre of tens of thousands of ethnic Haitians on the Dominican border. This tragedy, retold by the Trujillo machine of state terror, erased the lives of many individuals and gave way to the reinterpretation of national and racial identity. Arguably, the history that runs through Alvarez's writing is complicated by the impossibility of recovering exact occurrences; her work reveals a web of conflicting and hidden stories that mirror and inform her struggle to pull the thread of her own identity from a tangle of possibilities. The discrepancies between what is true and not true, known and unknown, seem to haunt Alvarez, resulting in a body of literature that, despite its light-hearted exposition, interrogates Dominican American Latina identity from her particular perspective: a woman of color who is considered "white" in her country and privileged on many levels as well as coming from an exiled Dominican family.

Latina/o writers must invent themselves as they negotiate their double cultural affiliations: Latin American and North American.² These two national identities are further complicated by multiple layers of ethnic and racial, cultural and genetic histories, which may include African, white European, and/or indigenous. Sociologist Juan Flores, former director of The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, has addressed both the uses and misuses of memory and identity construction in his studies of the way that Nuyoricans restore the past according to present needs, maintaining a deeper sense of Puerto Rican identity in the barrio than relatives on the island. In a chapter essay, "Broken English Memories: Languages of the Trans-Colony," he recounts how Puerto Ricans did not become part of U.S. national memory until literature giving space to Puerto Rican memory began to appear. Flores refers to La Memoria Rota, by literary critic Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, to propose that broken memory is at the root of all identifications. Flores begins his essay as follows:

Historical memory...