Dominican female bildungsroman as an anthropological text of knowledge. Julia Álvarez and the experience of migration in the United States

Abstract

The great human exoduses that took place between the three islands that make up the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic) and the United States throughout the second decade of the twentieth century originated a Caribbean territorialization of significant presence. This way, many texts began to testify the sociological processes of Caribbean migration and, at the same time, another literary typology of literature did start to focus on describing in detail the edges of female displacement. This is how How the García Girls lost Their Accents (1991), by Dominican-American author Julia Álvarez, has emerged as a canonical work of female Dominican displacement in the United States. However, far from being limited to occupying a place within the artistic corpusof female migration, the work may also be considered as an anthropological text of knowledge because of its intention of focusing exclusively on the integration of Dominican women in The United States, which also acts at two levels: testimonial genesis and commercial interest. The article, therefore, proposes to analyze Álvarez's work as an anthropological dissemination text following the annotations of Australian professor Joel S. Khan.