A Journey Home: Transnational Dominican American Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Authors

Bethany A. Dolman, Brigham Young University
Dr. Trenton L. Hickman, Brigham Young University

Keywords

transnational Dominican American, identity, Julia Alvarez, García Girls

College

Humanities

Department

English

Abstract

Transnationalism is sociology’s relatively new model of national identity that explains and validates a phenomenon that most immigrants from the Dominican Republic to the United States experience: a simultaneous sense of connection to multiple countries, cultures and national identities. I examined Dominican American transnationalism from an interdisciplinary perspective, fusing sociological and literary theory by using Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents as a case study for the transnational Dominican American experience. I set out to analyze a very abstract and dynamic concept, somewhat unsure during the project’s early stages of how I was going to delimit such a broad theoretical notion but finishing more than a year later with a detailed 79 page Honors Thesis.

Recommended Citation

Dolman, Bethany A. and Hickman, Dr. Trenton L. (2013) "A Journey Home: Transnational Dominican American Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents," Journal of Undergraduate Research: Vol. 2013: Iss. 1, Article 713.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jur/vol2013/iss1/713