How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
While reading the excerpt from How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, by Julia Alvarez, it made me realize the importance of valuing and maintaining my students first language and culture. I mean this is a part of their identity isn´t it? In this story, each family member seemed to view American life from a different perspective. The dad wanted to maintain his culture by keeping up with Dominican news and speaking Spanish, while the mom did not act this way. She seemed to embrace and adapt to the American way of life. The girls on the other hand seemed to struggle with their identity. It appeared that a divide was created between the girls and their parents. The Garcia girls found it harder and harder to relate to their parents and the family began to drift apart. Something that resonated with me is as the girls learned more English and lost some of their Spanish, it became more difficult to understand their father. This breaks my heart as I have a student who faces the same challenges. He has focused so much on the English language and American ways that he struggles to communicate with his father. My student's father only speaks Spanish and my student is losing his ability to meaningfully communicate with his dad. This made me realize that my next steps are to make sure my students realize how special they truly are and to incorporate their culture and values in my classroom. I need my students to understand that their home language and culture is a stepping stone and a tool for learning a new language. They need to embrace and value their bilingualism. My goal is for my students to recognize how valuable their culture is; because if they lose this, they are losing a piece of themselves.
A common theme is the generational gap the acculturation process causes between the parents and the students. Personally, I struggled being between two worlds, having been raised by immigrants parents in a country foreign to them. I inherited many of their traditions but also would pick and choose what I liked and what I valued from each, making it my own. You mentioned the importance of valuing home language so they can continue to maintain their identity and have communication with parents. Language is one of the important components of the acculturation process.
ReplyDeleteI read the same piece, what a clear and powerful picture of the different generations in a family and how each member deals with a new life in a new country. It helped me understand my students and their families and what their experiences must be. I too have had students tell me that they speak English and not Spanish and their parent(s) do not speak English. Love can be conveyed in many ways and not just through language but it must be so difficult just the same for parents and children. This piece offered me time to reflect and think about my students and their families.
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