Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

VOICELESS AND COLORLESS...
VOICELESS AND COLORLESS:
THE HIDDEN WOMEN IN JULIA
ALVAREZ’S WHEN THE GARCÍA
GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENT
AND ¡YO!
María Cristina Rodríguez*
The women in Julia Alvarez’s novels remember, recall and relive a life
where they were privileged girls in a household propped invisibly by
women functioning as maids, nannies, cooks, and all kinds of servants.
This study focuses on these women who were barely seen or heard, and
whose race automatically placed them in the invisible spaces of kitchen,
maid quarters, backyard, shacks, and slums, and how a change in location
rendered them visible as part of sought-after caretakers in metropolitan
centers.
Caribbean women writers create female characters who undergo the
experience of migration, and they dramatize these fictional lives as shaped
by sensations of isolation, marginalization and displacement. The homeland
is redefined as they move from the island nation to the metropolis.
Whether they remain in the “foreign” urban center, or return “home,” the
lives of these women have been marked by an experience they have not
accepted, rejected or analyzed. In the narrative works of these women
writers, the female characters are marginalized from the onset, yet they
attempt to hold on to an acceptable reality by assuming the proper masks
which will allow them to find some significance in their lives. Ironically,
these female characters who migrate as adults find in the metropolis a
freedom they never experienced at home. The expected roles of daughter,
wife/companion, and specially mother, are overturned by the needs,
fragmentation, strangeness, and mobility in these urban centers. If one is
poor and dark-skinned, an island woman is able to go unnoticed in a city
* Professor, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus.
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •