Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

VOICELESS AND COLORLESS...
There are decisive advantages in living outside the homeland for poor,
dark-skinned women. For them it is worth risking savings, small possessions,
and their own lives to reach literally the shore of the centre. Even
if they link with other Dominicans living in Washington Heights, where
they will be guided through the complexities of the system, these women’s
first encounters—customs and immigration officials—will make them immediately
aware that they are foreign, suspicious, unwanted. Gone will
be the familiarity back home, the same one that placed these women in
the back house. A woman in the big city is expected to move around on
her own in search of a job and a living space. The roles of wife, daughter,
mother are redefined so that they become secondary: without a job that
brings in money she can not provide for her children or family back home.
In Alvarez’s ¡Yo!, Consuelo’s daughter is one of the many thousands of
Dominican women who make it to New York:
Ruth had made it to Puerto Rico on a rowboat, then on to Nueva York
where she worked at a restaurant at night and at a private home as a maid
during the day. Every month, Ruth sent home money along with a letter
someone in the village read to Consuelo. Every few months the Codetel
man came running through town, ‘International call!’ Consuelo would be
out of breath by the time she arrived at the telephone trailer to hear her
daughter’s small voice trapped in the wires. ‘How are you, Mamá And
my baby Wendy’ (Yo 97-98)
She learns that everything is negotiated and this skill will assure her
survival in this hostile—because of its strangeness and perception of the
other—environment. She will take advantage of night school, second and
third jobs, special or new training, facilities such as daycare centers, second
language learning. This new world that suddenly opens up for women,
according to Oliva M. Espín, will directly affect their sexuality:
Frequently, newly encountered sex-role patterns in the ‘host culture’ combined
with greater access to paid employment, create for women the possibility
to live a new way of life. Some women become employed outside
the home for the first time after the migration. Many of them encounter
new opportunities for education. All of them are confronted with the
alternative meanings of womanhood provided by observing the lives of
women in the host country. (4)
Working-class women in Alvarez’s novels are “protected” by their
employers who from the start arrange all the paperwork necessary to bring
them to the United States, and who continue to provide for them as long as
they agree to serve and stay exactly in the same place they were in back in
the Dominican Republic. While Primi in ¡Yo! is the perfect servant—forever
grateful of having been sent for by Doña Laura and Don Carlos to
serve them in New York as she did back home—, her daughter Sarita will
see this relationship for what it truly is: a class exploitation where her
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •