Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

MARÍA CRISTINA RODRÍGUEZ
the homeland, and how to inscribe one’s name in this new space. How
can one achieve this when the remnants of home that these women hold
on to carry the price of patriarchal gender definition How to find home
away from home whether in the island country or the urban center Once
she chooses to stay in New York and sever all ties with the “benevolent
patrona”, Sarita learns how to pursue a higher education through scholarships.
Education will free her from the ties that her mother and all the
women before her maintained as part of the patriarchal class system still
standing in the Dominican Republic. She has transformed the present by
choosing to live away from a society that never changes no matter the
political parties in power or the influence of liberal ideas from developed
countries. The families that owned the land, properties, businesses, then
and now, continue to control the lives of those less fortunate.
In Julia Alvarez’s hybrid fiction, there is a strange transplant of the
patriarchal structure in the homeland. Although new spaces are opened
by interactions in these displaced and newly placed communities, James
Clifford warns that “maintaining connections with homelands, with kinship
networks, and with religious and cultural traditions may renew patriarchal
structures” (259). In the case of the García family, they all need
to remember with nostalgia, and recreate whenever possible, the social
familial structure they were forced to abandon. This attachment will undergo
changes as the girls become teenagers and then adults, and try to
break away from the paternal hold that restricts their sexuality. Yolanda
in ¡Yo! and the sisters in The García Girls can go back to the Dominican
Republic and spend time in all the comfort provided by servants both in
the city and the countryside. They might live in the United States, but
they can always go home to bask in the sun and relive the good life they
left behind. Going back home also makes them lose sight of the women
who seem to be always there to bring them a drink when they are thirsty,
a pillow when they are sleepy, a blanket when it is breezy, an umbrella
when there is too much sun. They do not speak and the privileged young
women only notice these black faces when they need something. They
know they cannot transplant this luxurious way of life—in the United
States they could not afford the comfort of having a chauffeur, a gardener,
a nursemaid, a cook, and two maids—so they take one maid that can take
care of the entire household—now a more modest place. This is Primi’s
“good fortune.”
The grown-up Yolanda García goes back to the Dominican Republic
after being exposed to a more democratic society where the poor and the
dark—skinned are very visible in the urban centers she knows so well. Although
there is a vision—the servants are no longer a part of the house but
women who stand on the sidelines to attend to the wishes of each family
member—still they are unable to denounce the system that upholds this
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 329