Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

VOICELESS AND COLORLESS...
hierarchy, because it would mean the destruction of their own and the extended
García family. Will the sisters, after being forced to see themselves
as oppressors, go back to the Dominican Republic and question its social
make-up Of course not. They still yearn for the unquestioned comfort
provided by the servants. They will still depend on their services, even if
now they can only have one maid and must do some things on their own.
When they marry someone who can provide for them as their parents have
always done, they expect to also have help around the house so they can
be professionals and model housewives and mothers. Although living elsewhere,
Yolanda has no trouble finding a house in the city or the mountains,
or having people at her service all the time. Migration does not erase the
links of the privileged. Her attempts to democraticize her surroundings is
based on the position she still holds in the island society because of her
class. She wants the peasants to call her by her first name; she is willing
to teach them how to read and write; she lectures the women on how to
stand up to an abusive husband. But she never attempts to break away from
her class. Once Yolanda is in the United States, these poor acquaintances,
Consuelo, Elena, become subjects for her fiction, and private jokes for the
family.
In Julia Alvarez’s stories, the main female characters have voices,
presence, a past and a future, and move from centre to centre. Back home
they were centre because of the combination of class and race; in the
United States they move to the centre because of the father’s profession
and his means to acquire comfortable housing and private schools for the
daughters. Even with their accents, Carla, Yolanda, Sandi and Fifi’s world
is white, wealthy, with maid(s) that are part of the world order they were
born into. Moving to New York and sharing spaces with the poor and
the dark-skinned—even if they did not have to go to school or play with
them—made them aware that Chucha, Gladys, Nivea and Primi were not
household fixtures. These women became visible, and the García girls
could no longer ignore them as shadows or backdrop. Yet this awareness
of class division barely changed their social perspective.
For Sarita and Ruth, who were able to make it to New York, leaving
behind the island meant a challenging new beginning, a total changeover in
their lives that brought them a different perspective of self and community.
They were able to establish linkages that allowed them to decide when and
where they wanted to be. It has been, and will continue to be a struggle
to negotiate all aspects of daily living, but there is no longer an invisible
pressure that fixes classless women into servitude. Sarita and Ruth, and all
the dreamers back home, see the Otherland not as displacement but as a
site of liberation, change, new projects that will mean hard work but also
possibilities. They have opted for fluidity and left fixity to the Garcías and
de la Torres families back home.
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •