From the Private to the Public: Latinx Bilingual Subject Formation in Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
From the Private to the Public: Latinx Bilingual Subject Formation in Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Summary/Abstract: This article brings together two established texts in the U.S. Latinx literary canon, Richard Rodriguez’s memoir Hunger of Memory (1982) and Julia Alvarez’s novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), to investigate the startlingly similar ways the authors frame their stories of Americanization through language. From their respective Mexican American and Dominican American positions, Rodriguez and Alvarez explore the process of mastering English as a requirement for acquiring an American identity. While Rodriguez and the Garcia sisters ultimately succeed, Spanish and English do not coexist harmoniously in their lives; rather, their first language inscribed by the private sphere and their adopted language inscribed by the public grate against each other in unsettling ways. Americanization necessitates a move from the (other) first language to the (same) English language, which is shown to be a fraught enterprise for bilingual individuals. This study applies Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation to situate language at the site of subject-formation and W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double-consciousness to define U.S. minoritarian identity along public and private lines. I also draw from the postcolonial history of the Americas and socio-linguistic studies of U.S. bilingualism.

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