(Dis) locating the I of the Yo in Julia Álvarez's Yo and Mario Vargas Llosa's La fiesta del Chivo

Abstract

Latina/Latino literature offers a continual dislocation of time, space, and perspective, fostered by the Hispanic and U.S. cultures they represent. A study of Latina/Latino works also helps to analyze other literatures written outside of a writer’s country of origin about transnational or global topics. These are textual concerns external to the writer’s national sphere, where other cultures interact and play a fundamental role in dismantling the work’s complexity. Such an approach is necessary given the increased numbers of exiles and immigrants, who, for economic and political reasons, have been dislocated from their country of origin and have been forced to reside abroad. In Julia Alvarez’s “Homecoming,” the poetic voice returns to the Dominican Republic to attend her cousin’s wedding to a “burnt face Minnesotan.” The poetic voice travels to a familiar environment, one that she knew as a child. However she observes it from a different perspective, not as a Dominican but as one who is closer to the culture of her adopted country. The time spent in the United States has caused the poetic voice to distance herself from the Dominican culture, and view it as the other. In essence, her new positionality resembles more closely the one assumed by anthropologists who study native societies, but rely on their own culture to understand and contextualize the one under observation. “Homecoming” is about a return to a familiar past, but it is also about the two cultures the poetic voice embraces, the original one, of her early childhood, and the adopted one, of her present Vermont surroundings. In the poem, the cultures are represented in binary terms: