Something to Declare (Pgs 121-180)

Summary:
In these pages, a new section is started in the book. This section is about what inspired Julia to be a writer. Even though she was inspired to be a writer since she was a child, it is not as easy as it sounds like. She spent a lot of time finding her voice, but this was hard since all of the reading she made had a male voice. This made it even more difficult for her to find a female voice that expressed her ideas and interprets her feelings. In these pages, she went back on time when she was a child and started to remember who were the people that she loved the most in her family. These people became her muses and help her find her voice and an inspiration for writing. Not only her family, but also her maids who spent most of her childhood with her and taught them a lot of things about her culture. She was most inspired by her Tias (aunts) who were Tia Rosa, Titi, and Tia Amelia, and also her maiden Gladys. But before she realized that these were her muses, she had always referred to the book The Thousand and One Nights, a book she read while she was a child living in the Dominican Republic. She used this book as her base to start her writing because she found a connection with the protagonist whose name was Scheherazade. This was because in the book this girl was stuck in a kingdom where females were unimportant, and Julia lived in a family in which female are told they are going to get married and have children and in a culture where boys were more privileged than girls. Finally, Julia found her voice not up in a tower in important places, but in the kitchen with the women that first taught her about service, passion, and singing as if their life depended on it during her childhood. But her problem was not solved when she found her voice and muses, now she didn’t have a vocabulary or context to apply in her writings and she didn’t want to imply her foreignness since she hasn’t see it before in any literature. But this changed one summer while she was a Bread Loaf where a poet stated that one could write poetry only in the language in which they had first said Mother.

Quote:
“In this new culture, my sisters and I had to find new ways to be, new ways to see, and–with the change in language–new ways to speak. It was this opportunity to create ourselves from scratch that led me to become a writer” (Alvarez 156).

Reaction:
Moving to the United States had a big impact in Julia’s life. Not only because of the fact that she had to get use to a new culture, but that she had to get used to the idea that she might never go back to her country again but she needed to be able to keep her roots and not forget where she came from. It was hard for her to move to a new country without knowing their language and more when she was discriminated and treated like an American servant class. This was because Latinos that didn’t finish school were working as maids in houses of American families. This made American kids think that everyone that was Latino was the same. One of the hardest things for Julia as becoming a writer in a new different language was the fact that in English there are different words for the same meaning. But even with all these impediments, and trying to fit into a whole new different culture, she was successful. It is true that she had failures and at times she didn’t have the support from her family, but she kept on going and became stronger in learning from her mistakes and getting up whenever she fell without giving up on her dreams.