When Yolanda was young she liked to sneak into a shed that was said to be haunted by ghosts and spirits to search for devils. It was during one of these visits that she found a mother cat and her kittens. She decides to bring one of the kittens home with her to keep as a pet, this despite having been told by a stranger that the kittens are too young to be taken from their mother. As soon as she reaches her home with the kitten she grows annoyed with it’s meows and throws it out the window, causing the kitten to hurt it’s legs and try to find it’s way home on it’s own.
Yolanda feels bad about this and is haunted by the mother cat in her dreams. This kitten symbolizes the Garcia girls and how they were plucked from their motherland when they were too young and the mother cat symbolizes the motherland, a land that haunts Yolanda and calls back for her kitten. After the family arrives in New York the girls start to attend a close by Catholic school. Yolanda is very fond of her teacher whom offers her much support. The teacher gives Yolanda special attention and helps her with her English. This might be one of the things that helped form Yolanda’s fascination and love of language.
Yolanda enjoys reading and writing poetry. When in school, she is chosen to write a speech and present to the rest of her school. The speech she writes is inspired with Walt Whitman and expresses subordination and that students should learn from their teachers but also rise above them and evolve which makes her father upset and he rips the speech into pieces. This shows how Yolanda is split between the American and the Dominican culture. She is trying to form an American identity and to express it but is held back by her father and the Dominican traditions.
The Essay on God Mother Home Hospital House
Personal Writing About My Mother and Her Stay In the Hospital by Master of ZoulDuring second period math class, the PA comes on. I hear 'David Higgins to the office for an early dismissal, Please'. Being as I was only in the second grade, I rushed to the office, only to see my God Mother waiting for me. She tells me that we have to go pick up my other two brothers at pre-school. I asked her why, ...
This split in Yolanda’s personality is also shown in the chapter where the story of Rudy Elmenhurst is told. Rudy is a boy that Yolanda begins to date and he wants to start a sexual relationship between them. Yolanda, even though she is in love with Rudy and even though she wants to sleep with him, says no because she is turned off because of the words he use when speaking of sexual acts. Even though language plays a big part in her refusal, it is also the cultural differences between American and Dominican attitudes towards sex that makes her refuse.
Later in life, after a failed marriage, Yolanda ends up in a mental hospital. She has lost to ability to communicate with others, speaking only in quotations or misquotations, and she can not understand other people. At the end of her marriage, all she could hear when her husband spoke was “babble babble”. Yolanda has no sense of herself, her cultural identity is split and feels that people can not understand her; the Americans can not understand the Dominican influences in her personality and her parents can not understand the American influences.
Some time after her stay in the hospital, Yolanda returns to the Dominican Republic seemingly to stay there for good. She goes there because she has an ‘antojo’, meaning she has a craving. Yolanda has a craving to find herself, to find her identity. Since she could not find herself in America, she returns to her motherland where she remembers being happy. When there, she discovers that does not fit in anymore. Her American way of thinking when it comes to gender roles and sexuality goes against the traditional way of thinking in the Dominican Republic. She has also forgotten a lot of her Spanish, she has lost her accent.
