Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Leon

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Lingüística Aplicada a la Enseñanza y Traducción del
Ingles
Literatura Contemporánea

Mtro.Mario Sepulveda
Grupo:i71

Alumna
Devanie Marisol Martinez Jimenez

Ensayo “Antojos”
The author Julia Alvarez wrote this reading which deals with the differences in cultures that
exist between countries, talks about how belonging to two cultures can be a bit tedious to get
used to and how there can be a crisis when returning to your native country to visit . The story
deals with how Yolanda feels more comfortable being treated as a foreigner than as a
Dominican, she has forgotten part of her Dominican culture and part of the language, an
example of this is the word "cravings". Yolanda is originally Dominican but now she lives
abroad, despite this she has many memories from when she was little and one of them is her
taste for guavas, this caused her a lot of nostalgia and made her connect with her original culture.
For Julia it is this story is very important since she went through something similar, so this
whole adventure has a lot of meaning.

Some phrases that I found interesting are ; ‘’They wanted to spoil her, so she'd stay on in her
nativeland before she forgot where she had come from”.”She had never felt at home in the
States’.”You United States was thought of.’’
I chose these phrases because I believe that they represent the cultural identity crisis that
Yolanda had within the story; she wanted to feel part of her origins again but throughout the
story, she realized that she no longer remembered many things about her culture, yet she missed
her home and wanted to reconnect with her roots.
This story reflects a reality that is lived today in our country, for example in Mexico it is
common for some people to move abroad for different reasons such as money, getting a better
job or a better school obtaining a better quality of life. These people usually get used to living
in a new country adapting to the different culture they have and when they return to Mexico
they feel a great impact from remembering where they lived, their childhood memories, the
food, the places they used to live and the way they lived,this is a great feeling of nostalgia.

To conclude , in my opinion this story has many layers which we can learn from, it looks like a
simple story, but it shows how different cultures may interact with each other. The writing is
very detailed, which help us relate and feel like we are inside the story, this is very interesting.
As I mentioned before Julia wrote this story based on her own experience, and this is very
exciting to understand the context of this work. This is a story worth reading and analyzing
because of its writing, and social impact.