A Study Guide for Julia Alvarez's "I Want to Be Miss America"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Julia Alvarez's "I Want to Be Miss America", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535868051

Book preview

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I Want to Be Miss América

Julia Alvarez

1995

Introduction

In Julia Alvarez's I Want to Be Miss América—first published in Allure as Translating a Look in 1995, before appearing in her collection Something to Declare (1998)—four young Dominican immigrants to the United States watch the Miss America pageant in the early 1960s to learn the definition of American beauty. The teenage sisters work together to master the American look: straightening their hair, rejecting their mother's fashions, and scouring magazines for new ideas. The desire to assimilate comes at a high cost for the narrator. Although she learns from the pageant that women in the United States are free to pursue their dreams outside marriage and motherhood, she also internalizes the whitewashed fantasy the pageant promoted at the time. Even decades later, the narrator struggles to feel as if she belongs on the proverbial American stage, despite the progress society has made toward inclusiveness.

Alvarez was awarded the 2013 National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in recognition of her literary contribution to American life. Her invaluable depiction of the immigrant experience, as she experienced it from a young age, helped change the literary landscape, leading to a publishing boom for Latina writers whose voices had not yet been heard in American letters.

Author Biography

Alvarez was born in New York City on March 27, 1950. Her parents decided to return to the Dominican Republic, from which they had only recently emigrated, when Alvarez was three months old. There she was raised in affluence, surrounded by her extended family, until her immediate family was forced to flee in 1960, owing to her father's involvement in the underground resistance to the brutal rule of Rafael Trujillo. Alvarez and her sisters were told that the family was going to the beach, but they instead boarded a plane and left their home country for good. Her father, a doctor, soon established a steady family practice in the United States, returning the family to a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle.

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