Alvarez was 10 years old when her family returned to the United States, and she had a difficult time adjusting to immigrant life and learning English. She was homesick and faced alienation and prejudice. “I consider this radical uprooting from my culture, my native language, my country, the reason I began writing,” Alvarez has said. “Language is the only homeland, Czeslaw Milosz once observed, and indeed, English, not the United States, was where I landed and sunk deep roots.”