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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
AuthorJulia Alvarez
LanguageEnglish
PublisherAlgonquin Books
Publication date
1991
Publication placeUnited States
ISBN0452268060

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is a novel of acculturation and coming of age by Julia Alvarez, published in 1991. Told in reverse chronological order and from shifting points of view, the novel, which consists of 15 interconnected short stories, covers more than 30 years in the lives of four sisters. The family is forced out of Trujillo's Dominican Republic and starts a new life in New York City.

Background and historical context

In an article written by professor William Luis he begins to describe the situation of immigrants from the Dominican Republic to the United States during the 1960’s revolution:

“The displacement of the Caribbean people’s from their Island to the United States, for political or economical reasons, has produced a tension between the culture of the country of origin and that of the adopted homeland, one representing the past, and the other future of the immigrant”.[1]

The García family is an example of this phenomenon. In How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez succeeds in altering the events of her own life to create fiction.[2] The family is displaced to the United States after living an established, upper-class life in the Dominican Republic, and is forced to face the challenges which come along with being an immigrant family in a foreign land. Julia Alvarez herself was not born in the Dominican Republic, but actually in the United States. After her parents failed attempt at a life in America, she returned to the Dominican Republic at the age of three months as her parents preferred the dictatorship of Trujillo to the USA.[3]

Although How the García Girls Lost Their Accents was written in the United States, there are definitely historical ties between the novel and the author’s country of origin. Alvarez wrote an essay entitled “An American Childhood in the Dominican Republic”, here she reveals some information about her own life, which leads us to believe that it may have served as the basis for the novel. For example, she mentions that it was Mr. Victor, of the U.S. Embassy and a member of the CIA, who persuaded Carlos García to join the resistance against Trujillo, and later helped him in leaving the country, and obtaining a job with an international cardiovascular team.[4] Julia Alvarez emigrated to the United States at the age of 10 with her parents and three sisters as political refugees from the Dominican Republic. The novel is clearly a variation of her real-life experiences, which have perhaps been slightly altered. The majority of her literature is constructed from multiple viewpoints and we see a strongly concealed political undercurrent.[5] In this case, that undercurrent is her family fleeing the Trujillo revolution, as did she as a child. The novel encompasses the impact living under a regime can have on a family, and the way it shaped the four girls upbringing. It is also an attempt to understand memory, the past, and a time before the sisters lost their innocence and accents.[6]

Publication history

Literary context

How the García Girls Lost their Accents is the first novel written by Julia Alvarez, after twenty-one years of life in the United States.

Plot summary

The novel, written episodically and in reverse-chronological order, is fifteen chapters divided in three parts: Part 1 (1989-1972), Part II (1970-1960), and Part III (1960-1956). Part I is centered around the adult lives of the García sisters; Part II describes their immigration to the United States and their adolescence, and Part III recollects their early childhood on the island, in the Dominican Republic.[7]

The Garcías are one of the prominent and wealthy Dominican clans tracing their roots back to the Conquistadores. Carlos García, a physician and the head of the family, is the youngest of 35 children his father sired during his lifetime, both in and out of wedlock. Laura, Carlos's wife, also comes from an important family: her father is a factory owner and a diplomat with the United Nations. Many members of the extended family live as neighbours in large houses on an expansive compound with numerous servants. In the early 1950s the García girls are born. Carla, Sandra, Yolanda and Sofía enjoy a happy, protected childhood and are brought up by their parents, aunts and uncles to preserve the family traditions. Their countless cousins serve them as playmates.

Part I

The first part of the novel establishes Yolanda at the centre of the story as she narrates the opening and closing chapter: "Antojos" and "The Rudy Elmhurst Story", respectively. In third person, Yolanda's return to Dominican Republic as an adult is described in the context of a family birthday party and a road trip. Their unity as sisters as The Four Girls is introduced in the third chapter, which is a communally narrated.[8] They celebrate Carlos, the patriarch's, birthday, and Sofía introduces her baby son to his grandfather, repairing the father and daughter's relationship somewhat. During Sofía's chapter, "The Kiss", it is revealed that Carlos discovered a packet of love letters addressed to his daughter, enraging him and leading to a conflict which ends in Sofía running away to her German lover. A major focus in this section is the romantic relationships between the four sisters and their partners. Sofía is married to a "world-class chemist";[9] Carla and Sandra are in long-term relationships; and Yolanda is in love with her psychiatrist and has previously broken up with a man named John. Part I closes with "The Rudy Elmenhurst Story", narrated by Yolanda.[10] This describes Yolanda's first real relationship, and the tension between her upbringing and American relationships: "I would never find someone who would understand my particular mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles."[11]

Part II

Part II details the family's collective experience of living in the United States as immigrants. The girls first attend a Catholic school in New York and later boarding school, and assimilate fairly well to their new environments, although meeting with a few set-backs along the way. Their time in the US begins with the opening chapter, "A Regular Revolution", and delivers the girls' (collective) opinion that "We didn't feel we had the best the United States had to offer. We had only second-hand stuff, rental houses in one redneck Catholic neighborhood after another".[12] While during their first few months in New York they regularly pray to God that they will soon be able to return to their homeland, they quickly start appreciating the advantages of living in a "free country" so that even being sent back to the Dominican Republic for the summer becomes a form of punishment for them.

A major turning point in the novel comes with Laura's discovery of a bag of Sofía's marijuana, and her subsequent punishment of being removed from her boarding school and forced to spend a year in the Dominican Republic with family. This event is representative of the girls' transformation into Americans and away from the Dominican culture and Laura and Carlos' conflicted relationship with the assimilation. Laura "still did lip service to the old ways",[13] and Carlos makes a point of educating the accents out of the girls, thus showing the tension between the cultures[14].

Carla becomes the victim of racism in the third chapter, "Trespass", with school boys telling her to "Go back to where you came from, you dirty spic!"[15] Later she is subjected to a child molester who masturbates in his car while pulling up at the curb and talking lecherously to her through the open window. The second part of the novel finishes with the chapter "Floor Show", in which the García family goes to a Spanish restaurant and Sandra witnesses the host's wife amorously attempting to kiss her father on the way to the bathroom.[16] Overall, Part II presents the unexpected aspects of living in the United States and becoming Americans, and explores the tensions that develop with the immigrant experience.

Part III

The five chapters in Part III, the concluding section, focus on the García family's early years in the Dominican Republic, and are the most political of the novel. The first chapter, "The Blood of the Conquistadores"[17], opens with an account of two of Trujillo's agents coming to the family home looking for Carlos. His revolutionary politics and work against the Chapitas made the family a target, and this chapter explicitly details the danger of their situation. The issues in past chapters appear superficial in comparison to the life-or-death nature of the conflicts that the Garcías face earlier in their lives. The family escapes persecution, but is forced to emigrate immediately, establishing their motive for relocating to New York.

As Part III progresses, the narrative switches to describing their upper-class life on the island, and filling details of the lifestyle the family was born into. Class becomes a more apparent theme with the story of the Haitian family maid elucidated, which is an indirect commentary Trujillo's massacre of Haitians and congruent with the political theme[18].

sIn the last three chapters Carla, Yolanda and Sandra narrate stories from their childhood surrounded by the extended family, and the girls' relationship with the United States begins. An American Surprise [19] tells of their early ideas of New York City, 'where it was winter and the snow fell from heaven to earth like the Bible's little pieces of manna bread.'[20]. The reader realizes that the innocence of childhood and idealized vision of their soon-to-be adopted country, given the reverse-chronological narration of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, are left behind with the García's home in the Dominican Republic.

Characters

Yolanda

Yolanda is the third oldest and most imaginative of the four girls.[21] She plays an essential and probably the most important role in the novel as Alvarez’s alter ego.[22] She is a schoolteacher, a poet and a writer. Her nicknames, which reflect and represent the different aspects of her personality, are “Joe”, “Yoyo” or simply “Yo”, the latter coincidentally[clarification needed] the title of the sequel to How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. There is important significance in her character as “Yo”, Spanish first person pronoun, the “I” of the narrator. The nickname “Yoyo” is reminiscent of the toy that goes up and down, back and fourth, similar to Yolanda’s bouncing from culture to culture, from one extreme to the other. The last, “Joe” represents the American version of Yolanda. Her ultimate return to the Island “represents her desire to displace herself from the North American Joe to the Yolanda of her family and youth.”[23] These nicknames “act to properly define and name the many diverse facets of her complex personality”.[24] Her character is that whose voice and words are most frequently heard throughout the novel; she is the most developed character and her identity is the most explored of the four girls.[25]

Sofia

Sofia is the youngest of the four girls, and could be named the maverick out of her sisters[26]. She gains the attention of the reader multiple times throughout the book, as her stories are excitingly different from those of the four Garcia girls. In the book Alvarez quotes ‘Sofia was the one without the degrees. She had always gone her own way’.[27] Out of her sisters, she was the plain one but had consistent boyfriends and was always being asked advice about men from the other three girls.[28] In her first chapter “The Kiss”[29] we are told the story of her rebellious marriage to a ‘jolly and good natured’[30] German man in Colombia during a rebellious vacation with her current boyfriend. After her marriage to him, her relationship with her father deteriorates significantly until her son is born and the family reunites to celebrate her father’s birthday and son’s christening[31] although Sofia still feels the same antagonism she felt towards him beforehand.[32]

Sandra

Sandi is the second daughter in the novel, the pretty one who could 'pass as an American, with soft blue eyes and fair skin'.[33] We see the loving and caring part of her personality emerge in “Floor Show” where at a very young age she decides that if her family got into a really bad financial situation, she would attempt to get adopted by a rich family, get an allowance “like other American girls got” which she would then pass onto her family. The spot-light falls on her again when she goes away to a graduate program and her parents receive a fall from the dean saying Sandi is in the hospital[34] for having gone on a crazy diet and losing lots of weight.

Carla

Carla is the eldest of the four daughters. As is common for the oldest sibling, she is some what seen as the mediator between the four sisters in the novel. ‘As the therapist in the family Carla likes to be the one who understands’[35] and ‘has a tendency to lace all her compliments with calls to self-improvement’.[36] However to her sisters, this creates a somewhat dominative character at times reminiscent of their mother.[37] Her criticism goes farther when she writes an autobiographical paper calling her mother mildly anal-retentive.[38] In Carla’s first and perhaps most dominating story in the novel “Trespass” as she is walking home from school in New York, a man exposes himself to her and attempts to lure her into his car. Alvarez displays the linguistic difficulties faced with only having ‘classroom English’,[39] and how communication barriers affect immigrants.

Major themes

Style

Literary significance and reception

When How the García Girls Lost Their Accents was published as a novel in its entirety in 1991, the book "made a resounding splash on the literary scene" according to Jonathan Bing in the 1996 Publisher's Weekly review of the novel.[40] Although it was her first novel, Alvarez gained significant attention for the book, including a part in the New York Public Library's 1991 exhibit "The Hand of the Poet from John Donne to Julia Alvarez".[40] The Women's Review of Books also lauds the author, stating that "With this first novel, Julia Alvarez joins the rank of other Latina writers such as Nicholasa Mohr and Helena María Viramontes".[41]

As for the novel itself, it was generally critically acclaimed, with Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés of The Women's Review of Books writing that "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is a noteworthy book, demanding our attention."[41] The Publisher's Weekly article notes that "the novel provided a keen look at the island social structure they (the García family) wistfully remember and the political turmoil they escaped".[42]

Since 1991, the book has become widely read and referenced, even being alluded to in an article published in the California Law Review; "How the García Cousins Lost Their Accents: Understanding the Language of Title VII Decisions Approving English-Only Rules as the Product of Racial Dualism, Latino Invisibility, and Legal Indeterminacy". [43] In 1999, Library Journal reported that a "select cadre of librarians representing New York City's three public library systems have released their hand-picked list of "21 new classics for the 21st century"" [44]. Significantly, the novel was included on the influential list. A number of scholarly articles and papers have been written on Alvarez's book, including 'A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents' by William Luis[45] and Joan Hoffman's article "She Wants to be Called Yolanda Now: Identity, Language, and the Third Sister in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents", which was featured in the Bilingual Review.[46]

Awards and nominations

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Notes

  1. ^ Luis 2000, p. 1
  2. ^ Luis 2000, p. 6
  3. ^ Alvarez, "About me"[clarification needed]
  4. ^ Luis 2000, p. 6
  5. ^ Bing 1996, p. ??[page needed]
  6. ^ Luis 2000, p. 3
  7. ^ Sirias 2001, p. 19
  8. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 40
  9. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 31
  10. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 86
  11. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 99
  12. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 107
  13. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 116
  14. ^ Barak 2008, p. 160
  15. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 153
  16. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 168
  17. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 195
  18. ^ Barak 2008, p. 162
  19. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 256
  20. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 257
  21. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 6
  22. ^ Luis 2000, p. 3
  23. ^ Luis 2000, p. 10
  24. ^ Hoffman 1998, p. 3
  25. ^ Hoffman 1998, p. 2
  26. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 27
  27. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 28
  28. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 28
  29. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 25
  30. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 27
  31. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 32
  32. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 27
  33. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 177
  34. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 53
  35. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 65
  36. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 61
  37. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 61
  38. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 41
  39. ^ Alvarez 1991, p. 153
  40. ^ a b Bing 1996, p. 38
  41. ^ a b Rodríguez Milanés 1991, p. 40
  42. ^ Bing 1996, p. 38
  43. ^ Ruiz Cameron 1997, p. 1347-1393
  44. ^ Staff 1999, p. 1
  45. ^ Luis 2000, pp. 839–849
  46. ^ Hoffman 1998, pp. 21–28

References

  • Alvarez, Julia (1991), How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, New York: Plume, ISBN 978-0452287075.
  • Sirias, Silvio (2001), Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion, Westport, CT: Greenwood, ISBN 978-0313309939.
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