50 pages • 1 hour read
Julia AlvarezHow the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Difficulties of Forging a Self-Identity
Each of the Garcia girls struggles to forge an identity, a struggle made more complex by their relationships with their families and with the two cultures they experience. Born within five years of one another, the four girls are close in age. When they are young, Laura dresses the girls similarly to herself and assigns them each a color, which she applies to their clothing and all of their belongings. Later, she will define each daughter through a signature story that she tells at parties and gatherings. The lack of agency and choice with regard to their identities frustrates the girls, who express a lifelong distaste at being lumped together. While the sisters struggle to differentiate themselves from one another, their journey toward a cohesive self-identity is even more difficult due to their experiences as immigrants. Because they immigrate to the United States as children, they all have different memories of life in the Dominican Republic, and that culture influences them to different degrees.
This is most notable through the character of Fifi. As the youngest, Fifi has the fewest memories of the family’s time in the Dominican Republic. An independent free spirit, Fifi fully assimilates into life in the United States and rebels just as her sisters do, but she quickly repatriates to the Dominican Republic when she chooses to stay for a year after being caught with marijuana, a choice her sisters attribute to her lack of memories of the culture there. Her older sisters are upset about the ensuing changes and perceive her taking on an identity that they believe is harmful, but through embracing a culture they disapprove of, Fifi finally sets herself apart from her sisters. Still, the sudden character changes she exhibits in the six months she is in the Dominican Republic demonstrate how fluid her character is and how a lack of a solid identity makes her open to other identities presented to her.
Fifi’s experience contrasts with that of Carla, the oldest sister. Having grown up the longest in the Dominican Republic, Carla experiences the most culture shock in the United States, especially because the family’s immigration coincides with her puberty. With little guidance from her distracted mother, Carla finds assimilation the most difficult. As an adult, however, Carla finds a semblance of identity and self-understanding through her career as a psychologist.
As depicted through Sandra’s experience, both family and cultural expectations can hinder individuation. Early in life—and therefore late in the novel—Sandi’s talent as an artist sets her apart. While her family recognizes her talent and wants her to receive lessons, they deny her individuation by sending 14 children to the lessons: All the children are now expected to have what Sandi does. Later in life, Sandra experiences a mental health crisis in which she becomes obsessed with reading to retain her humanity, fearing that she is devolving. Her unstable sense of self as a young adult, in this sense, is linked to losing such an essential part of herself at a young age.
Yolanda’s pursuit of identity centers on language and communication, and like Sandi, she experiences a loss of her defining ability—writing—in adulthood. She calls herself a poet, but she abandons the label when she loses her ability to write. Yolanda looks for identity through culture, not quite able to find herself at home in either the United States or the Dominican Republic. The ambiguity surrounding her potential decision to stay in the Dominican Republic at the beginning of the novel reflects her ongoing struggle to find her truest place in the world.
The Oppression of Machismo and Patriarchal Culture
Julia Alvarez’s novel takes a stance against the patriarchal culture exhibited in the Dominican Republic by highlighting its hypocrisies and double standards. This culture is depicted primarily through Carlos, Mundín, and Manuel. In Manuel’s relationship with Fifi, he is concerned with his needs and desires, but not with hers, nor those of the men in the family who are charged with maintaining her “purity.” He also demonstrates machismo in his desire that Fifi not appear too sexualized to other people. While he wants free access to her body, he wants to control how others see her by controlling how she dresses. As Alvarez shows, this is a culturally ingrained attitude.
Mundín displays his own machismo through his reaction to Fifi and Manuel. As a trusted chaperone, he is considered responsible for his female relatives, but he refuses to stop Manuel and Fifi from their tryst at a run-down motel. Because men are expected to be loyal to one another to uphold their system of dominance, Manuel adheres to the code of machismo, even though it conflicts with the expectation that he protect women from other men. Similarly, the girls are forbidden from working as teenagers due to the potential of sexual attention from male bosses. Instead, they are expected to spend summers engaging in “family time,” which often results in unwanted sexual attention from male relatives. This suggests not only a hierarchy of values within patriarchal cultures, in which upholding the system matters more than the safety of those whom it purports to protect, but also hypocrisy.
Finally, patriarchal attitudes toward women are represented through Carlos, the patriarch of the Garcia family. Carlos loves his daughters, but he does not respect their agency, believing that it is his job to protect his unmarried daughters’ sexual life and, therefore, his reputation. When he finds Fifi’s love letters from Otto, he becomes enraged and holds a grudge against Fifi for years, feeling personally insulted by her sexual behavior. Carlos’s machismo is also evident through his reticence to have his sons-in-law at his birthday party each year. He wants to be the primary male of the family at these times. He does not want to have to compete with other men for his daughters’ attention, and he does not want to be shown up by younger, more physically fit men. In this way, his birthday parties represent Carlos’s last hold on his reign as the family patriarch in a culture where he feels increasingly irrelevant.
Throughout the novel, the girls struggle to reconcile their appreciation of the traditions and familiarity of their home country with its oppressive attitudes toward women and their sexuality.Julia Alvarez’s novel takes a stance against the patriarchal culture exhibited in the Dominican Republic by highlighting its hypocrisies and double standards. This culture is depicted primarily through Carlos, Mundín, and Manuel. In Manuel’s relationship with Fifi, he is concerned with his needs and desires, but not with hers, nor those of the men in the family who are charged with maintaining her “purity.” He also demonstrates machismo in his desire that Fifi not appear too sexualized to other people. While he wants free access to her body, he wants to control how others see her by controlling how she dresses. As Alvarez shows, this is a culturally ingrained attitude.
Mundín displays his own machismo through his reaction to Fifi and Manuel. As a trusted chaperone, he is considered responsible for his female relatives, but he refuses to stop Manuel and Fifi from their tryst at a run-down motel. Because men are expected to be loyal to one another to uphold their system of dominance, Manuel adheres to the code of machismo, even though it conflicts with the expectation that he protect women from other men. Similarly, the girls are forbidden from working as teenagers due to the potential of sexual attention from male bosses. Instead, they are expected to spend summers engaging in “family time,” which often results in unwanted sexual attention from male relatives. This suggests not only a hierarchy of values within patriarchal cultures, in which upholding the system matters more than the safety of those whom it purports to protect, but also hypocrisy.
Finally, patriarchal attitudes toward women are represented through Carlos, the patriarch of the Garcia family. Carlos loves his daughters, but he does not respect their agency, believing that it is his job to protect his unmarried daughters’ sexual life and, therefore, his reputation. When he finds Fifi’s love letters from Otto, he becomes enraged and holds a grudge against Fifi for years, feeling personally insulted by her sexual behavior. Carlos’s machismo is also evident through his reticence to have his sons-in-law at his birthday party each year. He wants to be the primary male of the family at these times. He does not want to have to compete with other men for his daughters’ attention, and he does not want to be shown up by younger, more physically fit men. In this way, his birthday parties represent Carlos’s last hold on his reign as the family patriarch in a culture where he feels increasingly irrelevant.
Throughout the novel, the girls struggle to reconcile their appreciation of the traditions and familiarity of their home country with its oppressive attitudes toward women and their sexuality.
The Ways Sexuality Breaches Innocence
There is a constant tug between innocence and sexuality in the novel, as the girls’ first introductions to sexuality happen against their wills and in taboo ways. These incidents are not only shocking, but confusing, as the girls receive little in the way of education about their anatomy or sexuality.
Adult men pushing themselves onto or exposing themselves to younger girls occurs numerous times in the novel. One of these times involves Fifi, who, as a very young child, is bounced up and down on a police officer’s erection. Right around the same time, Vic is discovered to be engaging with sex workers implied to be underage. Perhaps the most egregious exposure occurs when an unknown man in a car exposes himself to Carla. He tries to get her into the car, and she refuses, but she is still quite upset about the incident, especially because a boy at school had recently exposed her breasts against her will. Through these incidents, which occur in both cultures, the girls are exposed to sexuality in ways they have no agency in or understanding of.
The girls’ experience with male predation is not limited to adults, however. Due to the novel’s structure, Mundín’s adult behavior has already been exposed: He represents and upholds the system in which men dominate women. Therefore, when he asks Yoyo and Fifi to show him their private parts so that he will give them some clay, the incident is situated not as innocent childhood exploration, but as an example of his early conditioning in a patriarchal system.
In the same incident, Fifi starts to show her belly button because she believes that that is how boys and girls are different. Her innocence, in this sense, is also a form of conditioning, as none of the girls receive education about their anatomy or sexuality. This is evident in earlier chapters when Rudy draws diagrams for Yolanda to explain her reproductive system, and when Carla struggles to find the words to explain that a man had exposed himself to her. In another chapter, Yolanda describes her mother’s reaction to finding a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves in the home, which was to suggest that sex, and bodies, were something to be ashamed of.
The Garcia girls’ reactions to their forced encounters with sexuality affect them in different ways. Carla comforts herself by praying for those she loves. Yolanda develops an aversion to crass language about sex. For her part, Sandi has an awakening of sorts after she sees Mrs. Fanning kiss Carlos against his wishes. She realizes that a waiter could just as easily lean over and kiss her, demonstrating that she is starting to see herself as more of a sexual being. She loses respect for Mrs. Fanning, but she has also been disillusioned in a more significant way, which changes the way she acts. In this way, the unexpected sexual advance she witnesses breaks her innocence and helps her see herself in more of a sexual light.
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