How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

The girls want to return to the Dominican Republic, but after Carlos returns home briefly and revolution breaks out, their father says they are staying in the United States. The Garcia girls do not believe that they are getting the best the United States has to offer, because unlike their peers, they still have to follow the strict Island rules for behavior and do not have nice things. Their mother decides to send them to boarding school because she wants them to meet those whom she considers the right kind of people, but the girls find out that these people do not want them around. Students at the boarding school assume the Garcia girls are the offspring of a wealthy dictator somewhere else in the world. The girls therefore learn American customs and learn to forge their mother’s signature on permission slips for social events: “We began to develop a taste for the American teenage good life” (108). As they begin to reject the ways of the Island, Laura and Carlos decide to send the girls back to the Dominican Republic every summer so they do not lose their ways. The four girls take turns upsetting their parents by the time the oldest ones are in college, and they develop a code and a system to subvert their parents that they believe is akin to the one their father used to subvert the government.