How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is Julia Alvarez’s debut novel and was influenced by her experiences as a young girl living in the Dominican Republic. While the novel’s Garcia girls were born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to New York, Alvarez was born in New York and immigrated to the Dominican Republic. Like other Alvarez novels, this book explores the tensions and difficulties that immigrants experience throughout their lives. It also provides a critique on aspects of both Dominican and American cultures as the four women struggle to forge their identities in each country. This bildungsroman was critically acclaimed after its 1991 publication and led the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra to name Alvarez Doctor Honoris Causa.

This study guide refers to the 2019 Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill paperback edition.

Content Warning: Prejudice against immigrants is prevalent in the novel, and the source text contains racial slurs. These are reproduced in the study guide only in quotations. The novel also confronts numerous sexual taboos, including incest, sexual relations between adults and minors, and sexual exposure between minors who are related to each other.

Plot Summary

Unfolding in 15 episodic chapters, the novel is written in reverse chronological order. It is divided into three parts spanning 1989-1972, 1970-1960, and 1960-1956, respectively. The first part explores the adulthood of the Garcia sisters and the difficulties they had and continue to have living in American society. The second part covers the sisters’ adolescence as they make their ways as new immigrants in the United States. Part 3 details their escape from the Dominican Republic and the childhood they experienced there. Due to the book’s structure, the reader first experiences the adult lives of the women before exploring the causes and situations that led to these outcomes. Still, the women’s stories are not complete at the beginning of the novel, as they are still alive and are attempting to make their way in the world, leaving some ambiguity and questions surrounding how the rest of their lives will continue.

As Part 1 opens, an adult Yolanda, or Yoyo, is visiting the Dominican Republic, although she has not told anybody that she might stay there permanently. She believes her Dominican relatives will likely see her as having let herself go because she has embraced the more laid-back American fashion to the exclusion of the more polished Dominican aesthetic. Yoyo has had a difficult time in her life and in her relationships, at one point ending up in a psychiatric hospital. Her main struggles as an adult are presented through relationships, as she experiences both language and value barriers within them. Her sister, Sandi, has also struggled as an adult and was hospitalized for psychological issues as she developed an eating disorder and believed she was an active part of the reversing of evolution. Sofia, or Fifi’s, greatest struggle is her relationship with her father, Carlos, who was greatly offended to learn that she was sexually active outside of marriage and cut communication with her for a while after learning this. Carla is a psychoanalyst who has been married twice.

Part 2 depicts the sisters’ teenage rebellion and their mother’s attempts to help them assimilate into American culture while maintaining their Dominican values. This is most noted through the different schools the sisters attend. Laura Garcia, their mother, wants them to go to Catholic schools, but eventually she does not think her daughters are associating with the right kinds of people, so she sends them to boarding school where they eventually take on American norms. Fifi brings marijuana into their family home one day, and Laura finds it. Fifi is told she can either return to Catholic school rather than boarding school, or she can spend a year in the Dominican Republic. She chooses the latter. She falls in love with an illegitimate cousin, and when her sisters visit the country, they are horrified to find that their free-spirited sister has become what they term a “Spanish-American Princess” (118) who submits to her boyfriend, Manuel. The sisters stage a coup and manage to get Fifi back to the United States, against her will, to break her away from what they consider to be the toxic Dominican culture.

Part 3 details the family’s escape from the Dominican Republic when the sisters are young. Their father, Carlos, was part of a revolution, and he was forced to leave or be executed or jailed. The family manages to leave the country, but they struggle in New York City. Carlos cannot practice medicine because he has difficulty getting an American license, and the family is forced to live in a small apartment in New York. In the Dominican Republic, they had a large compound just for themselves, their servants, and their extended family.

This final part of the novel explores the class struggles in the Dominican Republic and how they play out at the Garcias’ compound. The final story tells of a kitten that Yoyo finds. She wants to keep it, but a hunter tells her to wait a week so the kitten will not die without its mother. She finds the man to be a hypocrite because he goes to shoot animals after he tells her this, so she takes the kitten anyway. Eventually, she gets afraid and throws it out the window, and the kitten’s mother haunts her nights for years.