How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Monkeys are a recurrent motif in the novel that represent the irrationality of people. Monkeys first arise when Sandi is hospitalized during a mental health crisis. She is certain that she is becoming a monkey, believing evolution has hit its apex and people are no longer evolving. To overcome this, she reads as much as she can to try to remember what it is like to be a person. In this way, monkeys are depicted as being less evolved than humans, and they are what humans can turn into if they lose what it is that makes them human. It is notable that Laura did not want her daughters going to public school because they might learn about evolution, but her daughters do learn the concept and internalize it enough that Sandi believes she is part of the actual process of its reversal.

Monkeys arise again when the Garcia girls plan to leave the Dominican Republic with Fifi. The older girls do not want their sister to remain there because they believe the patriarchal culture is stifling to the liberty and spirit of women. Despite their rejection of the culture, they become sad as they leave, and the narrator describes their situation as being similar to monkeys in psychological trials who become so accustomed to their cages that they do not leave once they are freed.