The Daughter of Invention

“Daughter of Invention” is one of 15 interconnected stories in Julia Alvarez’s acclaimed novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. The novel is written in reverse chronological order and follows the lives of the García family after immigrating to America from the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship. “Daughter of Invention” takes place in New York when the four daughters are adolescents. Each story focuses on three or four family members, and “Daughter of Invention” narrates a clash between Laura (Mami), Yoyo, and Carlos (Papi), as they each navigate the challenges of their new lives in America. The story’s conflict reveals how each character must confront the tensions of assimilation in relation to their own desires, family, and history.

This guide refers to the version in How the García Girls Lost their Accents, published by Algonquin Books in 1991.

The first half of “Daughter of Invention” centers on Laura. After she and her family arrive in America, Laura spends much of her time trying to “invent something” that Americans haven’t yet thought of. While her husband, Carlos, takes the girls to see New York City monuments, she takes them to department stores to watch demonstrations about how refrigerators and washing machines work. On the way home, the girls try to talk to their mother, but she is already inventing in her mind. In the evenings, after everyone is asleep, she doodles inventions on notepads brought home from Carlos’s office. She draws familiar gadgets with new handles or functions, like a car bumper fashioned with a bottle opener.

After moving to America, Laura’s interactions with her daughters often revolve around their desire to become Americans despite their parents’ resistance to the idea. In these arguments over their issues at school or their father denying them permission to go out alone, Laura speaks in imperfect English and uses slightly incorrect idioms. In one such argument, Yoyo, speaking for the rest of her sisters, declares that they don’t want to return to the Catholic school after other children threw rocks at them. Laura insists they stay and says they might get “thrown out” of America if they do otherwise.

Most nights, while her sisters are downstairs watching TV, Yoyo writes poems in English. She hunches over her desk writing “her secret poems in her new language” (238). Laura often bursts into Yoyo’s room to share her new inventions, clucking to her about writing in a dark room and promising that one day, she’ll buy Yoyo a typewriter. One night, she comes in and shows Yoyo a drawing of a suitcase on wheels. The daughters resent all the time Mami spends creating inventions. As they try to navigate adolescence in a new country, they feel their mother is scribbling “dumb inventions.” They understand, though, that Mami needs something that brings her acknowledgment in their new lives. In the Dominican Republic, her last name on its own told the story of her family’s prominence.

One night, while reading the New York Times, Laura shouts when she sees an advertisement for luggage with wheels. After seeing someone else succeed with an idea she came up with, Laura stops inventing. She begins working at Carlos’s medicine practice, peeling stickers off waiting room magazines and doing the books.

In ninth grade, Yoyo is chosen by Sister Mary Joseph to deliver the Teacher’s Day address at her school’s assembly. Since moving to New York, Yoyo “took root in the language” (245), so much so that her writing is read aloud in English class. At the prospect of writing a speech praising the teachers at her school, though, Yoyo is “jammed” with fear of displaying her accent and further isolating herself from her peers. She tries to write the speech night after night but can’t get anything down. Laura tries to help her by citing “Mister Lincoln’s” speech at Gettysburg and reminding her of the American saying: “[N]ecessity is the daughter of invention” (248). Carlos contributes by reciting his valedictorian speech at the dinner table. The girls can no longer understand Papi’s formal Spanish, though Laura smiles to herself.

The night before the assembly, Yoyo hasn’t written a word. She finds some Whitman poems that inspire her with their irreverent lines about celebrating the self instead of following in the steps of the teacher. She writes “recklessly” until she is done and recites her speech to Laura, who praises what Yoyo has created.

They walk down the hall to show Carlos, who is reading in his Dominican newspaper that the Trujillo dictatorship has been toppled. He puts his paper down as Laura and Yoyo enter the room and calls for her to begin, “Eh-speech!” She reads from start to finish without pause and with pride. When she looks up at her father, he is angry. He mocks Yoyo’s speech, calling it “boastful” and “insubordinate.” Laura protests, but Carlos only gets more furious. He tears Yoyo’s speech into tiny pieces, deeming it an “insult.” Yoyo weeps wildly and finds the worst thing she can call her father: “Chapita.” She uses Trujillo’s nickname, knowing it will enrage her father to be compared to someone he loathes and fears. Carlos runs toward Yoyo, who sprints to her room and locks the door.

Later that night, after Carlos calms down, Laura comes into Yoyo’s room and helps her craft a new speech “wrought by necessity and without much invention” (251). The next day, the speech is a great success. Yoyo comes home with high praise from her teachers.

Carlos returns home that night with a typewriter for Yoyo. It has every feature she could ever want. The end of Laura’s inventing period marks the beginning of Yoyo’s success at school. Yoyo imagines that her mother’s actual last invention was her speech, as though she passed along the paper and pen.