How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is a 2001 novel written by Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist Julia Alvarez. Told in reverse chronological order and narrated from shifting perspectives, the text possesses distinct qualities of a bildungsroman novel. The novel's major themes include acculturation and coming of age (Alvarez 2010). In a series of fifteen interlocked stories (each presenting the perspective and often the actual voice of a particular character or family group), the reader follows the four, very different, immigrant sisters into their memories in a reverse march across thirty-three years and two cultures. Through this journey, the reader witnesses their varied and often troubled cultural awakenings as they experience their individual introductions to womanhood.

Inher first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez offers a sprawling, backward spiraling journey into memory and self - discovery for all four of the Garcia sisters. That great female democracy of blue blood, exiled from their genteel Dominican life to be plummeted into the turbulent American mainstream and beyond. Their journey of self - discovery from childhood to adolescence into adulthood - a veritable tightrope walk for any young girl - is made all the more precarious by their immigrant experience. Not only do they have dual memories, but also dual languages and dual cultures to negotiate along the way (O'Sullivan 1994). They must reconcile the Old World and its old memories with the New, their servants and chaperones and extended family with new freedoms, fast cars, and impatient boyfriends - not to mention the snow and the difficulties of English pronunciation. The words of their voodoo - soaked Haitian maid in the epigraph above are profound and prophetic. All of these girls - Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia - do come to some trouble in the New World. In Jean Franco's words, they all know the difficulty of having to refashion themselves in a new place. Yolanda confirms, We all took turns being the wildest.

In a series of fifteen interlocked stories, each presenting the perspective and often the actual voice of a particular character or family group, the reader follows the four, very different, immigrant sisters into their memories in a reverse march across thirty-three years and two cultures to witness their always varied and often troubled sexual and cultural awakenings and their individual introductions to womanhood (Neuhaus 1995). Thus, we observe Sandi's early Dominican introduction to Virgin monuments and exaggerated male anatomy as well as her later memorable encounter with a drunken American seductress in the New World. We see young Carla's difficulties with mocking gringo boys in the schoolyard and with an incomprehensible exhibitionist offering so much more than a ride home after school (Alvarez 2010).

We follow the sisters into parentally imposed banishment, away from the free-for-all that is America. They go back to the homeland, for some cultural reinforcement--only to be introduced, in the protective bosom of their extended family and their patriarchal culture, to that unseemly side of Dominican ...