How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

I have noticed that novels we read in this class are increasingly resembles something poignant to the one we read previously. The fragmented structure of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is similar to Woman Hollering Creek and other stories but the vignettes of this novel explicitly state the perspective from which the story is told in the beginning of the chapter. Sometimes, all four of the girls are the protagonists of a story, offering multiple perspectives on life in the United States and Dominican Republic. Similar to Woman Hollering Creek and other stories whose characters straddle the line between the United States and Mexico, having one foot on each side, Alvarez’s novel (unlike Rivera) also names the characters of the story. Each of the sisters have a name and a pet name and the people around them are distinguished with unique names such as Illuminada and Altagracia. The names seemingly function as an indicator of class and the pet names of the girls, such as Yo for Yolanda explicitly refer to the first person.

Although each of the girls each have names, their mother confuses them and attempts to resolve the situation by assigning a particular color to them almost as like how the colors of a flag are representative of a nation. The attention to color seems to be an important aspect of this novel. It begins with visual descriptions of Yolanda’s coming home party.

That story also hints at a matriarchy, indicating that the widowed Tia Carmen was the head of the clan. I am interested to see if this turns out to be a feminist novel. One of its similarities to Cisneros’ novel is a daughter’s defiance to a father’s wishes. Sofia packs her things and flies to Germany after her father confronts her about the letters from her German boyfriend. One of the women in Cisneros’ novel also defied her father to be with her husband. Alvarez’s character more explicitly feels exiled. He only goes to her house to visit his grandchildren and although Sofia threw his seventieth birthday, he mentions all her sister’s names but fail to mention her’s during the games.