How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
First edition
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| Author | Julia Alvarez |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Bildungsroman |
| Publisher | Algonquin Books |
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Publication date
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1991 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 286 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 25025163 |
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is a 1991 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. Spanning more than thirty years in the lives of four sisters, the story begins with their adult lives in the United States and ends with their childhood in the Dominican Republic, from which their family was forced to flee due to the father’s opposition to Rafael Leónidas Trujillo's dictatorship.
The novel's major themes include acculturation and coming of age. It deals with the myriad hardships of immigration, painting a vivid picture of the struggle to assimilate, the sense of displacement, and the confusion of identity suffered by the García family, as they are uprooted from familiarity and forced to begin a new life in New York City. The text consists of fifteen interconnected short stories, each of which focuses on one of the four daughters, and in a few instances, the García family as a whole. Although it is told from alternating perspectives there is particular focus throughout the text on the character of Yolanda, who is said to be both the protagonist and the author's alter ego.
The years between 1956 and 1970 were a period of oppression and instability in the Dominican Republic as the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo came to an end with his assassination in 1961, only to be followed by military rule, revolution, intervention by the United States, and further dictatorship. Central control over the military, the economy, and the people meant that only a select few were allowed to leave the island. Critic William Luis describes the situation of immigrants from the Dominican Republic to the United States during the revolution: "The displacement of Caribbean people from their islands to the United States, for political or economical reasons, has produced a tension between the culture of the country of origin and that of the adopted homeland, one representing the past and the other future of the immigrant".
The García family is an example of this phenomenon. In How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez succeeds in altering the events of her own life to create fiction. The family is displaced to the United States after living an established, upper-class life in the Dominican Republic, and is forced to face the challenges which come along with being an immigrant family in a foreign land. Julia Alvarez herself was not born in the Dominican Republic, but in the United States. After her parents' failed attempt at a life in America, she returned to the Dominican Republic at the age of three months as her parents preferred the dictatorship of Trujillo to the US. Clearly in the novel, this is not the case, however throughout, the reader witnesses the Garcia family assimilate into American society. Although their Hispanic roots are reflected in their personalities, it is evident that the stories which focus on the four daughters depict many problems that normal North American girls do.
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