American History

Julia Alvarezs novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents reveals a story of four sisters immigrating to the US with their parents, a story of a family caught between their old world and their new world.  They grapple with decisions on how to blend their patriarchal, traditional values with their more independent and rebellious American surroundings.  Regardless of the choices that they make, there is a struggle. When they choose to retain elements of their Dominican culture, their American friends are critical and perplexed. Likewise, when they choose to discard a Dominican value and replace it with an American one, disapproval from family members is nearly unavoidable. The sisters and their parents each have a unique way of handling this question of how to create a new identity using the fabric of their two worlds.  Cultural displacement and the feeling of being in-between and not pertaining to either world is central to understanding the problematics the Garcia family faces in Alvarezs How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
In the title of the novel, the phrase Lost Their Accents refers to the immigration to the United States, which causes the sisters to Americanize and to lose some of their Dominican-ness in the process. By using a linguistically-charged term such as Accents, to describe the difficulties of immigration, Alvarez displays that Latino identity among others is related to linguistic identity.  In addition, for Julia Alvarez loss of accent articulates particular cultural loss experienced by immigrants, loss of homeland and loss of cultural essence that cannot be replaced or substituted.  Through the challenges and difficulties of immigration and a resulting hybrid existence, one watches the Garcia de la Torre family in fifteen intertwined stories, cope with their loss of privileged status, being perceived as the Other, struggling with English, and searching for their cultural identities.  Search for the identity starts for Yolanda with a journey, both literal and figurative back to the Dominican Republic to find a link to her past, a way to make her origins connect with her present. She visits her homeland, the land of her literal birth, with a sincere hope, that she will discover that she truly spiritually belongs there on the island.  In one of the books earliest scenes, Yolanda is about to make a wish on the candles on her welcome cake She leans forward and shuts her eyes. There is so much she wants, it is hard to single out one wish (Alvarez, 11).  In the final chapter, The Drum, Yolandas statement, There are still times I wake up at three oclock in the morning and peer into the darkness (Alvarez, 290) symbolizes Garcias family physical and spiritual search for its identity.
    Garcia girls and their parents coincidently feel as if they do not belong or fit into the United States in the way they have hoped they would.  Part of their feeling of being outsiders in the United States was foisted upon them by authentic Americans such as a neighbor in New York. La Bruja, as the girls not-so-fondly refer to her, often showcases her ignorance and bigotry when dealing with the Garcia family. La Bruja constantly complains to their buildings superintendent about the Garcias, highlighting things that make them different, and therefore in her opinion, bad neighbors. She does not understand and does not appreciate their language, food, or their culture. For example, The old woman in the apartment below, who had a helmet of beauty parlor blue hair, had been complaining to the super since the day the family moved in a few months ago. The Garcias should be evicted. Their food smelled. They spoke too loudly and not in English (Alvarez, 170).  From the critical perspective, Alvarez does not display the problem of neighboring but the dilemma of cultural acceptance. Mrs. Garcia addresses this problem with the argument that We have to walk around. We have to breathe (Alvarez, 170).  What more could they reasonably do to keep their neighbors happy Nothing. The lack of sympathy was surprising to the Garcia family. They could not understand how behavior such as this was an unfortunately commonplace occurrence, especially for immigrant or hybrid families in the United States.
Carla, the eldest daughter, encounters painful incidents of humiliation and confusion at her Catholic school. A gang of boys chases after her in the hallways and playground of the school peppering the air with mean and intolerant names and phrases, such as Go back to where you came from, you dirty spic No titties Monkey legs (Alvarez, 153).  Alvarez employs the image of harassing school kids to symbolize the lack of tolerance in contemporary American culture.  The boys were searching for liminal figures to harass - any kid that was different from the expected norm, whether in size, looks, wealth, language, ethnicity or country of origin.  From this perspective, in the harassed victims, such as Carla, their games only served to reinforce and highlight those differences.  Making excuses for her lack of belonging, Carla would blame her command of English when someone would ask her for directions or the time I dont speak very much English, she would say in a small voice by way of apology (Alvarez, 156).  Carla like her family is overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness, displacement, being in-between two places but belonging to neither, cooped up in those little suburban houses, withno island to make up the difference (Alvarez, 107).  As Alvarez articulates in the novel, this suation of being trapped in-between two places for the Gacria family is due to the fact that they were not yet reconciled to the idea of their immigration as a permanent change. They held on to the element of thinking they would eventually go home, that their move and the resulting uncomfortable duality were just temporary.  However, practically the Garcia family does not have any choice but to adjust culturally and emotionally to the United States.  Carlos explains this situation with a single statement This is your home, and never you should forget it (Alvarez, 25).
    Julia Alvarezs novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is not only a story of coping with change.  It is a story of what it is like to be a cultural hybrid and be in a constant search for cultural identity.  Coming from the Dominican Republic where life was Spanish and having to the United States into an Englishexistence, the Garcia family is straddling two worlds.  From Alvarezs perspective, this duality is permanent.  Familys identity, psychological bonds and familys memories serve as powerful anchors that make it impossible for the Garcia family to reject old homeland and embrace fully a new life and culture.