The Garcia sisters experience severe moments of conflict between the two different cultural systems of America and the Dominican Republic and a subsequent alienation from both. The movement away from their roots and the inability to accept fully the culture of their host country results in confusion and the inability to develop a sense of self. The connection between trauma and development in the narrative is evident in the novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” by Julia Alvarez. Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930–61) built on terror, fear, control, and total compliance with his will had a huge impact on the lives of the Garcia Family before fleeing the Dominican Republic to New York City and continued as the girl’s transition from childhood into adulthood. With a focus on matters of personal concern, the sisters are plagued with developing a sense of self as well as a sense of belonging to their host and home countries, problems communicating, and an inability to establish stable romantic relationships, leaving them stranded between Dominican and American culture. The book divided into three groups of five stories, is arranged in reverse chronological order and revolves around the lives of the four García sisters, navigating from the stages of adulthood, adolescence, and ending with childhood. The carefully plotted chronology of the past gives way to one’s understanding of how the sisters came to be the way they are in their adult lives and their present predicaments. Through varied accounts of each sister the reader is exposed to different facets of assimilation each sister faces as we navigate through their past in attempts to understand their present. However, it is through the voice of Yolanda, who begins and ends the book chapters, who exemplifies the hardships one faces in a traumatic immigration experience at a young age and how it transcends for a lifetime.
The Garcia sister’s traumatic immigration to New York City at a young age, results in the loss of much of the language and culture on which their family background is based as exemplified by the first chapter “Antojos” narrated by Yolanda in the third person. This chapter provides clear psychological motivations, as well as insight into Yolanda’s socio-historical background. Yolanda is in search of her cultural and personal identity, after having secretly returned home to the Dominican Republic for the first time in five years to possibly remain. The details of the chapter reveal Yolanda’s sense of displacement in the Dominican Republic which is accentuated by her unconventional behavior. Yolanda’s cousin refers to her as “Miss America” (4) due to her manner of dress, seen as informal/ casual in comparison to the glamorousness of her Dominican cousins. Linguistically Yolanda has forgotten much of her Spanish and is almost incapable of expressing herself in her native language as she is reluctant to speak “halting Spanish”. (7) When her aunts verbally abuse the help, who take on the role of being inferior in the household, Yolanda is sympathetic towards them. Moreover, the ill-advised, solitary adventure in the Dominican countryside at the heart of this chapter shows Yolanda as the Americanized foreigner that she has become as she defies her relatives’ concern for a woman traveling on her own, leaves the gated community and goes in search of Guavas. The Chapter ends with Yolanda pondering on the image of a woman in a soap ad. As a result, Yolanda’s struggle to gain a sense of self in her home country appears to alienate her more. One can assume that Yolanda does not fit in well with American culture, either. Yet, during her moment of greatest crisis and fear, she embraces her identity as an American and chatters on in English to the men who only want to solve her car trouble. Her initial distrust of the men reflects her fears of the Dominican Republic and all the unknowns it represents. From the first chapter, it is evident Yolanda will not be able to integrate herself into Dominican culture and society as if she had never left. The twenty-nine years living in the United States have shaped her identity and she will never truly fully belong to either America or the Dominican Republic.
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Yolanda's descent into madness and her inability to communicate with other people, especially the ones she loves the most, reflects the dissolution of her sense of self. Yolanda used to define herself as a poet, and a person for whom words had a particular and very important significance. Her inability to understand the words that John spoke represents their problems communicating on a personal level. The gap between what he said and what she understood led to the breakdown of their marriage, with the communication problem symbolized by the transformation of language into meaningless and garbled babble.
The story of Rudy Elmhurst reflects the cultural differences between Dominican and American attitudes toward sex and relationships. Yolanda’s fears of intimacy and sexual experimentation relate to her desires to be appreciated and cherished as a pure and chaste virgin. Though tempted by the mystery and pleasure of sex that Rudy offers, she is also terrified by the disrespect communicated through his unpolished vocabulary when referring to the act of intimacy. Yolanda places such importance on the hidden and subtle meanings of words and language that she becomes offended by what she deems an inappropriate and crass way of talking about sex. Rudy’s casual attitude towards sex differed from Yolanda’s view of it as something to be honored and cherished. Her Dominican background did not allow for her to see sex as a fun and harmless experience as Americans did, but rather as a symbol of a long-term and spiritual commitment to another person. Yet the casual attitude that she finds so offensive is what originally attracted her to Rudy in the first place. Though Yolanda experiments with sex during the years following her relationship with Rudy, her desire is framed within a vocabulary that matches her sentiments towards sex in that she finds it attractive and respectful. This Chapter illustrates the problems Yolanda faces with American men, as she mediates between her Dominican values and newfound American ones, and is an indication of the message in the chapter titled “Human body doll”. Following the doll's destruction, though all the pieces add up to a comprehensible whole, will not fit together again.
As an adolescent, we witness Yolanda's struggle to write in English and create a speech that reflects who she is as an individual. Yolanda's first speech embodies the American attitude that encourages intellectual independence and liberalism, which she is inspired by in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Even though Yolanda’s mother is supportive and takes pride in the first speech, her father remains adherent to traditional Dominican attitudes and values, tears the speech seeing it as insubordinate and improper, and insists she writes one more fitting. Yolanda's response, comparing her father to the dictator Trujillo, draws attention to the aspects of American culture and society that her father left the Dominican Republic to embrace and is also representative of the difficulty in putting away one set of values to embrace another. This story is symbolic in that it is not easy for Yolanda to integrate herself into American society without also accepting and participating in the aspects of intellectual and civic liberty, though they do not easily fit into traditional Dominican culture.
The Chapter titled “Snow” is used by Alvarez as a funny story Yolanda can relay to the reader and takes some of the edge off created by the weightiness of the other themes in the story. As a young Dominican girl, Yolanda faces unexpected aspects of American society that she cannot relate to. As Yolanda's fear leads her to assume the worst when she encounters the strange and unknown phenomenon of snow and screams “Bomb!” This memory serves as an indicator as to why Yolanda grew to use language as a tool to deal with the unusual and uncertain traumas she would encounter later in life. Yolanda’s growing vocabulary in English better prepares her to interact with American culture and provides a channel that makes it possible for her to articulate her voice in the language.
The family's last day on the Island ties all the different characters and perspectives together at one point in time that continues to affect all of them in various ways throughout the rest of their lives. The root of all the problems the family has faced in previous chapters is revealed in Blood of the Conquistadores. The perspectives of lower-class people, such as the servants and police, balance out the novel's focus on a wealthy, upper-class family. Yet both Chucha and the police seem powerless to influence the course of events they contribute to and submit themselves to the authority of the state and their bosses while simply hoping for the best.
In the final chapter of the book, Yolanda’s guilt for violating Schwarz’s right foreshadows the problems that she and her sisters would face as they grow up in another country. Yolanda, just like the kitten, was physically from her motherland at an age when she was too young to survive without it and suffered emotionally and mentally, as Schwarz did during the abrupt transition and having to adapt to a new cultural environment. Yolanda’s journey mirrors that of Schwarz’s, as an unsuccessful movement back toward the place she had been prematurely taken from. mirrors Yolanda's journey, described in the first chapter, back to her homeland. The mother cat that continually appears in Yolanda’s dreams is symbolic of her home, the Dominican Republic, and just as Schwarz was removed and unable to find his mother again, so is the same for Yolanda who left the Dominican Republic and is unable to connect with the place she once called home. In the first chapter, we gain an understanding of Yolanda’s sense of displacement as an adult as she is unable to find her roots when she returns home in the first chapter. As Yolanda's life advances from childhood, the smaller troubles suffered as a young child are compounded by the larger problems of immigration and cultural transformation. Yolanda's sense of cultural violation, beginning from her experience as a child immigrant becomes the focus of her creative endeavors and the understanding of her cultural and personal identity. Yolanda’s writing is centered around the violation of removing Schwarz and continues throughout her adult life as she struggles to incorporate her Dominican values into her life. The haunting of this violation in the Dominican Republic with the kitten continues throughout her life and the psychological distress unfolds into further traumas, which can be traced back to her being uprooted from the Dominican Republic, her culture, and her extended family at a very young age. As Hoffman notes As troubled as it may be--by memory or failed love or fragmented identity or that precarious tightrope that is the immigrant's life--Yolanda still has spirit in her; she still has her art, her writing, her refuge. With that, she will always be able to invent what she needs to survive.
Through the many hardships and experiences, the girls have endured as immigrants, their hard-gained proficiency in English is no proof that they belong to the United States, just as their birth in the Dominican Republic and inability to relate to their birthplace, leads them to feel displacement. It is obvious to the reader from the very beginning of the narrative, that the girls have lost the core of who they were and are left to put the broken pieces of their lives back together, trying to strike a balance where their cultural and family roots can be supported and celebrated.
Works Cited
- Alvarez, Julia. “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2007). An introduction to language (8th ed.). Boston, MA: Thomson Higher Education
- Yitah, Helen Atawube. “‘Inhabited by Un Santo’: The Antojo and Yolanda’s Search for the ‘Missing’ Self in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” Bilingual Review, no. 3, 2003, p. 234-243
- Hoffman, Joan M. “`' She Wants to Be Called Yolanda Now': Identity, Language, and the Third Sister in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” Bilingual Review, vol. 23, no. 1, Jan. 1998, pp. 21–27
- Molina-Narr, J. “Current Sociopolitical, Sociocultural, and Sociolinguistic Issues of Latino Immigrants in Julia Álvarez’s Novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” Journal of Latinos & Education, vol. 15, no. 3, July 2016, pp. 253–258
- Tikhonov, Aleksandr A., et al. “Bicultural Identity Harmony and American Identity Are Associated with Positive Mental Health in US Racial and Ethnic Minority Immigrants.” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, vol. 25, no. 4, Oct. 2019, pp. 494–504
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