How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Laura and Carlos are talking to a doctor at the mental hospital where Sandra is admitted. Laura explains to the doctor that Sandra’s good looks caused Sandra to become obsessed with her appearance, eventually leading to her mental health crisis. At other points in the novel several characters describe Sandra’s looks as attractive, and they always draw attention to Sandra’s light features, as though Sandra is attractive simply because she has white, European-looking features. In the Dominican Republic at the time in which the story is set, race plays a big role in social hierarchies.

Much of why Laura’s family is respected and wealthy is because they are descended from Spanish “conquistadors,” so they have lighter features than most Dominicans. The family is also thrilled that Sofia’s son has “Nordic” features. The Garcías openly value white features as superior to those of other races—a result of internalized racism. This ideology proves to be harmful mostly in that it oppresses people with darker skin, like the Haitian Dominicans, but also because the focus on her appearance drives Sandra to neurosis.

At the hospital where Sofia has just given birth, Laura strikes up conversation with a stranger and tells him her version of how Sofia met Otto. Laura’s version of the story is far from the truth—Sofia and Otto met in Colombia, not Peru, and Sofia’s trip was not through church nor was it chaperoned. Laura changes the story to suit her beliefs. She seems to recount the events as she would have liked them to happen instead of how they actually happened. Storytelling is important to Dominican culture, and it plays a key role in the García family members’ relationships to one another. The characters build their senses of self partially on stories their family tells, but these stories are often inaccurate, like Laura’s account here of Sofia meeting Otto.

Another example of this is Sofia constructing her idea of life as a child on the Island through what her sisters say, because she was too young to remember it herself. But her sisters’ memories aren’t always accurate, and some of their accounts contradict each other. Thus, language and storytelling are not reliable ways for the characters to build their inner realities.

This passage also reveals Laura’s conservative values. She generally seems slightly more modern and progressive than Carlos, but her admission that she doesn’t “believe in […] freedom” is telling. It’s also ironic, because the family actively fought for their freedom in the face of a militant dictator. The four sisters compare the American feminist revolution to the Dominican political revolution, but their parents are unable to see the similarities between the two.

Yolanda’s parents come to visit her in the hospital while she is in the midst of a mental health crisis. Yolanda is happy to hear her mother say Yolanda’s full name for once, but for the most part people call Yolanda by various nicknames. The physical description of Yolanda’s full name, as though it’s composed of flesh, sheds light on how Yolanda sees the various versions of her name. To her, they are not mere words but an extension of herself. Yolanda gets satisfaction out of hearing her full name because it makes her feel like she is a full and complete human. This is important to her—the biggest struggle Yolanda faces is forming a cohesive self-image.

The mention of apples and God alludes to the Genesis story in the Bible. At one point while in the hospital, Yolanda quotes Genesis and makes up a story about Eve. These mentions of the biblical creation story imply a new beginning for Yolanda. During her mental health crisis, Yolanda seems to forget how to produce and understand language, and everything feels foreign to her. As she recovers from the crisis and regains her language skills, Yolanda begins to think of herself as creating her reality through words. At one point, she even refers to herself as God.

The girls are in college, and they regularly get in trouble for doing things their parents don’t approve of. Yolanda is in trouble one day for reading a book about the female body. Laura’s reaction to the book sheds light on the extent of how harmful it is to push her extremely conservative values on her daughters. Laura seems to become more conservative as time goes on and her daughters grow older. When the girls are young, Laura makes an effort to raise them in the “American” style—in other words, she tries to adopt a less authoritarian approach to parenting and be more progressive in her values. But as the girls come of age and the family is exposed to the progressive, urban culture of the 1960s, Laura retreats into more traditional views.

The idea that exploring one’s body is shameful deeply affects Yolanda as she becomes an adult. She identifies as a feminist and doesn’t agree with her mother’s sentiment, but Yolanda can’t fully erase the effects on her mentality of how her parents raise her.

For a while after moving to the U.S., Laura is obsessed with inventing new products. Yolanda writes a speech for school, and Carlos tears it to shreds because he thinks it’s offensive. Laura helps Yolanda rewrite a new speech. Though Yolanda argues with her mother a lot as she gets older, this passage shows how much love and care Laura has for her daughters. It also reveals a unique connection Yolanda has with her mother—creating is very important to them both. Laura invents because she hopes to make something of herself, and Yolanda writes for the same reason.

After Laura gives up on inventing, she’s still a creator in that she loves telling stories. Laura doesn’t write like Yolanda does, but she creates her reality with words. Yolanda also uses language and storytelling to construct herself and her reality. Laura always hoped Yolanda would become a writer, and she supports Yolanda in her writing career. This illustrates the mother-daughter bond, and shows how important words, language, and stories are to both characters. 

Two officers (Pupo and Checo) from the SIM—the secret police—just arrived at the García household in the Dominican Republic. Laura greets them and tries to charm and placate them by offering them food and drinks. She knows that, though the SIM carries out orders from the dictatorship, the actual officers are not evil and have joined the force only because they are desperate for money. This reveals the severe wealth inequality in the Dominican Republic. Many young men take jobs working for a nefarious dictator and carry out kidnappings and murders just to make enough money to live.

Laura recognizes this and takes pity on the men, yet she herself belongs to the privileged upper class. She appears to sympathize with the men, but she actively benefits from the system that keeps the poor people poor. At many points before the Garcías move to the U.S., the family appears to act kindly toward people of the lower classes. Ultimately, though, the way they treat their servants shows that they consider themselves superior to others due to the color of their skin and the social status that they were born into.

Laura has just found out that the family’s papers have been approved to move to the United States. She and her family have been waiting eagerly for this moment, living in fear of the secret police. But now that it’s becoming a reality, she realizes that the event is tinged with sadness. The Dominican Republic is no longer safe for the Garcías, but the vivid descriptions of light and natural beauty represent the good that the Island has to offer. The image of warm, “glorious light” represents the peace and comfortability of life on the Island. Aside from the dictatorship’s threat, the Garcías live well, surrounded by friends and family and with enough money for everything they want or need.

Laura is right to sense loss. When they move to New York, the Garcías will experience hardship that they never could have expected, including racism, poverty, mental illness, and abuse. What they lose by leaving the Island can never again be regained, and the whole family struggles to grapple with this difficult truth.

While the SIM officers are at the García household, Vic reveals that the family is approved to move to the U.S. Laura tells her daughters to pack their belongings and choose one toy to bring with them. Sandra can’t decide on what to bring because it doesn’t seem that a single object suffices. Sandra is still a young child, but she already senses that the move to the U.S. entails a great loss. And though doesn’t realize it at the time, the loss she senses is her innocence—the comforts of her childhood on the Island. When the family arrives in New York, the girls will have to face hardships like racism and poverty, and they will grow distant from their family.

Out of the four girls, Sandra leads the second most tumultuous life in adulthood, after Yolanda. Sandra tries to find fulfillment in her good looks, among other things, but her superficial endeavors only lead to suffering. Nothing ever fills the hole that Sandra feels opening inside her the day she packs up her things.

Yolanda reflects on her life. Laura had dismissed Yolanda’s visions of the black cat on her bed as a “phase,” but Yolanda continues to see the cat throughout her adult life. The “violation” she refers to is the loss of innocence and comfort that Yolanda inflicts on the kitten—and also the loss of innocence that, parallelly, Yolanda experiences herself. Yolanda violates the family of cats by taking the kitten prematurely, and the Dominican dictatorship violates Yolanda by uprooting her from her childhood home too early.

These are the last lines of the novel’s final story. As Yolanda narrates this section, the narration implies that the story itself is the art that Yolanda refers to.

Laura and Carlos are talking to a doctor at the mental hospital where Sandra is admitted. Laura explains to the doctor that Sandra’s good looks caused Sandra to become obsessed with her appearance, eventually leading to her mental health crisis. At other points in the novel several characters describe Sandra’s looks as attractive, and they always draw attention to Sandra’s light features, as though Sandra is attractive simply because she has white, European-looking features. In the Dominican Republic at the time in which the story is set, race plays a big role in social hierarchies.

Much of why Laura’s family is respected and wealthy is because they are descended from Spanish “conquistadors,” so they have lighter features than most Dominicans. The family is also thrilled that Sofia’s son has “Nordic” features. The Garcías openly value white features as superior to those of other races—a result of internalized racism. This ideology proves to be harmful mostly in that it oppresses people with darker skin, like the Haitian Dominicans, but also because the focus on her appearance drives Sandra to neurosis.

At the hospital where Sofia has just given birth, Laura strikes up conversation with a stranger and tells him her version of how Sofia met Otto. Laura’s version of the story is far from the truth—Sofia and Otto met in Colombia, not Peru, and Sofia’s trip was not through church nor was it chaperoned. Laura changes the story to suit her beliefs. She seems to recount the events as she would have liked them to happen instead of how they actually happened. Storytelling is important to Dominican culture, and it plays a key role in the García family members’ relationships to one another. The characters build their senses of self partially on stories their family tells, but these stories are often inaccurate, like Laura’s account here of Sofia meeting Otto.

Another example of this is Sofia constructing her idea of life as a child on the Island through what her sisters say, because she was too young to remember it herself. But her sisters’ memories aren’t always accurate, and some of their accounts contradict each other. Thus, language and storytelling are not reliable ways for the characters to build their inner realities.

This passage also reveals Laura’s conservative values. She generally seems slightly more modern and progressive than Carlos, but her admission that she doesn’t “believe in […] freedom” is telling. It’s also ironic, because the family actively fought for their freedom in the face of a militant dictator. The four sisters compare the American feminist revolution to the Dominican political revolution, but their parents are unable to see the similarities between the two.

Yolanda’s parents come to visit her in the hospital while she is in the midst of a mental health crisis. Yolanda is happy to hear her mother say Yolanda’s full name for once, but for the most part people call Yolanda by various nicknames. The physical description of Yolanda’s full name, as though it’s composed of flesh, sheds light on how Yolanda sees the various versions of her name. To her, they are not mere words but an extension of herself. Yolanda gets satisfaction out of hearing her full name because it makes her feel like she is a full and complete human. This is important to her—the biggest struggle Yolanda faces is forming a cohesive self-image.

The mention of apples and God alludes to the Genesis story in the Bible. At one point while in the hospital, Yolanda quotes Genesis and makes up a story about Eve. These mentions of the biblical creation story imply a new beginning for Yolanda. During her mental health crisis, Yolanda seems to forget how to produce and understand language, and everything feels foreign to her. As she recovers from the crisis and regains her language skills, Yolanda begins to think of herself as creating her reality through words. At one point, she even refers to herself as God.

The girls are in college, and they regularly get in trouble for doing things their parents don’t approve of. Yolanda is in trouble one day for reading a book about the female body. Laura’s reaction to the book sheds light on the extent of how harmful it is to push her extremely conservative values on her daughters. Laura seems to become more conservative as time goes on and her daughters grow older. When the girls are young, Laura makes an effort to raise them in the “American” style—in other words, she tries to adopt a less authoritarian approach to parenting and be more progressive in her values. But as the girls come of age and the family is exposed to the progressive, urban culture of the 1960s, Laura retreats into more traditional views.

The idea that exploring one’s body is shameful deeply affects Yolanda as she becomes an adult. She identifies as a feminist and doesn’t agree with her mother’s sentiment, but Yolanda can’t fully erase the effects on her mentality of how her parents raise her.

For a while after moving to the U.S., Laura is obsessed with inventing new products. Yolanda writes a speech for school, and Carlos tears it to shreds because he thinks it’s offensive. Laura helps Yolanda rewrite a new speech. Though Yolanda argues with her mother a lot as she gets older, this passage shows how much love and care Laura has for her daughters. It also reveals a unique connection Yolanda has with her mother—creating is very important to them both. Laura invents because she hopes to make something of herself, and Yolanda writes for the same reason.

After Laura gives up on inventing, she’s still a creator in that she loves telling stories. Laura doesn’t write like Yolanda does, but she creates her reality with words. Yolanda also uses language and storytelling to construct herself and her reality. Laura always hoped Yolanda would become a writer, and she supports Yolanda in her writing career. This illustrates the mother-daughter bond, and shows how important words, language, and stories are to both characters. 

Two officers (Pupo and Checo) from the SIM—the secret police—just arrived at the García household in the Dominican Republic. Laura greets them and tries to charm and placate them by offering them food and drinks. She knows that, though the SIM carries out orders from the dictatorship, the actual officers are not evil and have joined the force only because they are desperate for money. This reveals the severe wealth inequality in the Dominican Republic. Many young men take jobs working for a nefarious dictator and carry out kidnappings and murders just to make enough money to live.

Laura recognizes this and takes pity on the men, yet she herself belongs to the privileged upper class. She appears to sympathize with the men, but she actively benefits from the system that keeps the poor people poor. At many points before the Garcías move to the U.S., the family appears to act kindly toward people of the lower classes. Ultimately, though, the way they treat their servants shows that they consider themselves superior to others due to the color of their skin and the social status that they were born into.

Laura has just found out that the family’s papers have been approved to move to the United States. She and her family have been waiting eagerly for this moment, living in fear of the secret police. But now that it’s becoming a reality, she realizes that the event is tinged with sadness. The Dominican Republic is no longer safe for the Garcías, but the vivid descriptions of light and natural beauty represent the good that the Island has to offer. The image of warm, “glorious light” represents the peace and comfortability of life on the Island. Aside from the dictatorship’s threat, the Garcías live well, surrounded by friends and family and with enough money for everything they want or need.

Laura is right to sense loss. When they move to New York, the Garcías will experience hardship that they never could have expected, including racism, poverty, mental illness, and abuse. What they lose by leaving the Island can never again be regained, and the whole family struggles to grapple with this difficult truth.

While the SIM officers are at the García household, Vic reveals that the family is approved to move to the U.S. Laura tells her daughters to pack their belongings and choose one toy to bring with them. Sandra can’t decide on what to bring because it doesn’t seem that a single object suffices. Sandra is still a young child, but she already senses that the move to the U.S. entails a great loss. And though doesn’t realize it at the time, the loss she senses is her innocence—the comforts of her childhood on the Island. When the family arrives in New York, the girls will have to face hardships like racism and poverty, and they will grow distant from their family.

Out of the four girls, Sandra leads the second most tumultuous life in adulthood, after Yolanda. Sandra tries to find fulfillment in her good looks, among other things, but her superficial endeavors only lead to suffering. Nothing ever fills the hole that Sandra feels opening inside her the day she packs up her things.

Yolanda reflects on her life. Laura had dismissed Yolanda’s visions of the black cat on her bed as a “phase,” but Yolanda continues to see the cat throughout her adult life. The “violation” she refers to is the loss of innocence and comfort that Yolanda inflicts on the kitten—and also the loss of innocence that, parallelly, Yolanda experiences herself. Yolanda violates the family of cats by taking the kitten prematurely, and the Dominican dictatorship violates Yolanda by uprooting her from her childhood home too early.

These are the last lines of the novel’s final story. As Yolanda narrates this section, the narration implies that the story itself is the art that Yolanda refers to.