How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Storytelling and language drive the narrative in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, and they shape characters’ identities, too. Yolanda attempts to define herself through words, including her own name. At various points in the novel her friends and family call her “Yo,” “Joe,” and “Yoyo.” Each nickname corresponds to a different version of Yolanda’s identity—she is torn between her Dominican roots and American life. Yolanda finally decides that she prefers her full name, but she is frustrated that those around her continue to use nicknames. This suggests that she longs for a whole, cohesive identity, but is unable to merge the different versions of herself.

Yolanda tries to repair her fragmented self-identity with language—not only by expressing herself with words but also by reading and internalizing others’ words. Words ultimately fail her—though Yolanda is a talented writer, her English vocabulary is lacking at first, and as her English improves, she begins to forget Spanish. Yolanda eventually reads and memorizes so much literature that she begins to speak only in quotes and loses the ability to use her own words. Yolanda’s language becomes nonsensical, she can no longer communicate, and she loses touch with reality. In effect—though Yolanda hoped she could form a cohesive identity through internalizing language and literature—she becomes more lost and confused than ever.

Storytelling impacts Yolanda’s family members’ identities, too. Yolanda’s mother Laura loves telling stories about her daughters, but she often muddles the truth, reconstructing her memories to reflect how she would have liked past events to play out rather than how they actually did. The youngest daughter, Sofia, relies on her family’s accounts of life in the Dominican Republic since she doesn’t remember much of it. Like Yolanda, Sofia partially forms her identity based on stories she hears from others, regardless of whether those stories are true. Through the characters’ attempts—and failures—to form conceptions of themselves and their worlds through language and stories, the novel suggests that words are ultimately inadequate means of understanding the complexity of human lives.