I enjoyed reading the first part of Garcia Girls. Maybe I wasn’t as captivated as with Cisneros’ stories, which were more forceful and had a more varied narrative style, but Alvarez has a lot to offer. It’s so easy to read these stories, with their endearing characters and familiar situations that happened to you or someone you know, but you are always aware of their backdrop commentary on immigration, ethnic and class relations, and gender inequality. I like how Alvarez transports the reader to a variety of settings, from a guava grove in the Dominican Republic, to maternity and psychiatric hospitals, to 1960s-era college dorms. The characters are varied; at first they seem like stereotypes (the revered Latino family patriarch and the irresistible college bad boy for example) but they are actually nuanced with internal contradictions which round out their personalities (the father wants his girls to fit into American society by attending the right schools and speaking without an accent but he won’t permit that they act like Americans, the boy that is intelligent and sensitive enough to write love sonnets for class but can’t understand why his virgin girlfriend doesn’t want to get screwed, laid or fucked.)

The most interesting characters I find are the two we know least and most about. The character of the mother intrigued me, and in some ways reminded me of Mrs. Norval. Despite the fact that these women invest the most work into their families, the father steals the limelight in the form of everyone bending over backwards to please Papi or praising Mr. Norval for being a beloved and kind-hearted father when he essentially left everyone to fend for themselves. Although the Garcia girls’ mother is not as greedy or duplicitous as Mrs. Norval, both mother their many daughters with a great sense of order and discipline, and their personal desires are deeply hidden from their families. For much of the first part of the book we don’t even know “Mami’s” name, much less about who she is or why she acts as she does, though this reveals itself sometimes in roundabout ways.

The second interesting character, and the one we know most about, is Yolanda. She lives her whole life negotiating between life as it was taught to her and life as she experiences it, between the Latino culture she was raised with, Catholic and Spanish-speaking, and the American culture she interacts with at school and in personal relationships. “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story” is interesting because it is apparent that Yolanda must work to interpret her surroundings, not only as a sexually inexperienced young woman but one in a foreign culture. She is also the character where the theme of language is most important, from her nervously babbling in English before the Domincan field workers, to taking refuge in Spanish with her American boyfriend John, to actually getting psychosomatic rashes when certain words are mentioned. As I listed in the title of this post, Yolanda goes by, sometimes against her will, a variety of names. Out of all of these, her real and full name is almost sacred to her, it is an expression of what she perceives to be her real self instead of the other names which refer to compromised versions of this real self, or perhaps roles she is forced to take on.