I think that “How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” effectively portrayed the internal struggles of a Latin American family trying to assimilate into the US. As we discussed in class, the girls as well as the parents desperately try to fit into the American culture. It is definitely a difficult situation on both sides. The parents want for their children to adapt American culture, but not too much so that they would forget their Spanish heritage. What is considered to be just the right amount of adaptation anyways?

The Garcia family moving to the US all together only caused family conflict and tension. The root of family problems within the family began when they had no choice but to leave the Dominican Republic. In the girls’ childhood, they lived a privileged life with maids and an abundance of gifts. However I think that as the girls grew older they grew further apart from each other and from their parents. The necessity for the girls to integrate into American life left them unable to relate to their parents’ traditional perspectives. For example, Sofia’s departure from her family was due to her father’s inability to cope with her sexual expressiveness, causing a serious rift in her family. One point mentioned in class was how could two out of the four Garcia girls be put into mental institutions if the parents had not done anything wrong? I think that having two Garcia girls institutionalized demonstrated just how much the family had drifted apart. The girls being put into institutions demonstrate how their parents were unable to relate and reach out to their daughters emotionally in a time of need. It seems that if a family has been divided culturally, there is no solution to mend it and the gap between the parents and their children will only grow wider with time.

Is it just me, or are there numerous references to Barbie in the works we have read? Cisneros had Barbie-Q, in “Never Marry a Mexican” (I believe it was that story), the man’s wife was described as a red-haired Barbie, and in Alvarez’s book, in the story “Floor Show”, we see “a dozen dark-haired Barbie dolls dressed like Spanish señoritas…she was a perfect replica…dressed in a long, glittery gown with a pretty tortoise shell comb in her hair…” (183-184), which Sandi eventually uses to “thank” the American Mrs. Fanning.

I guess Barbie dolls have the ability to be the manufactured stars in the eyes of young girls around the world, and I can see their symbolic importance in certain contexts. I used to play with Barbie when I was younger. I remember wanting to have all of her clothes, and I wanted to (unfortunately when I was five) work at Pizza Hut like “Pizza Party Skipper”. I wanted it to be easy to identify myself with a doll, and in a way, play out the mansion-convertible-fifteen-cats life that I did not have. I also always wanted Mattel’s “Hispanic” Barbie with the dark hair “-Theresa (you girls know which one is Theresa!), and I would always settle for Christie, Barbie’s African-American friend. However, I was always less receptive to blonde Barbie. She just was so unlike me. I guess you could say I had “Barbie Syndrome”.

Side Note: Please Wikipedia “Barbie Syndrome”. It is actually quite sick, as is “Ken Syndrome”. Also, if you look into Barbie’s redheaded friend “Midge” on Wikipedia…that is also quite interesting.

Along the lines of this “Barbie Syndrome”, I can see why Alvarez may have put Barbie into Sandi’s recollection of her experience at “El Flamenco”. The dark-haired “Spanish” Barbie seems an interesting connection to Alvarez’s story. Whether or not Sandi usually had a preference for blonde, brunette, or redhead Barbie, she seemed determined to have the dark haired Spanish one at the end of the night. This makes me wonder: did Sandi choose this doll because it resembled her? Or was it because of her Spanish roots? Or was it because the Barbie doll looked nice? Or was it because the “American” (maybe non-Latina looking) Mrs. Fanning, who had already upset Sandi, did NOT resemble this doll that resembled Sandi’s mother, and she was using this doll as a way to express her identification?

I enjoyed the fact that this book was written in reverse chronological order and I’ve been wondering how exactly that alters our impressions of its events and characters. One aspect is that the first half of the book is caught up with the adult lives of the sisters, so those of their parents become overshadowed and minimized, which can lead the reader to misinterpret their characters. When the girls are adults, Papi seems like a rather depressed and difficult old man who makes great demands on everyone and emotionally distant when Yolanda is hospitalized, and when they are teenagers he is a social hazard (with his embarrassing accent and out-of-place Island-style clothing) and a tyrant (with his ripping up of Yolanda’s masterpiece). However, when they are children you see how these behaviors emerged; Papi grew up in a culture where men were taught to guard their emotions, he was hunted by the secret police in a country where any type of dissension was a death wish, and he worked hard and sacrificed his dignity so that his family could have a good life. The same goes for Mami who is just a fussy old woman who persistently mangles English expressions in the first half of the book, then her personal desires, quirky personality, and inventiveness are revealed in the second part of the book, and finally we see her as a young mother who must bravely be interrogated by secret police for her husband and pack up her life and four daughters in a single night to go to a new country. It’s interesting to see these characters get fleshed out just as the four women revert back to children.

The other aspect of the reverse chronological order is that we see the characters of the four women unravel in complexity, and we can analyze their influences, experiences and traumas with the benefit of knowing the final outcome. It’s interesting to read about these kids’ experiences when at the back of your mind you know that she turned out to be a psychologist, or she was hospitalized with a mental breakdown, or she was the one who had a stable marriage. Many of the chapters are written in first person, as if they were the autobiography of one of the girls. The final chapter is written by Yolanda and she is definitely aware of how her childhood experiences shaped her adult life. For many pages we read about the unfortunate kitten-in-drum incident, then on the final two pages she presses the fast forward button and sums up the next twenty years and psychoanalyzes the source of her artistic angst. I guess the main benefit of the book moving chronologically backwards is that it jolts the reader out of the complacency with which we follow normally unfolding stories, which makes us very conscious of time itself and how our current and past selves are linked together through continuing emotions, memories of significant events, impressions, recurrent nightmares, etc.

Okay.
I was the only person in the class who initially did not respond well to this book, and though I am not completely finished with it, I must say that my opinion has improved. This is by no means my favorite book we have read for the class and I am less impressed by by her actual writing style than the other authors. However, needless to say, as I read more I got more into the stories, became less irritated with the characters, and found their story to be more relatable. I think that part of the reason why I was not initially into the book was because of the reverse chronological order in which it is written. I am not used to reading books in this order and for some reason, meeting these characters at the ‘end’ of the scope in which their lives are discussed left me a bit uninterested because I didn’t find them very likable. As I read more though, I began to understand how they came to be as they are and the reasons behind their idiosyncrasies. They were very ‘Americanized’ in the beginning of the novel, and it was interesting to watch the psychology behind the progression of their assimilation into a new culture. With each chapter, I began to see them as more ‘Dominican’ which made me understand the elements in their lives that lead to their Americanization. This book was interesting to me because my roommate is a whitewashed Dominican who migrated to the U.S. at age nine. I have heard many tales of her assimilation process, and the difficulties she faced, which were surpisingly similar to the struggles of the Garcia Girls.

What is the significance of Yolanda’s captured and abandoned kitten? What does she mean when she says, “There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art.”? (286) And what violation is she talking about?

Well, I skimmed through the chapters specifically about Yolanda to see if I could come up with answers to my questions…and I found some interesting correlations between Yoyo and this little forlorn kitten. Although some of the chapters offer the points of view of different family members, the majority of the book focuses on Yolanda and I think the last chapter is strategically written to provide an encoded reflection of Yolanda’s life; the way this fragile kitten is abused and trapped, parallels the ways in which Yolanda is stifled and violated throughout her life.

Yolanda doesn’t seem to find her place or fit in anywhere she goes. In the first chapter of the book, her relatives single her out as “Miss America”, and “look[ing] terrible” and they scold her when she reverts to speaking English, after having forgotten her Spanish vocabulary due to living in the States. She is also noted as the sister who (with cousin Mundin) formed the only boy/girl pair of “best friend cousins” out of her family. It is the same in America, for example in her first year of school in the States, she is the “only immigrant” in her class and is therefore given a “special seat” so that she could be tutored without disturbing other kids. Whether it’s in her homeland, or America, Yolanda is considered as “different”, therefore it is quite symbolic that the kitten that Yoyo immediately singles out, is “one who had four little white paws and a white spot between the ears, fully dressed, so it looked as opposed to the others who were careless and had lost their shoes and their caps.”

Like the kitten, Yoyo has been violated, stifled and put in a box all throughout her life. She is used by people like Rudy who only want her for sex, and stifled by people like John, who see her only under a certain light (for example: only allowing her to have Americanized nicknames). In the same way that she traps the kitten in her drum, Yolanda is trapped in a cage that is built by those around her, and is unable to escape on her own. This is evidenced when she winds up in a mental institute and relies completely on the doctor to save her. Yolanda has a drum but can’t play, just like the kitten has a life but can’t live. She is constantly tormented; constantly crying out, like the meowing kitten, but is too fragile to be able to save herself. Maybe it is because her “roots” are torn up and transplanted before she is able to develop her own sense of self and so she spends her whole life trying to figure out who she is; while being caught between two opposing worlds. In the end, she winds up wounded and lost and wailing over some violation that lies at the center of her art.

I would have to say my favourite story in the latter half of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents was “The Drum”. I felt Alvarez’s use of the kitten as a metaphor for the García girls quite wonderful. As scholar William Luis has put it “like the kitten, Yolanda was also uprooted from her nest, her childhood (perhaps seven years too early) in the Dominican Republic. And the drum beats meant to disguise the meows of the kitten represent a natural language and an imposed one, which in the years to come would cover her accent” (Luis 847). I thought it was very significant that Alvarez chose to end with this story, as it painted such a perfect picture of the pain and trauma of being uprooted from everything one has ever known and flung into a confusing and foreign environment.

The change in narrative voice near the end of the novel from third person to first person is a significant stylistic technique. There is a definite distance between narrator and reader in the instance of third person narration. First person narration, however, is a much more personal and intimate representation of events and thus the transition allows for the reader to feel a much stronger connection with the girls. The sentiments expressed are therefore much more effectively communicated to the reader and the sense of pain and bewilderment is emphasized stylistcally.

So I just finished the book, and I’m glad to finally find a book in its entirety that I will not be selling back. I love how the historical context of it was so accurate and the fact that we got to follow their impact on real people instead of just reading about it in a history book. I found it really interesting how the tale was told from the future to the past, and I wonder why that was deemed necesary by Alvarez? Why did she feel the need to tell her story this way when it wouldn’ve been just as effective to tell it chronologically? My belief is that this way, the reader can see exactly the roots that later influenced the girls to act the way they did and become who they did in society. Honestly, I’m going to need to read the book again from the start (or rather the end) to be able to fully understand it. The lines of who is who and what happens when are somewhat blurred (and I wonder is this was the desired effect). Much like the mother would dress her girls in the same colour always and call them all by the same nickname, I found their personality boundaries somewhat blurred as well. They all seem like distinct people when you are reading their own stories, but looking back I can’t exactly remember them as different people. It seems like if they are the same sister, going through differnt but similar issues (sorry my computer just erased what I had writtenf rom now on, so i’m going to try to remember what I had said..gah).
Also, I wonder about the haitian cook. It seems weird to me that she would want to be in a coffin every night just to become acustomed to being in that environment when she dies. I hadn’t perceived haitian people as very “voodoo” until now, so i find it very compelling to learn more about what exactly they believe in.
Alvarez definetly puts a lot of herself and her life in this book. (I’m doing my wikipedia on her). Right now if anybody were to ask me that cliche question of who I’d like to have lunch with, anybody dead or alive, I’d have to say Alvarez. I’d be curious to know just how much she actually embellished in the story for the sake of a commercial book, or how much is actually true (such as the haitian cook, the “proving you are a girl”, and the art lesson story)
Something that was mentioned in class right before we were dismissed was what we though the parents could’ve possibly done to make 50% of their girls go crazy. I dont think it’s the parents fault at all. It is true that we are much influenced by our lives at home, however, the parents only moved the girls for their own protection. I dont think it was a choice as much of a necessity: they probably woudn’t have been alive had they stayed. The problems that led the girls to go crazy, consequentially, were thsoe of adjusting to a new life and being pulled like rag dolls from one culture to the other. I believe we all go through issues in our lives, and it’s unfair to blame the parents for something that they only did with good intentions when any of us could go mad from what they faced, and we all face every day regardless of having their exact experiences. We all have the need to belong and problems that come with it, therefore I think examining the source of their madness is somewhat insensitive to the people we are to blame.
Looking forward to discussing this book for another week.

What struck me most about the second half of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents was the amount of people who actually contributed to the lives of these girls. It seemed to cement that old saying that “it takes a village to raise a child”, although in this case perhaps the whole Dominican Republic was in on it!

In pondering the reverse chronological order of the book, apart from the chapters actually being published for the first time out of order (which could be another clue to their innovation), I would also like to think that this set-up is to give us a view of the girls’ adult, ‘developed’ personalities, and then bring us back to the points in time that helped shape them into who they have become. I enjoyed this style, as the technique isn’t all that common. It made me feel like a psychiatrist with each girl on my couch recounting their life stories and I had to be the one that decided which experience had affected them in which way. On this note, I found that many of the girls saw the world through the lens of their hobbies. Yoyo’s chapters were founded by a much more poetic voice which showed how her entire life was governed by this talent for words which she has. Sandi, as the early artist in the family, speaks of the sky as a ”cloudy canvas” (page 245). It was refreshing how the language the girls used in describing their lives stemmed from their varied talents.

In Sandi’s chapter ‘Floor Show’, the truth of how a nice person can make all the difference to a foreigner shone through. Although due to Mrs. Fannings crazy antics this may not be what we are supposed to take away from this chapter, I still felt humbled by the presence of someone (Mr. Fanning) who would help this family enjoy a dinner out of the house while they were in dire straits. In my travels I have found the most memorable moments come from when a native of the country helps me out: a ride to the next town, extra money, directions, ANYTHING!!! Also, when I travelled in South America, one dollar could go a long way. So although I am not an immigrant as the Garcías are in the book, I feel their powerlessness when I return to a first-world country and a buck can’t even get you a bus ticket. How terrible it would be to leave your home country as a well-off family to come to an unforgiving city where you have trouble making ends meet.

I really wish that Alvarez had written the speaking on the island IN SPANISH!! I found it hard to relate to Mamita when she yells, supposedly in Spanish, “Damn it!…You all say he pees holy water, well he’s been peeing it all right!” I guess I just feel like such an outburst should be written in the mother tongue; but with the majority of the book being in English, it is more inviting to a larger English-speaking audience…which is perhaps whom Alvarez is trying to reach. Although I must say, I love the christmas carol on page 264 which goes: “A Santa Claus le gusta el vino, A Santa Claus le gusta el ron…” Those Dominican Santas sure know how to party! 😉