How the García Girls Lost Their Accents 149dream seems to have worked against the four García
“girls,” rather than helped them.
What the four García women have learned
is that there are inconsistencies in the American
dream. As Sandra learns early on, looking like an
American does not mean that you are accepted as
one. “Being pretty, she [Sandra] would not have to
go back where she came from. Pretty spoke both
languages. Pretty belonged in this country.. .” This
is despite Sandra’s own experiences with children at
school who shout at her, “Spics! Go back to where
you came from!” The women’s ability to attain the
American dream is not enough to make them feel
“American.” Emphasizing just how foreign the girls
feel, upon the family’s first anniversary in the United
States, Carla wishes that they be allowed to return to
the Dominican Republic.
The one thing that gives Carla solace in this
foreign land is her family, including those she left
behind on the island. When she recalls those chil-
dren who chase her, screaming that she “Go back!
Go back!,” she recites to herself “the names of her
own sisters, for all those she wanted God to espe-
cially care for, here and back home. The seemingly
endless list of familiar names would coax her back to
sleep with a feeling of safety, of a world still peopled
by those who love her.”
The attainment of the American dream, there-
fore, has nothing to do with material objects that
can be photographed. Rather, the women must learn
to own themselves and their culture, even as it might
be rejected by “real Americans.”
Nancy Cardona
Gender in How the García Girls Lost Their
Accents
Julia Alvarez’s novel describes the lives of four
Dominican daughters of a man who escaped the
Trujillo regime to relocate in the United States.
While they are all “strong” women in their own
rights, each one struggles with how to be a “good”
woman. Over the course of the novel, Alvarez
describes two major obstacles that these women
struggle with as they grow up: First, how do they
become American women when they are foreigners,
and second, how do they balance the values with
which they have been raised and their desires to be
“American” women?
One of the first major struggles that the García
women must confront is their status as “outsiders”
as they are born in the Dominican Republic and yet
are raised in the United States. Sandra, the second-
born daughter, struggles with this while in graduate
school. Shortly after the family arrives in the United
States, they go out to dinner with another family
that is helping them. She stops in the bathroom to
look at herself in the mirror and observes that “she
was surprised to find a pretty girl looking back at
her. It was a girl who could pass as American, with
soft blue eyes and fair skin.. .” (emphasis added).
Here, Sandra begins to understand the importance
of looking like an American. She believes that “look-
ing” American is a key to being accepted as one.
However, this initial understanding betrays her
when she is in graduate school and innocently goes
on a diet because she wants to “look like those twiggy
models. She was a looker, that one.” Sandra’s desire
to emulate the American epitome of beauty, in this
case a physically thin woman, becomes a struggle for
her mental stability. Instead of succeeding with the
diet and becoming a confident, self-assured woman,
Sandra has a nervous breakdown, believing that she
is slowly devolving and will become a monkey. Her
inability to truly embody this beauty ideal leads to
her mental collapse.
The second struggle is related to the first. Even
as the four García women may consider themselves
to be wholly American women, how do others
perceive them? This theme is explored in Yolanda’s
story. At several junctures in the novel, she must
contend with others’ perceptions of her as a Latina
in terms of her sexuality and the reality of how she
sees herself. As her college boyfriend, Rudy Elm-
hurst, says, he expects her to “be all hot-blooded,
being Spanish and all, and that.... [Y ]ou’d be really
free, instead of all hung up.... [Y ]ou’re worse than
a... Puritan.” Rudy’s expectations of Yolanda have
more to do with his own stereotypes about Latinas
than about who Yolanda is. Yolanda, like many
college-age people, is torn between the woman she
wishes to become (a liberated woman who makes
decisions for herself ) versus the woman she has been