How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents #2

After reading the second part of “How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents” by Julia Alvarez, I’ve noticed that how the book is organized is becoming less of an issue for me, therefore putting the context of the book more into focus.  

As we go further back into the past of the four Garcia girls, we begin to make sense of situations in the beginning of the book that was confusing. A lot of the situations that the Garcia girls are dealing with in the beginning of their immigration to America speak of their troubles and how hard it was for them to adapt to American life and how much they disliked it. But when we compare that to the beginning of the story and part one of the stories, we learned that it was hard restoring the Dominican Republic cultures and values within them and getting them out of the American culture that was destroying some of them (we learn that two of the sisters end up in hospitals and are suffering mental breakdowns).

One interesting theme that was brought up in Mr. Sutherland’s class today during discussion was that as the four girls move farther apart from their cultures and into American life, they began to lose their innocence. In this book, the Dominican Republic culture represented the innocence and as they begin to adapt to American culture, this innocence was disappearing. This can be exemplified in one of the vignettes, “A Regular Revolution”, in which the four girls are caught doing stuff that was deeply influenced by their time in America and its culture. What they were caught doing was smoking marijuana, which was illegal back then as well, and also one of the sisters was wearing a tampon, something that seemed disapproved of by Carlos and Laura. These practices could have been prevented, if they stayed in the Dominican Republic, protecting their cultures.