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How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents
Julia Alvarez New York : Plume Books (1991), 290 pages.
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in... ("The Death of the Hired Man" by Robert Frost).
For immigrants who must abandon their families and friends, home becomes a train station, a midpoint between two solitudes. Caught between worlds, these migrants long for one world, while knowing they must grow old in another. Often, only through dreams and imagination can the land of their birth be revisited. Unburdened with daily problems or antagonisms, that former world exists as a perfect foil to the imperfections endured everyday in a strange new place. Julia Alvarez, in her book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, explores the limbo of displacement faced by four sisters, Carla, Yolanda, Sandra and Sophia (Fifi) Garcia.
In 1960, the Garcia family fled the repressive Trujillo reign in the Dominican Republic when their father was identified by the government as a threat to the safety of the country's welfare and to its dictator. Alvarez's fifteen connected short stories are the chronicles of the Garcia girls, who in 1980 admit to having lead "turbulent lives" in the United States. Carla, Yolanda, Sandra, and Fifi share episodes from their privileged and protected childhood in the Dominican Republic.
Recalling or remembering is a painful process since it mixes the joy of revisitation with the sorrow of loss. Julia Alvarez presents this pain and reveals the emotional complexity of living in one country while longing for the other. The first story is narrated by Yolanda Garcia, nicknamed "Yoyo" or "Yo." In Spanish, "yo" means "I," and it is through Yo that Julia Alvarez expresses herself. The reader feels the authenticity of the poignant voice of a woman who is hoping to come to terms with her own restless longings, her own cravings for a lost golden childhood.
Now "the American girl," Yo is unmindful of the strict traditional ways imposed on females in the Dominican Republic. She is determined to assert her independence. Although Yolanda has never had to bend to the expected protocol for a Latin American woman, she knows what is expected of a woman in this country....