First Impressions Review: How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez
This book reminds me somewhat of a Dominican ‘Little Women’. It follows the four Garcia sisters - but focuses the most on Yolanda (‘Yo’ or ‘Joe’), a tomboy with a talent for writing – as they try to figure out who they are and how they fit in the world following their family’s exile. The writing is evocative, and anyone who has Latin American family or friends will probably recognize the personal dynamics and the contrasts between North American and Latin American life that are depicted here. The environments are vividly described as well. By the 16th page I was craving guavas, and by the middle remembering descriptions of my grandmother’s first reaction to snow.
The first chapter is called ‘Antojos’, a word that is tricky to translate but means something like “a craving of the heart”. Yolanda is visiting the island for the first time in years, and she “sees herself as they will, shabby in a black cotton skirt and jersey top, sandals on her feet, her wild black hair held back with a headband. Like a missionary, her cousins will say1.” But for all that she is seemingly Americanized, Yo is considering going back. We never find out if she does, which was a little disappointing, but that is partly due to the structure of the book. Each of the three sections steps backward in time, from the grown-up sisters, to their experiences as young immigrants with culture shock and discrimination, to their childhood on the island under the shadow of a dictatorship. This gives the book an ending which feels unsettling and unfinished but not at all unsatisfying.
1. That made me smile, as I recalled my American mother getting mistaken for a missionary when going to do fieldwork in Brazil due to her practical clothing, and my own mixed relationship to cross-cultural fashion standards!
The girls and their parents roughly match the generations of my father and grandmother, and that is where the familiarity comes from for me - not exactly, but in echoes2. The father had taken part in a failed plot against the dictator, which is why they had to flee. Both Papi and Mami exhibit a common pattern in immigrant parents: They want their children to have a better and safer life and to succeed in their new country, but they are also disturbed when they seem to be assimilating too much, to be at risk of losing their cultural identity. The mother, Laura, is a little more open to change. When the girls are young she sketches inventions – though she is discouraged when her suitcase on wheels idea start showing up in advertisements, a Yankee already having thought of it and gotten it made before she could make a start. She warmly encourages Yo’s writing, even the school speech that her father rips up for being too disrespectful. In this, she reminds me of my Abuelita, who despite having inherited a lot of traditional, conservative ideas was at the same time inventive and open to new ones3.
2. Like the nickname Cuquita, which I always thought my Abuelita had made up out of one of my mom’s many food-based nicknames for me (‘Cookie’). But now I suspect it was the other way around!
3. As illustrated by her adopting Southern black-eyed peas as a lucky New Year’s dish but cooking them like black beans, with the addition of cinnamon as suggested by an Iranian neighbor. Or giving advice like so: “Remember, absolutely no sex before marriage. [Thoughtful pause] Although…it does help if at least one of you knows what they’re doing!”
The daughters run into a lot of issues that are exacerbated by their cultural limbo. Carla gets bullied by American boys, particularly as she enters puberty4. Sofia married her German lover, which provokes an odd dichotomy of responses in her father: he likes Otto, and he is proud of his grandson when he is born - almost obnoxiously so, since he already has a granddaughter! - but he didn’t really talk to Sofia for years, and their relationship is still rocky. Both Yo and her sister Sandi suffer from mental illness, which is interestingly illustrated in Yo’s case by the way the writing changes, becoming more fluid and dream-lie:
“The nurse rubbed a tiny cloud on her arm. ‘Please, honey, don’t cry,’ her mother pleaded with her… ‘Tears, tears,’ Joe said, reciting again, ‘tears from the depths of some profound despair.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ the doctor said, coaching the alarmed parents. ‘It’s just a poem.’ ‘But men die daily for lack of what is found there,’ Yo quoted and misquoted, drowning in the flooded streams of her consciousness.”
Carla, on the other hand, becomes a therapist herself, and turns hers skills on her sisters in ways they find intensely annoying.
4. The taunt of “monkey legs” unearthed a memory of similar insults. I’m sure the other Midwestern girls were growing hair on their legs at the same time, but black hair shows up more prominently, and children are cruel.
Yo in particular struggles with the dichotomy in expectations of sexuality, the Catholic lessons she’d grown up with clashing with the free-love expectations of the ‘60s. What she wants is romance, but she’s not getting it, at least not with her first serious boyfriend in college. To make matters more awkward: “He had told [his parents] that he was seeing ‘a Spanish girl’…they said that should be interesting for him to find out about people from other cultures. It bothered me that they should treat me like a geography lesson for their son.” But it’s an issue for all of them in one way or another. Fifi, the youngest, gets shipped back to the island when their parents find a baggie of marijuana. But she ends up nearly getting into much more trouble when she takes up with a distant cousin, Manuel, who bosses her around and seems very likely to get her pregnant (because of course that’s more likely to happen where you can’t easily get contraception!). So the other sisters stage their own little revolution to make sure she gets sent back to New York!
Overall recommendation: The family’s stories don’t get tied up in a neat bow at the end, especially since the last chapter happens about 20 years before the first, so if you need a conclusive ending this might not be the book for you. But if you like exploring what made a person the way they are, and sinking deep into a poetic, non-linear, emotional exploration of culture and identity, you would probably like this a lot.
