How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Content Warning: This section of the guide reproduces racial slurs used in the source text only in quotations. This section of the guide also discusses sexual taboos, including incest and sexual relations between adults and minors.

“There have been too many stops on the road of the last twenty-nine years since her family left this island behind. She and her sisters have led such turbulent lives—so many husbands, homes, jobs, wrong turns among them. But look at her cousins, women with households and authority in their voices. Let this turn out to be my home.”

In the novel’s present, Yolanda is back at the Garcia compound in the Dominican Republic. She considers the cultural differences between the lives her cousins live in the Dominican Republic and her life in the United States. She is beginning to wonder if a life of tradition might have been better than the life of freedom they live in the United States.

“They were passionate women, but their devotions were like roots; they were sunk into the past towards the old man.”

The sisters’ husbands are upset that their father-in-law only wants his daughters to come to his birthday parties and that they are not invited. They lament the devotion the girls have to their father and to their roots. This sentiment expresses a key theme in the novel, the pull between tradition and freedom, between past and future.

“The daughters could almost hear his thoughts inside their own heads. He, who had paid to straighten their teeth and smooth the accent out of their English in expensive schools, he was nothing to them now. Everyone in this room would survive him, even the silly men in the band who seemed like boys—imagine making a living out of playing birthday songs! How could they ever earn enough money to give their daughters pretty clothes and send them to Europe during the summers so they wouldn’t get bored? Where were the world’s men anymore?”

These words reveal some of Carlos’s strongest values and fears. He wants to provide for his daughters, but he also wants their respect. The culture they come from is patriarchal, but things are different in America in the latter part of the 20th century. This world is not one that values him in the same way that his previous world did. This passage also refers to the novel’s title, highlighting that Carlos himself played a key role in his daughters’ assimilation into American culture, which includes losing their accents.