How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Reading How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents has been exhilarating, and a necessary balance to the mainly male-centered works of Junot Diaz. In Alvarez's well-known novel, we see an immigrant narrative of a family forced to choose emigration because of the Trujillo regime's constant presence and attempts to kill the patriarch of the family, Don Carlos. Thus, like so much of immigrant literature, the focus of the novel is on identity and finding meaning in the 'new land.' However, the novel does more than explore the contours of Dominican-American identity. Issues of gender, race, color, language, patriarchy, and sexuality are relevant in all sections of the novel. Moreover, it's structured in an intriguing fashion: it moves backwards in time chronologically, thereby tracing the troubled lives of the four Garcia girls from their adult years in the United States back to their childhood in the Dominican Republic, a period where Trujillo's secret police sought and killed some of their relatives.

As in Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life, the shadow of Trujillo and the unequal power distribution of his regime lurks behind the scenes, though Trujillo never appears as a character (except one allusion to his daughter being a neighbor of the family compound). Somehow, the dictator manages to exert an influence that begins to affect everyone's behavior, including the children (the harrowing scene where two secret police (guardias) show up at the house for Don Carlos is an excellent example). And, likewise, aspects of the patriarchal culture of the upper-class family the four girls descend from mirror that dictatorship: male heirs were favored, males were given more freedom, women were to abstain from sex until marriage, etc. In addition to the widespread misogyny and sexism that characterized Trujillo's regime (and many families of the Dominican Republic), Sofia's experience with an illegitimate cousin, Manuel, prove how women are subordinated in very real ways by a culture of machismo (cousin Mundin is another outstanding example of Dominican masculinity being cultivated in horribly sexist ways, since he plays the role of catalyst in the loss of innocence of his cousins, Yoyo and Sofia). Clearly, a female-centered narrative such as this novel provides a fascinating way to study the effects of gender and sexism on maintaining the dictatorship, as well as the conflicts the family faces in the US as the daughters mature and embrace their sexuality and 'liberation' in ways their parents do not support.

Issues of race, color, and xenophobia in the Dominican Republic and the US also shape the novel. The family faces racism in New York (being called spics by white children and adults), poverty (Don Carlos struggles to get his medical license and find work when the family first leaves the Dominican Republic after narrowly escaping capture by Trujillo's men), and alienation. Simultaneously, while becoming victims of US white racism (including from the more 'liberal' types like a college boyfriend of Yolanda's who assumes 'Latin' women are easy and whose parents believe the Dominican would be like a geography lesson for their boy, an intersectional example of racism and sexism), strict class and race boundaries within the Garcia family's elite background dictate a type of condescension and racism towards the servants and those of Haitian descent. Thus, as Dominican-Americans, regardless of color, face racism and xenophobia in the Diaspora, Dominicans in the Island perpetuate another form of oppression against each other and Dominicans of Haitian descent.

 For instance, Chucha, a Vodouizan survivor of them 1937 massacres ordered by Trujillo (again, Trujillo is omnipresent in this novel), taken in by the generous grandparents of the girls, is looked down upon by the servants in the household because of her 'blue-black' color and descent, as well as being a practitioner of Vodou (entitled 'voodoo' in Alvarez's novel). Despite loyally serving the family since 1937, she is looked down upon by other similarly lower-class, dark-skinned Dominicans (the skin color or hair texture of the servants makes it quite obvious they are Afro-Dominican, being described as 'black' like Nivea or Chucha, dark-brown like Haitian-descended Pila, and having kinky hair, like Gladys. In this case, one can see how classism, racism, colorism, and xenophobia influence the Dominican and Dominican-American self-conceptualized identity. Even in the Garcia family, Laura is constantly bringing up their Swedish descent, her pride in conquistador ancestors, and praising the light skin and blue eyes of one of the daughters. This slavish devotion to white skin and privilege obscures the racial complexity and need for unity among Dominicans, especially in a dictatorship that based so much of its power on demonization and 'de-Haitianization' of the border with Haiti.

Perhaps this is why the two servants of Haitian descent play such prominent role in the early experiences of the Garcia girls before leaving for New York. They are a constant reminder of the classism, colorism, sexism, xenophobia, and immigrant experience the Garcias will undergo in what Chucha refers to as a land of the unliving, white zombies. Indeed, Chucha even prays for the girls on their last day 'home,' showing them the very same statue or 'talisman-like' figure that appears to be crying, the very same 'paquet congo' and her Vodou faith that sustained her all these years, losing contact with her family in Haiti and barely escaping death at the hands of a Trujillo-sanctioned massacre. The irony of this must not be lost, since the Garcia family was perilously close to a similar end under the same dictator. Pila, on the other hand, introduces Yoyo, or, Yolanda, into the coal shed where her innocence and the beginning of her longing for 'home,' take shape. If Pila's story of losing her eye and Yoyo's fears of the black cat (which manifest in nightmares after she flings the kitten out the window and steals it from the shed) symbolize her longing for home, then these women of Haitian descent, like the Garcia girls in the US, will continually struggle with locating 'home,' their identity. In fact, to make things worse for Pila, she disappears after stealing from the Garcia family, only to be brought to justice swiftly because of what I presume to be vitiligo, which marks her like Cain, just as skin color and national origin mark the Garcias in New York.

Unfortunately, this novel would have been better off focusing entirely on Yolanda than the entire family. Maybe if published as separate but interconnected short stories, the novel's structure would have been less jarring, but this is certainly a powerful read. The prose is simple and direct, the metaphorical language accessible, and the character of Yolanda very strong. Due to a lack of similar development for the other sisters, one cannot help but disinterested in some parts of the novel, but the working backwards chronologically worked quite well. It allows one to see, as Diaz observed in his famous novel, how Trujillo lives on in the minds, hearts, and behavior of Dominicans in the Diaspora, with devastating results for women. Their horrendous experiences with abusive, sexist, and racist US men, in conjunction with the struggle of assimilation, language barriers, intra-family squabbles, and the plethora of issues plaguing the Dominican Republic, demonstrate how everyone in the family is capable of becoming a little 'Trujillo,' capable of acts of great malice and abuse of power.