Garcia Girls Final Essay

            In the book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, four girls and their parents move from the Dominican Republic to the United States after their father was forced to flee from the Dominican Republic’s government.

This book is formatted from the most recent times to more distant times. It is separated into three parts and in each part, there are vignettes. These vignettes are written to specifically describe one sister, all four sisters, or the whole family’s experiences.

            Julia Alvarez includes a lot of her own experiences in her book through one of the daughter’s, Yolanda. The whole Garcia family is based off of Alvarez’s own experiences and family. In the book, the Garcia’s move from the Dominican Republic to the U.S, but Alvarez gave no specific detail on why. In her life, Alvarez’s family fled from the Dominican Republic because her father was caught up in a plan to overthrow the dictator and her family was forced to be on the run.

            This whole book talks about change that the family has to go through. Mostly, Alvarez talks about the change that her character, Yolanda, goes through. The first part of the book shows Yolanda when she is the oldest. The very first vignette talks about how Yolanda wants to go back to the Dominican Republic because of the experiences she’s had in America. Part I of the book describes Yolanda as a woman who wasn’t afraid of anything. She shows her problems with dedication and relationships in the vignette Joe. In this vignette, Yolanda has an affair with her therapist while still married to her husband, John. She describes that Yolanda is continuously leading John on, but when he gets the point and does something that he thinks she wants, she pushes him away and is disgusted.

 In the vignette after that, The Rudy Elmenhurst Story, Alvarez shows Yolanda’s true turning point from her old, religious, innocent self into what she is in Joe. In this vignette, Yolanda meets a boy by the name of Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third in her first English class. Rudolf, known as Rudy in the story, grabs the attention of the innocent Yolanda. As Yolanda gets more and more obsessed with the dangers and excitement that Rudy brings to her life, the more Rudy pressures Yolanda to have sex with him, but the more he presses on, the more Yolanda resists. Rudy’s pressuring includes a lot of verbal abuse about how Yolanda was too religious:

“You know…I thought you’d be hot-blooded, being Spanish and all, and that under all the Catholic bullshit, you’d be really free, instead of all hung up like these cotillion chicks from prep schools. But Jesus, you’re worse than a fucking Puritan.” (99)

Soon enough after Rudy said this, he gives up on trying to get Yolanda to have sex with him and leaves her for a girl who is willing to give him what he wants. As proven, in this vignette, Yolanda starts out as a very innocent and religious girl, but in the vignette before that, Joe, Yolanda is cheating on her own husband. In between those two vignettes, there is something that has been left unsaid by Julia Alvarez, perhaps written in one of her other books. Yet, it doesn’t take much to see that not only does Yolanda change, but she changes so much that she goes from a proper lady who just wants to explore to a messed up slutty woman who cheats on her husband. I think that Yolanda is forced to change herself and this was the biggest turning point to her change in attitude and personality to which she looked at life in America. Because this vignette is written after the fact, Yolanda describe that this is just another relationship in college. In some way she describes her naivety and her looking down at herself from how she was in college.

“That’s the way I remember relationships starting in college – those obsessive marathon beginnings. It was hard to go back to your little dorm room and do your homework after having been so absorbed in someone else.” (92).

In this quote, Yolanda is ridiculing her own character and how she used to be. Because Yolanda is a direct reflection of Julia Alvarez herself, this quote shows how much Alvarez has grown from this vignette, not only the beginning of the book, but to how she was when she wrote this book. It shows that although she was a very naive girl, she was not afraid to admit it now, but still a little earlier on in her life, she looked down on how much she had done.

To clarify what I meant in the last paragraph, there are three time periods in every vignette: the time that is being talked about, the time that the character is telling the story and the time that Alvarez actually writes this book. All these times tell how much Alvarez has grown. For example, the time that The Rudy Elmenhurst Story occurred, Yolanda was a innocent girl. When Yolanda is telling this story, it is later on in her life and she’s been through more experiences and has turned into a whole new person who doesn’t believe in the morals she used to. When Alvarez writes this vignette, because of the paradox between Yolanda and her, Alvarez shows that now, her head is cleared and that she somewhat regrets the things she ad done and brings herself to admit her feelings and mistakes.

All in all, this book was very good. From the start, it was confusing, but once I finished the whole book, everything fit together. Part I was confusing because there was so much going on and the characters were not built, but started out from whole and then teared down to scratch. In Part II, it was the most clear because I knew what was going on. In Part III, it was even more confusing because of the fuzzy memories that each of the characters experienced. The timing of the book reflects on the clarity of each section. But when I read all of it, it became very clear to me, the genius of Julia Alvarez’s book. It was a very good book that showed that hardships of Julia’s family and her experiences as an immigrant to the US from the Dominican Republic.