50 pages • 1 hour read
Julia AlvarezHow the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “A Regular Revolution”
The girls want to return to the Dominican Republic, but after Carlos returns home briefly and revolution breaks out, their father says they are staying in the United States. The Garcia girls do not believe that they are getting the best the United States has to offer, because unlike their peers, they still have to follow the strict Island rules for behavior and do not have nice things. Their mother decides to send them to boarding school because she wants them to meet those whom she considers the right kind of people, but the girls find out that these people do not want them around. Students at the boarding school assume the Garcia girls are the offspring of a wealthy dictator somewhere else in the world. The girls therefore learn American customs and learn to forge their mother’s signature on permission slips for social events: “We began to develop a taste for the American teenage good life” (108). As they begin to reject the ways of the Island, Laura and Carlos decide to send the girls back to the Dominican Republic every summer so they do not lose their ways. The four girls take turns upsetting their parents by the time the oldest ones are in college, and they develop a code and a system to subvert their parents that they believe is akin to the one their father used to subvert the government.
The night before the girls are to leave for their last forced summer on the Island, they are all sitting around when Fifi holds up a bag of marijuana. As the girls hear their mother coming, she tosses it behind a bookcase, and the four girls forget about it. A few weeks later, they learn that their mother is coming to the Island to talk to them, but they do not know why. They learn that their mother discovered the marijuana, and all four girls take the blame and are ready to be punished when Fifi confesses that she is the one who brought it into the home. Fifi is told she can either stay on the Island for a year or return and go to a local Catholic school while the other three sisters return to their boarding schools. Fifi chooses the Island.
When the girls reunite after Fifi has spent time on the Island, her sisters are horrified to learn that she has fully embraced the Island look, calling her, “A Spanish-American Princess” (118). They worry that if their parents believe Fifi has repatriated, they will force them all to go back to the Island. They are dismayed because Fifi had always been so free and rebellious. Now, she is dating their cousin, Manuel Gustavo, a secret cousin born of their father’s brother’s mistress.
The sisters find themselves waiting on Manuel as if they had never had the liberated experiences they had in the United States. Fifi becomes upset, however, at the attention they give her boyfriend. The girls back off, but they realize that their feisty sister listens to the commands of Manuel. He gets upset when she reads. When the two lovers argue, the sisters remind her that she is a free spirit, but she eventually calls Manuel and apologizes. The sisters confront Manuel, and he maintains that it is the man who is supposed to have control in a relationship. They plan to win their sister back.
In the evenings, the sisters and the other young people go out. Carla is Fifi’s chaperone, but once they are away from the adults, Carla joins the other young people while Manuel and Fifi spend time alone. Fifi worries because Manuel will not wear a condom, and she cannot access other forms of birth control. The sisters insist that she not have sex because then she will be forced to marry Manuel immediately. They threaten to tell the adults if she does have sex. One night, Mundín takes the young people to a motel known as a meeting place for sex workers. The young people all joke about having had sex before, but Mundín is upset when he learns that his sister, Lucinda, has had sex before. While they are leaving, they see Fifi and Manuel, but Mundín refuses the sisters’ insistence that they go and get Fifi before she gets pregnant.
The sisters realize that she will not leave the Island with them, so they develop a plan, or a revolution, as they term it. Through careful maneuvering, they make it so that after Manuel and Fifi break away from the crowd, the rest leave, and the two lovers are forced to come back to the family compound by themselves, unescorted. That night, Manuel and Fifi argue because he thinks her clothes are too revealing. The sisters are frustrated with Mundín, who acts like them in America but acts “macho” on the Island, rubbing his male advantages in their face.
People back at the compound are upset when Fifi and Manuel do not arrive back home with the others. Tia Carmen blames their behavior on the girls’ time in America, while Laura reminds her of how long Fifi has been living on the Island. Laura insists that Fifi come back to America with them. Just as the sisters are about to leave the Island, they start to feel sad, and the first-person plural narrator describes them as being like confined baby monkeys in an experiment who will not leave their cages, even when free to do so.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Mother of Invention”
As the Garcias first arrive in the United States, Laura Garcia enjoys attempting to invent things. She comes up with many different ideas. In the evenings, Yoyo writes, and her mother tells her that she will buy her a typewriter when she makes money with her inventions.
The girls do not generally support their mother’s inventions. There is a cultural divide between the parents and daughters in the Garcia family, as the girls want to be more American, and the parents do not want them to. One day, the girls refuse to go to school anymore, telling their mother it is dangerous because people throw things at them. They get frustrated because she spends her time working on them rather than guiding them on fitting into this new world. The girls’ mother gets upset when she learns that the wheeled suitcase she wanted to invent have been invented by an American. She feels like she will never succeed. She changes her focus to her husband’s business instead.
When Yoyo is in seventh grade, she is chosen to give a speech at Teacher’s Day. She works hard and crafts what she believes is a wonderful speech after she reads Walt Whitman’s words, “I celebrate myself and sing myself.” After writing her speech, Yoyo believes that her writing finally sounds like herself. Her mother tells her she will type it out for her.
Despite Carlos’s questioning of whether they should return to the Island, Laura is happy where she is because she has some control in the United States. When Yoyo reads the speech to her father, he is livid, believing that her words about celebrating herself are boastful. He tells her that her words are insubordinate, and he refuses to allow her to read it. He is upset when Laura takes Yoyo’s side, thinking that he may one day be surrounded by “independent American women,” and he rips up the paper (146). Both mother and daughter are distraught. Yoyo calls her father Chapita and then runs into her room and locks the door so that he cannot get at her. Yolanda writes a new speech that goes over well, and her father buys her an electric typewriter. Her mother no longer invents and passes that baton onto Yoyo and her writing.
Part 2, Chapters 6-7 Analysis
These chapters highlight the Garcia parents’ difficult task maintaining their values and passing them on to their children while also integrating their children into a successful life in America. While Laura attempts to bridge this divide in several ways, she is never as successful as she hopes to be. When she sends the girls to boarding school to expose them to the types of people she wants them to encounter, they begin to learn the ways of American kids and start to break the rules just like the Americans do. Laura has successfully found them friends in the right circles, but her daughters have lost many of the values she tried to teach them in the process. In this way, external assimilation requires the abandonment of their family values and norms.
This struggle between tradition and assimilation comes to a head when Laura finds Fifi’s marijuana. To correct Fifi’s behavior, Laura gives her the option of staying in the Dominican Republic to correct her behavior and reinvigorate her values. Fifi agrees, which her sisters believe is because, as the youngest, she does not remember as much about life on the Island as her sisters do. This reveals that Laura still sees the Dominican Republic as her home and where values are taught: Her daughters’ values have become Americanized, but hers have not.
In many ways, Fifi successfully repatriates in the Dominican Republic. She finds a traditional man, and she is ready to settle down. However, Fifi’s return to Island life is marked by The Oppression of Machismo and Patriarchal Culture as well as her assimilation into the more rebellious American culture. Fifi gives in to Manuel’s pressures for sex, and she repeatedly skirts the supervision regulations the adults set to protect their children from making what they consider to be immoral sexual decisions. Part of Fifi has become repatriated to the ways of the Island, but her choices are nonetheless colored by the independence she enjoyed in America.
The older sisters’ reactions to Fifi’s behavior demonstrate that they have chosen American culture for themselves, and they refuse to let their sister make any other decision. They see the difference between themselves and their cousins in the Dominican Republic more clearly, and they even note the difference in the ways certain cousins act while in America versus in the Dominican Republic. Most notably, they see that Fifi has lost much of her spunk and spirit, allowing herself to be dominated by Manuel. Ironically, they respond to her lack of choice on the Island by taking away her choice of how to proceed with her life. By exposing her sexual behavior and lies to their mother, they take control of the situation, mirroring the dominance they don’t want Manuel to have. In this way, Fifi has little agency over how her life is to proceed, regardless of where she lives.
When the sisters are finally about to leave the Island, instead of feeling free and happy to have Fifi with them, they feel sad. They recognize the nonsensical nature of this feeling because they feel caged in Dominican culture. They do not feel free to explore the world as they wish, and they do not feel equal to their male cousins. They compare themselves to monkeys, who are trapped in cages so long that they do not utilize their freedom once they obtain it. In this way, monkeys represent instincts deeper than rational thought, highlighting that even strong emotional or psychological attachments are not always in a person’s best interests.
The chapter describing Laura’s inventions demonstrates that the Garcia girls have also struggled to extend their desire for independence and autonomy from their mother. They are frustrated by Laura’s inventing because they believe she is taking time away from them. They are upset when men dominate women, but they find it acceptable to dominate their mother’s time. The girls struggle to define who their mother should be: They want her to be a liberated Mom, while also being a constantly attentive Mami. They want their mother to reject her career ambitions, but also to abandon the cultural values of the Dominican Republic that likely informed these ideas. Just as the girls do not know how to navigate living in the world as immigrants, neither does their mother, and Laura’s task is not made any easier by her daughters’ confusion over who they want her to be.
Yoyo’s speech reflects her own inability to figure out who she is, as well as her father’s inability to allow his daughter to move freely in the American world. It is not until after Yoyo reads and paraphrases Walt Whitman that she feels like she sounds like herself. She is not actually using her own words or her own ideas, however. As such, she is presenting herself as she wishes she were. Her father is repulsed by this new version of her because it rejects the mores held in Dominican society. He rejects her for the ways in which she is becoming more American, and in her insult of him, she rejects him for the ways she sees him acting Dominican.
The story about the speech ends with a statement about how Laura no longer tries to invent things because she trusts that her daughter will instead make a mark with her words. This demonstrates how assimilation into a culture often takes multiple generations, and it sometimes takes generations for immigrants to become financially successful in a new country. Laura did her best to make her mark on American culture through her inventions, but she never succeeded. Instead, she started to put her efforts into her husband’s business. She accepts this because while she realizes that the American Dream may not be fully available to her, it will be more available to her daughters. This echoes back to an earlier chapter, later in life, when Laura has a hard time when Yoyo stops writing. She needs Yoyo to continue her dream and to make a mark for their family in a way that she cannot.
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