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 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Trespass”
Carla attends a different Catholic school than her sisters do, a year into their time in America, because the school the younger kids are at does not have any openings in seventh grade. Laura Garcia believes that public schools are places for “delinquents” and does not like that they teach evolution there. While at school, Carla is picked on by boys who throw stones at her in places where bruises will not be left. One day, one of the boys pulls up her shirt and comments on her lack of breasts. This brings her shame, which she already feels over her changing body. This change is occurring alongside her change from Dominican Republican to American. It is hard for her to be in a family of four girls where there is very little room for individuation.
The next day when she is walking to school, a man in a car summons her. When she gets to the car, she notices that the man is naked from the waist down. He tries to get her into the car, and she cannot speak, but she does run away. Laura calls the police, but the girls are afraid of the police because they are the ones they escaped back on the Island. The police insist on talking to Carla, and the police officer gets frustrated when she does not understand all the words they use. Her education has not given her the words she needs to describe what she saw the man doing. Carla is afraid that the boys will taunt her if her picture ends up in the paper, and she also wonders if she can tell the officers about the boys at school. Her mother starts to walk her to school, and the boys begin to leave her alone, likely thinking she told her mother about them. She continues to dream about the boys, and she falls asleep at nights praying for the people that she knows, feeling safe in a world “peopled by those who love her” (165).
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Snow”
During Yolanda’s first year in the United States, she is in fourth grade when her teacher tells them about the Cuban Missile Crisis. The students say rosaries and practice air raid drills, learning about radiation. When Yolanda sees something white falling from the sky one day, she screams that a bomb has gone off, but the teacher laughs and explains that what she sees is snow.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Floor Show”
Some days, Sandi wishes she could escape her world, where she is the second of four sisters. The family is planning a meal at a restaurant with the Fannings, who were instrumental in getting the Garcia family to safety in the United States. The Garcias have only been in America for three months. The Garcias’s downstairs neighbor constantly complains about their noise and the smell of their food. They call this woman La Bruja, and she stops them one day and calls them “spics.” Back home, one of their uncles has been jailed, and at least one may be dead, and in the United States, their father cannot get a medical license. Sandi wonders if the Fannings might adopt her if she makes a good impression.
In the cab, Sandi realizes that she misses the special attention they received back home as de la Torre-Garcia girls. Everybody cared about their well-being, but that is not the case in America. At the restaurant, Fifi asks for a Coke even though their mother has already told them not to, and her father urges her mother to allow it. In America, their mother is the leader because her American education and lack of a heavy accent give her more authority. Mrs. Fanning drinks throughout the night, and when she excuses herself to go to the bathroom, Papi and Sandi go along. Before they enter the bathrooms, Mrs. Fanning kisses Papi.
Sandi looks in the mirror and realizes that she looks pretty. The girls have always been called pretty, but it has always been said in the plural. Papi tells Sandi not to tell anybody about the kiss, but she plans to tell her sisters. She sees a waiter and realizes that he could lean down and kiss her just as Mrs. Fanning did to her father. Sandi sees the Fannings argue, but she also realizes that they are more powerful than her parents are in this country. She thinks about how she could say no to her parents right now just as American children do.
Spanish dancers come on stage, and Sandi is mesmerized by the joy they bring. Suddenly, Mrs. Fanning joins the dancers, and while people cheer, Dr. Fanning is upset by his drunken wife, and Sandi thinks she has “broken the spell” the dancers cast (186). Mrs. Fanning is brought back to the table, and someone comes around with some Barbie dolls and asks the girls if they want them. Sandi knows her mother said they cannot accept any gifts, but she asks her father anyway, and he says yes. Their mother says they may not have the dolls. Sandi, remembering that Mrs. Fanning kissed her father, tells Mrs. Fanning that they want the dolls, and the woman and her husband agree to buy them. Sandi gives Mrs. Fanning a kiss on the cheek with her doll, realizing that both the dancers and the woman know things she is just figuring out.
Part 2, Chapters 8-10 Analysis
Early in the Garcia girls’ time in the United States, Laura desires to protect her daughters and preserve their innocence, but she does not understand the true nature of the difficulties they face. Carla, for instance, is abused and bullied at her Catholic school: She is treated as an outsider, called names, and physically attacked. On top of that, she experiences unwanted sexual overtures on the way to school. Laura does not know about these dangers, so she chooses this school over a nearby public school she dismissed due to rumors about the students there and about what is taught. Had she more fully understood the dangers presented on the way to and at the Catholic school, she may have made a different decision. All of this emphasizes the theme of The Ways Sexuality Breaches Innocence.
Carla is going through two difficult transitions at the same time, and they both serve to make the shame of the other stronger. Her body is maturing sexually, which brings her shame, because she does not want it to change. When the boys at school mock her body, it makes her even more ashamed of who she is becoming. Her physical changes are layered upon the change she is undergoing trying to assimilate into American culture. Physically, she does not feel like she belongs in her new body, and culturally, she does not feel like she belongs in her new society. In this way, she feels a lack of belonging in most places, and this is psychologically disturbing to her.
More significantly, as Carla is stuck between the cultures of girlhood and womanhood and the cultures of America and the Dominican Republic, she does not have the language to protect herself or navigate these worlds. When the police officer wants her to explain what the man in the car did, Carla is unable to do so because no one has taught her the language of anatomy or sexuality. The incident illustrates how Carla is ill-equipped to maneuver in the worlds she finds herself in and echoes Yolanda’s ignorance regarding her anatomy when she dates Rudy.
The Garcias’s naivete regarding America also comes to light when Yolanda experiences snow for the first time. As Dominican children, the Garcia sisters have no experience of snow, and at one point, they hope their father will bring them snow back from a trip to the United States. When Yolanda finally experiences snow, however, it causes distress, as she believes that the white flakes are actually fallout from a nuclear bomb. This demonstrates how even benign differences, like snow, between the two cultures can cause great distress for immigrants who do not know what they are experiencing.
The Difficulty of Forging Self-Identity is fleshed out in these chapters, in which the Garcia girls are adolescents. Carla complains about being lumped in as one of the Garcia girls, and later, Sandi makes the same complaint. The girls are trying to figure out who they are in a new culture while they are still so bound to each other that they are treated as one organism. Even their stories in the novel are intertwined, as the narration sometimes changes between characters mid-chapter, and the narration sometimes uses the first-person plural, talking about a “we” and never mentioning an “I.” Sandi’s distaste at being one of four sisters elevates to the point where she wonders if she could be adopted by the Fannings if they approve of her.
Part of Sandi’s assimilation into her new culture requires her to see her parents in light of power dynamics that differ from those in the Dominican Republic. Her father was a wealthy doctor in the Dominican Republic, but in the States, he cannot get a license to practice medicine. While her father was the final authority over their family back home, her mother has more authority in America due to her education and light accent. Her family was wealthy and influential back home, but in this country, nobody pays them any special attention. This loss of prestige is evident when the family dines with the Fannings. In this context, the Garcias defer to the Fannings because they are the ones who helped them escape the country. Furthermore, Papi cannot disclose Mrs. Fanning’s kiss because he cannot offend them. In this way, he is subject to unwanted sexual advances, as women are in both countries, demonstrating his diminished prestige. Through these realizations, Sandi has to come to terms with not only cultural changes, but also changes in social status.
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