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.
Symbols & Motifs
Monkeys
Monkeys are a recurrent motif in the novel that represent the irrationality of people. Monkeys first arise when Sandi is hospitalized during a mental health crisis. She is certain that she is becoming a monkey, believing evolution has hit its apex and people are no longer evolving. To overcome this, she reads as much as she can to try to remember what it is like to be a person. In this way, monkeys are depicted as being less evolved than humans, and they are what humans can turn into if they lose what it is that makes them human. It is notable that Laura did not want her daughters going to public school because they might learn about evolution, but her daughters do learn the concept and internalize it enough that Sandi believes she is part of the actual process of its reversal.
Monkeys arise again when the Garcia girls plan to leave the Dominican Republic with Fifi. The older girls do not want their sister to remain there because they believe the patriarchal culture is stifling to the liberty and spirit of women. Despite their rejection of the culture, they become sad as they leave, and the narrator describes their situation as being similar to monkeys in psychological trials who become so accustomed to their cages that they do not leave once they are freed. In this way again, monkeys represent irrationality and counterintuitive behavior. They show how people can neglect their human nature and instead allow themselves to be guided by the more “primitive” forms of themselves.
Snow
Snow represents what is foreign to the Garcia girls about American culture and the environment of the country. One day when their father comes back home to the Dominican Republic with treats when they are children, they hope the surprise is snow. Having lived their whole life in the Dominican Republic, they have never seen snow, so it elicits wonder and awe in them. The wonder and desire to see snow is so great that their grandmother promises to take them to see it sometime.
Later, when the family is in the United States, Yolanda looks out her school window and sees snow. Because she has just learned about the ongoing Cuban Missile Crisis, she believes the snow is fallout and that a nuclear bomb has been dropped on New York. Her teacher knows right away what it is that is falling from the sky, and she puts Yolanda’s mind at ease. Still, this incident illustrates how even benign occurrences in a new culture can cause distress to those not familiar with it. It also shows how what the girls were most looking forward to in their new country looks fearful and threatening when they experience it up close. The relatively minor surprise of snow can be compared to even greater cultural differences, such as sexual mores, that will later plague the young women.
The Spanish Restaurant
The restaurant the Fannings take the Garcias to represents all that is familiar to Sandi. It reminds her of her home culture, because in this restaurant, her culture is appreciated rather than mocked by bullies at school or in her apartment building. She feels like she has no world to feel comfortable in, and for the briefest of moments, she feels comfortable in this setting, and she feels proud of her culture as she watches the women dance.
However, it quickly comes to represent a loss of innocence. First, Mrs. Fanning drunkenly kisses Sandi’s father in front of her, and her father is uncharacteristically powerless due to how much the Garcias owe the Fannings. When Mrs. Fanning begins to dance with the professional dancers, Sandi feels like she is denigrating the authentic and beautiful experience of the dance. Eventually, Sandi takes out her frustration by thwarting her mother’s desires and convincing Mrs. Fanning to buy her a Barbie doll, showing that she is unwilling, at least temporarily, to play into a cultural facade that is not real.
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By Julia Alvarez
