Study Questions for Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
By Thad Curtz (for Politics of Identity)

1. Who is telling the story?

You will see that each chapter has two headings, a title and one or more names, and that those names rather than the title are then used as the heading for each page in the chapter. Some of the time, as in "The Rudy Elmenhurst Story" (p86 seq.), the person listed in the heading tells the story in first person, "I suppose it all started..." What does being listed in this way mean about who's telling the story in the other chapters?

You might look carefully at stretches of a few of them and see what you could say about the person (or people) who are talking in each of them, just on the basis of how they talk - the words they use, how they sound, and so on. (You do this all the time in restaurants and on street corners, and you can do it with the voices telling stories too...) For some conspicuous examples, you might look at the last paragraph on p. 107, or compare the language in which "Joe" is told with the language in the "The Rudy Elmenhurst Story" which follows it immediately, about "...a mystery I'm exploring by picking it apart like poems".

The Contents page gives an overview of the book by titles - make a brief sketch of the book using the name headings and the contents of each story. Who gets to talk most? Why might that be? What can you figure out about how the different pieces which belong to a given person relate to each other...

2. Title

Why is the book called How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents? (When you are trying to think about the particular phrasing of something, it can often be useful to play around with some other possibilities as a way to highlight the actual words you are dealing with... How is this different, from, say How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Virginity? or How the Garcia Girls Became American? How did they lose them? (Presumably this means more than living in America for 29 years, since their father clearly hasn't lost his...)

3. Structure

3a. How does the stuff that is in each chapter fit together, if it does? Why is it divided into three sections? (How do you explain the conspicuous difference in the amount of time each covers?) More dramatically, the book proceeds backwards in time. What kind of a way to tell a story is that; wouldn't it make more sense to begin at the beginning? What does beginning at the beginning imply about identity? In what ways would the experience of the book, or its exploration of identity, be different if we rearranged the chapters and read the book from the back? You might start by comparing the end of the first chapter and the end of the last chapter - how are they related, and why does this relationship occupy such a central position in the book's structure?

3b. How do the characters compare and contrast with each other? (You might think about this as a psychological question, about family history and dynamics, or a literary one, about how novels are put together to convey meaning...) One refrain in this book is "...four girls too close in age" (p. 154) What does that mean? The psychologist daughter says "...the system had weakened the girls' identity differentiation abilities and made them forever unclear about personality boundaries" (p. 41) What's that mean? To what extent is it true? Is it a blessing as well as a problem?

"Like we're all competing, right? For the most haunted past" (p. 117). Is that true? If so, what does each of them have to enter in the competition?

(It might help to start by trying to make a list of the four girls' personality traits, and of their experiences...) Why does Yolanda have so many nicknames? Why doesn't Carla have any?

4. Some more particular questions about this book.

I. Being American and being Dominican -

Before you start reading the book, make a list of whatever you have in your head at this point about what "being Hispanic" means. (For most of us, this is probably a mix of some experience, some reading, some stereotypes, and so on.) Which of the people in the book are Hispanic? How do you tell this as a reader? (Can you "see" them?)

You might try to work out the complications of some particular aspect of Dominican culture as it is presented in the book, like sex, or class. How does "a look that has always made Yolanda think of call girls" (p 5) fit with her father's response to Mrs. Fanning? With "Whore Hour"?

What does "... raising ... girls American style" (p. 202) mean - besides not beating them? (How "American" is Yolanda? (Seven pages into the book, we learn that "This time, however, Yolanda is not so sure she'll be going back" to the United States.) What can we learn from the rest of the chapter about why she might, or why she might not...

II. Some of the themes you might look for - most simply, words or ideas or issues that come up repeatedly in the book...

a. Roots
b. Hearts
c. Lies and inventions
d. Different people's antojos - Sandi, Papi. Mami. Yolanda, "the monkey experiment" (p. 131), etc.
e. Tyranny and revolution
f. "Crazy people" (p. 140)
g. Kisses
h. "the _______" (as in "the father, the mother, the four girls, the lover...
i. And, of course, identity - where does it come from, and what ideas or assumptions do different characters offer about it?

IV. Writing about writing

The book is full of incidents which seem to have something to do with art and making it. Here are some samples. What can you figure out from each of them about the relationships between art and the politics of identity...

Yolanda's language when she's in the hospital
Playing the drum
The cry of the mother cat, "at the center of her art"
Lies and making up stories
Sandi's drawings, and what happens to her talent
Scherezade
"...the voice she had learned from her mother..."
Dolls - the Barbies dressed as senoritas, the Human Body, the banks from America (and Gladys' response to one of them - p. 265)
The cathedral sculpture of the Madonna, and where it comes from
"I wanted to find out something secret..." (p. 249)
Mami's inventions