The Silence of Exile in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract

The very title of Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents reveals the central role that language plays a novel that chronicles the difficult paths that four young sisters from the Dominican Republic take while growing up the United States. The novel, made up of three parts of five chapters each, traces the Garcia girls' story backwards time, beginning with American adulthood 1989 and ending with their Dominican childhood 1956. As Joan M. Hoffman has observed, despite this unique chronological structure, language is one of the unifying symbols for the four sisters' transition from one culture to another. Hoffman writes: Not only words, but also the manner of speech is significant to the story of the Garcia girls' coming-of-age America. Language, both its form and its content, is an important unifying agent here, every bit as essential as the strong family connections throughout this loosely woven work. Communication is of fundamental concern for each member of this immigrant family as they struggle with the strange vocabulary, difficult grammar, and incomprehensible voice rhythms of their newly acquired English order to tell their stories. (22) This aspect of Hoffman's article is particularly important, especially since she correctly notes that the Garcia girls have to acquire the English language skills necessary to tell their story several of the novel's first-person narratives. Nevertheless, Hoffman also concludes that language is a powerful symbol of the four sisters' successful bicultural assimilation into the American way of life: While accentuating youthful vulnerabilities, the struggle with language the novel also highlights the need to find the strength and self-assurance to forge an assimilated dual identity on the journey to a self-determined adulthood, an identity that both melds and celebrates cultural and linguistic elements from the Old World and New. Even the girls' father... who had paid to ... smooth the accents out of their English expensive schools (36), knows that his girls must lose their accents without losing too much more of their cultural heritage. (22) Despite the importance of language The Garcia Girls, this paper will show that the novel does not demonstrate the four sisters' successful assimilation into American life, and that even this incomplete transition occurs to a great extent because of the displacement of their Hispanic language and culture. Rather than forging an assimilated dual identity as Hoffman believes, the sisters repeatedly find themselves at odds with their bicultural surroundings, experiencing a form of alienation that is often symbolized by either silence or by an absolute failure to communicate with the other characters. (1) These contrasting critical approaches to The Garcia Girls reflect different ways of looking at the so-called 1.5 or one-and-a-half immigrant generation, a concept developed by sociologist Ruben G. Rumbaut to describe young refugees who were born abroad and raised the United States, and who therefore find themselves stuck between the first and second generations of American immigrants. The idea of the one-and-a-half generation has also been used extensively by Gustavo Perez Firmat his work on Cuban American literature and Cuban culture the United States. While both Rumbaut and Perez Firmat focus on the same intermediate immigrant generation, they do so very different ways. Rumbaut writes that the members of the 1.5 generation are an awkward position because in many ways they are marginal to both the old and the new worlds, and are fully part of neither of them (61). Perez Firmat, on the other hand, thinks that this middle generation enjoys an advantageous cultural position: I diverge from Rumbaut ... stressing the beneficial consequences of this intermediate location. Although it is true enough that the 1.5 generation is 'marginal' to both its native and its adopted cultures, the inverse may be equally accurate: only the 1. …

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