Analysis Of How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, By Julia Alvarez

The book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents can been taken through a postcolonial lens, and although it is a different perspective of analysis, struggling to understand and locate personal identity can also be indicated in this book much like The Bluest Eye. The main core issue that is faced the main daughter, Yolanda, is something known as “double consciousness”. This core issue is “a consciousness or a way of perceiving the world that is divided between two antagonistic cultures” (Tyson 403). While all four of the girls within the novel struggle through this core issue, we find it to be the most prevalent in the character of Yolanda, who in her eagerness to learn English and gather up the American culture, finds herself trapped between

In deep contrast to Yolanda, they find themselves in a relationship, the only issue being that Yolanda would not have sex with him: “I did yearn for him, but I yearned for so much more along with that body… I wanted to feel we were serious about each other before we made love” (Alvarez 98-99). This moral that she holds is very similar to her conservative viewpoints from her Dominican background. But this is challenged by Rudy’s morals and America’s culture that she has been thrown into. She feels torn between the two things she loves the most, her country and her boyfriend. But with his crude humor, vulgar language and casual knowledge and talk of the subject completely contradicts what Yolanda feels towards the whole ideal of sex and intimate relationships. Like Yolanda, thousands of new immigrants in any country, America especially, feel when they come to their new country. They want to hold on to both set of morals, keep their old culture and explore their new, but there are so many obstacles they find holding them back, such as lack of knowledge, feeling slow or behind others, or even losing memory of traditions and

This contrast of handling the problem is the main divide between the two novels. While Pecola takes the path of denial and avoidance, Yolanda actually takes steps to improve herself into her new culture. Pecola believes that the problem is nonexistent and ignores it to try and disprove the existence of it. She avoids confronting the reality of her rape and pregnancy through her blue eyes that she now believes that she has: “After that first day at school when I had my blue eyes… Now I don’t go to school anymore. But I don’t care” (Morrison 197). She thinks the reason why they stare, why they whisper, why she was even kicked out of school is because “they are prejudiced” about her unique and beautiful blue eyes. And while she may seem happy, in the long run, she is headed down a detrimental and dangerous path. On the other hand, Yolanda takes these issues that she has and overcomes it, to a certain extent, to try and make her life easier, to help herself identify who she is as a person. This concept is known as hybridity, or syncretism, which is: “not the stalemate between two warring cultures but is rather a productive, exciting, positive force in a shrinking world that is is itself becoming more and more culturally hybrid” (Tyson 404).