Dominican Girls

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, is a novel by Julia Alvarez that follows the lives of the Garcia girls; Yolanda, Carla, Sandi, and Sofia, as they flee from their privileged lives in the Dominican Republic and to a drastically different country. The novel touches on the most important part of the Garcias journey to America, the lives of the parents, and the changing influences of the four daughters. The novel shows how the girls are transformed into modern American women, even when their family pushed them to stay in the Patriarchy that ruled the Dominican Republic and the Garcia family for generations. They did not lose their accents, the Garcia girls lost the strict adherence of gender roles that had been placed on them by the culture

Perhaps the largest influence of hispanic culture is the role of religion in the Dominican Republic with 95% of the population identifying a Catholic. The Catholic religion has left a lasting impact on the everyday lifestyle of the dominican people especially when it comes to the family unit. A study of latino families at the University of California at Irvine, outlines the role of the mother and father. Typical mothers in latino families share the common characteristic of the Virgin Mary. Women are held to a higher moral standard than men are, women are to be self- sacrificing, submissive, modest, humble and a source of religion in the family. It is commonly found in Catholic communities that girls are taught about chastity before marriage, and that marriage is indissoluble even if the marriage is based on social standing and not love. The Garcia Girls are taught this at a very young age, and Yolanda recalls a time when her father preached chastity to them as young girls.‘"I don't want loose women in my family," he had cautioned all his daughters. Warnings were delivered communally, for even though there was usually the offending daughter of the moment, every woman's character could use extra scolding.”(page 28). Women who follow these moral rules are ideal wifes for their husbands and believed to raise children of the same moral code, keeping a tradition of male domination. In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, the reader saw the patriarchy of the Dominican family, the life that the Garcias were leaving in comparison to the sexual revolution and the birth of the modern feminist, the life they would enter. The reader begins to understand the