Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents By Julia Alvarez

Garcia Girls Essay Rough Draft For the Garcia girls, like many children of first-generation immigrants to the United States, sexuality is a complicated and far-reaching issue involving tradition, family, class, and identity. The Garcia Girls are coming of age in the United States during a period in which classic American values are constantly being called into question by American youth; this is the 1960s, a time that will stand witness to the blossoming of the sexual revolution. The traditional ideas about sex and independence found in their Dominican homeland come under repeated assault, as the family begins the assimilation process in their new homeland of New York City. In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, author Julia Alvarez explores how each Garcia girl attempts to develop her own views on what it means to be a sexually independent American woman, even as her family still believes her to be a Dominican lady, one

“Even as grown women, they lowered their voices in their father’s earshot when alluding to their bodies’ pleasure” (28). The respect and understanding they have of the views their father continued to hold about sex continued to follow them even into adulthood. Sophia would travel across the globe to Colombia to have a night alone with her boyfriend, unceremoniously discarding her birth control at the airport upon her return to the home where traditional morality still ruled the day (29). Unfortunately, her propensity to collect the love letters sent to her by her beau lead Sophia astray of her father’s view on sex. Challenged about her maidenhood and her sexual activity, Sophia would boldly claim her independence, spiriting herself across the world to her lover and getting married. This rift would cause a long-term freezing of relations between Sophia and her father, one that is never fully