A Bildungsrom The Four Garcia Girls From The Dominican Republic

Coming of Age Life is all about choices and how we choose to make them. Who we are and where we go in life is largely determined by decisions that we choose to make: where we go to college, who our friends are, who we eventually decide to marry. However, sometimes in life, we encounter a situation where we are forced to mature maybe before we are ready. In my case, my younger brother was born when I was seven with a multitude of health problems. While my parents were preoccupied with taking care of him, I sometimes was forced to fend for myself and making sure my younger sister was cared for. In the long run, this made me a much more responsible and self-reliant person. Circumstances are seen like this all throughout literature. A Bildungsroman,

The book, which progresses backwards in time, starting with the four Garcia girls as adults to the time of them leaving the Dominican Republic, discusses the different times in the girl’s lives that forced them to make the significant transition from little girls from the Dominican Republic to American adults. This particular novel deals with the struggle that the girls have in their new country with the struggle to fit in, a sense of displacement, and confusion of identity. Carla, Yolanda, Sandra, and Sofia were all uprooted from everything that they knew at a very young age and thrust into the unfamiliar. Because they were in a new country, with a completely new sense of social rules, they were forced to grow up a lot faster than most children would. They needed to learn to adapt to social norms in order to be functioning members of their society. An example of this would be a year after the Garcias move to the United States, Carla is walking home from school. She is stopped by a man in a lime green car. The man in the car “beckoned her to come up to the window” (126). He was naked from the waist down. After her mother called the police, Carla was too shocked and afraid of the police to fully piece together the story. However, she needed to talk to the police herself about what had occurred. This was the first in many instances where the

This identity crisis is explored when the whole family goes out to dinner with a friend of their father and his wife. There is a floor show with Dominican dancers. Sandra comments on how the “dark-eyed waiters” and “right, familiar smells of garlic and onion” remind her of her time in the Dominican Republic (141). It is a type of substitute for the lack of connection that she is starting to feel with her roots. This is explored further later in this chapter when Sandra is simply looking at herself in the mirror. She notes that “she was surprised to find a pretty girl looking back at her. It was a girl who could pass as American, with soft blue eyes and fair skin, looks that were traced back to a great-great grandmother from Sweden at every family gathering” (146). The fact that Sandra considers herself to look American and is pleased with the fact that she could probably pass as American even furthers her from the Dominican. Her looks are just an indication of the fact that she, along with the rest of her sisters are just growing more and more distant from their home country, and eventually just leave it all behind. This is an example of the girls’ coming of age. Their willingness to let go of something that was once extremely important to them, their country, and moving on to other things is a major sign in the coming of age