Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent Analysis

When immigrants come to America, it can be difficult to create a new identity. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents portrays this issue through Yolanda, who is shown to have a difficult time gaining a sense of belonging and leaving her roots behind. From learning a new language to finding her American voice to encountering liberal beliefs regarding sexuality and gender, she is exposed to a whole different culture, one that contradicts those she was raised with. Through the clashing of her two cultures, Yolanda spends time trying to find and shape her identity despite the hardships and heartache the search causes. When she first arrives in the United States, she strives to assimilate, first through the learning of the English language. She writes a speech for her school and comes across a poem that

Her exposure to new literature, as opposed to a “literature of appropriate sentiments”, allows her to adapt to liberal ideas which excite her and allow her to begin to feel a sense of belonging (Alvarez 143). To belong she “took root in the language” to avoid being bullied for her accent and to be more like a true American (Alvarez 141). Despite all this effort, she would still find herself being unable to understand all aspects of American culture, which can be seen in her encounters with her first boyfriend, Rudy. She was exposed to liberal beliefs about sexuality which contradicted with her conservative Catholic roots to protect her body and innocence. It hurt her when she realized Rudy was unable to “understand her peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles” (Alvarez 99). She is helpless and trapped between her two cultures in this moment as she realizes that the person she cared for couldn’t understand or empathize with both of her cultures and