In her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, Julie Alvarez
             presents the reader with a series of 15 interlocking stories that narrate
             the difficulties of growing up bicultural in the United States.
             The Garcia girls are Carla, Sandra, Yolanda and Sofia, though Alvarez
             speaks most through Yolanda's narrative. They Garcia girls were born in
             the Dominican Republic and move to the United States as children. The book
             opens in 1989, with the Garcia girls are American adults. The narrative
             then flows backward, tracing the transition the girls had to make as they
             strive to create an identity that is both Latina and American.
             As implied in the title, language plays a vital role in the
             transculturalization of the Garcia girls, into their assimilation into
             American popular culture. The acquisition of English language skills as
             well as American argot was a vital step in the Garcia girls' forging of
             their dual identity. Their struggle with the language is symbolic of each
             sister's struggle to create a cohesive cultural identity that blends their
             For the Garcia girls, the manner of speech, how they sound as they
             talk, matter as much as their grasp of the English language. The stories
             are told in first person narratives, showing how every member of the
             immigrant Garcia family struggles to tell their stories using the
             inadequate vocabulary, the incomprehensible grammar and the jagged voice
             In the novel, the Garcia girls see Spanish as the mother tongue, which
             represents their refuge (72). In contrast, English is more than a
             difficult second language. For the members of the Garcia family, the sheer
             difficulty of mastering the English language is a constant reminder of
             their alienation. Their accents brand the Garcia girls as strangers in a
             This alienation is particularly evident in the story "Tre
             ...