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The very tide of Julia Álvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents reveals the central role that language plays in a novel that chronicles the difficult paths that four young sisters from the Dominican Republic take while growing up in the United States. The novel, made up of three parts of five chapters each, traces the Garcia girls' story backwards in time, beginning with American adulthood in 1989 and ending with their Dominican childhood in 1956. As Joan M. Hoffman has observed, despite this unique chronological structure, language is one of the unifying symbols for the four sisters' transition from one culture to another. Hoffman writes:
Not only words, but also the manner of speech is significant to the story of the Garcia girls' coming-of-age in America. Language, in both its form and its content, is an important unifying agent here, every bit as essential as the strong family connections throughout this loosely woven work. Communication is of fundamental concern for each member of this immigrant family as they struggle with the strange vocabulary, difficult grammar, and incomprehensible voice rhythms of their newly acquired English in order to tell their stories. (22)
This aspect of Hoffman's article is particularly important, especially since she correctly notes that the Garcia girls have to acquire the English language skills necessary to tell their story in several of the novel's first-person narratives. Nevertheless, Hoffman also concludes that language is a powerful symbol of the four sisters' successful bicultural assimilation into the American way of life:
While accentuating youthful vulnerabilities, the struggle with language in the novel also highlights the need to find the strength and self-assurance to forge an assimilated dual identity on the journey to a self-determined adulthood, an identity that both melds and celebrates cultural and linguistic elements from the Old World and New. Even the girls' father . . ." who had paid to . . . smooth the accents out of their English in expensive schools" (36), knows that his girls must lose their accents without losing too much more of their cultural heritage. (22)
Despite the importance of language in The Garcia Girls, this paper will show that the novel does not demonstrate the four sisters' successful assimilation into American life, and that...