How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Each of the Garcia girls struggles to forge an identity, a struggle made more complex by their relationships with their families and with the two cultures they experience. Born within five years of one another, the four girls are close in age. When they are young, Laura dresses the girls similarly to herself and assigns them each a color, which she applies to their clothing and all of their belongings. Later, she will define each daughter through a signature story that she tells at parties and gatherings. The lack of agency and choice with regard to their identities frustrates the girls, who express a lifelong distaste at being lumped together. While the sisters struggle to differentiate themselves from one another, their journey toward a cohesive self-identity is even more difficult due to their experiences as immigrants. Because they immigrate to the United States as children, they all have different memories of life in the Dominican Republic, and that culture influences them to different degrees.

This is most notable through the character of Fifi. As the youngest, Fifi has the fewest memories of the family’s time in the Dominican Republic. An independent free spirit, Fifi fully assimilates into life in the United States and rebels just as her sisters do, but she quickly repatriates to the Dominican Republic when she chooses to stay for a year after being caught with marijuana, a choice her sisters attribute to her lack of memories of the culture there.