Garcia Girl

Words: 667
Pages: 3

Imagine having four very different people and treating them all as if they are one. In the novel How the Garcia Girls lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez this is what happens with the four Garcia girls. They were born very close together in the Dominican Republic and were treated like one human. This affects each of the girls in different ways causing a few of them to have identity issues, to become very unstable with themselves, and how this harms them in general. The girls when they were young were treated a certain way, which causes them to have identity issues throughout their lives. The girls were treated as though they were only one person and are only referred to as the four girls. “But not even the oldest who was once the only girl, remembers the mother calling them anything but the four girls. The mother dressed them all alike in diminishing-sized, different colors...the same party dress, school clothes, underwear, toothbrush”(40-41). This shows how similar all of the girls are treated, and with how close together they are born which only makes them be treated even more closely. Their mother dresses them the same as her but …show more content…
This only affects them in negative ways. For example Sandi becomes very confused on who she is: “‘Soon she wouldn’t be human...she told us she was being turned out of the human race. She was becoming a monkey.’ The mother’s voice broke. ‘A monkey, my baby!’” (54). Sandi has a small mental breakdown, and this is due to her mother not creating identities for her or the rest of the girls. She struggles so much and is so confused that she struggles to find who she is, and begins to question if she is even human. Saying that she has to read as much as she can because soon she will not be human. The girls past and present identity issues leads to Sandi becoming both emotionally and mentally unstable which is not good for