Language In 'How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents'

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Language is a fundamental marker for social belonging. In How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, language played a huge part in their lives and identities as Dominicans growing up in America. When they first immigrated, language and sexuality are the two most troubling aspects of their cultural displacement. Yolanda, as a poet and the novel's primary narrator, has the closest and most troubled relation to language. Because she learns English as a second language, Yolanda develops sensitivity to the musicality of the words. She searches for a romantic partner who treats language with “great respect” but didn’t succeed. The intensity of Yolanda's relation to language nurses an uneasy relativism in her and she resists the idea that the outside
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