50 pages • 1 hour read
Julia AlvarezHow the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Joe”
Yolanda is with John, who wants to marry her. They play rhyming games. John tells her that she needs a therapist, and she says they both should see one. She no longer trusts him. Yolanda believes that John believes too much in the real world and not enough in the world of words. She does see a therapist, and one day she finds a pro-con list that John made about whether he should be with her. She is upset that he had to decide whether to love her. He kisses her as she tries to say no. On another day, the two have difficulties understanding each other.
When Yolanda decides to leave John, it is because she wants to stop having her self separated into head, heart, and soul. She wants the parts of herself to be connected. She no longer feels like her name is Yolanda; she feels like she is Joe, the nickname John gave her. Yolanda quotes and misquotes authors, and her therapist recommends that she be admitted into a psychiatric facility, and her parents oblige. Yolanda starts to fall in love with her therapist, Dr. Payne, but she does not tell him. When her parents question her about her love for John, Yolanda tells them that she and John did not speak the same language. Yolanda has become allergic to the word “love,” which was previously the “most important” word to her, and she thinks about how some words come with a cost. She does not believe she knows what love means.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story”
Yolanda explains that the four sisters “took turns being the wildest” (86). In boarding school, Yolanda was known for having a vivacious personality and many suitors. As she got older, however, she learned she was able to attract men but not keep them. By college, she describes herself as “Americanized” and as a “lapsed Catholic.” The only person at college who Yolanda believes she has anything in common with is Rudy. She lends Rudy a pencil in class, and he mocks her for its tiny size. Later that night, he comes to her dorm room to return it. She can tell he wants to come in, but she is already dressed for bed. They decide to have lunch the next day.
They get to know each other, and she helps him write a sonnet for class, and he explains all the sexual double meanings his words have. Yolanda begins to realize that other people have more experience than she does, and she blames her immigrant background for this. If she were American, she believes that she, too, would be having sex and using curse words. She parties with Rudy, but never drinks too much because she does not trust what he might do to her sexually if she were drunk. He is offended by the insinuation that he might rape her.
Yolanda and Rudy disagree over sex. He wants to have sex with her, but he uses words such as “screw” and “fuck,” and these words turn her off. Rudy draws diagrams to teach Yolanda the parts of her anatomy because she does not know the names for her reproductive organs. While Rudy’s parents encourage him to have sexual encounters with women, hers still embarrass her with their “old world” clothing. Rudy’s parents are glad he is dating an immigrant, saying he can learn more about the world from her, but she is offended at the thought of being a cultural lesson for someone.
Rudy becomes increasingly frustrated with Yolanda’s refusal to have sex. He tells her that it is painful for men not to have sex, and he calls her frigid. He also tells her that he thought that she would be more passionate because she is Spanish, but he thinks that she is just like the cotillion girls he knows. She leaves, and he does not follow her. She is frustrated that he does not understand her combination of “Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles” (99). That night, she sleeps with a crucifix that used to serve as a security blanket for her. She runs into Rudy and his parents, and they compliment her lack of accent. Yolanda starts avoiding social situations, but she plans on going to a dance, and she imagines having sex with Rudy afterward. Instead, she gets to the dance and sees him with another woman. Years later, she gets a call from Rudy asking if he can come over because he is in town. He stops her from talking and says he wants to have sex, and she kicks him out, angry that he hasn’t changed and that he instilled so much doubt in her during her sexual awakening.
Part 1, Chapters 4-5 Analysis
The Difficulties of Forging a Self-Identity are evident in this set of chapters, which focus primarily on Yolanda’s relationships and sexual awakening. In her relationships with both John and Rudy, Yolanda struggles to retain her identity as she bridges the divide between the culture of her youth and family and the freer—and crasser—attitudes of American men.
These chapters establish that even before she becomes a literature instructor and poet, Yolanda views the world through words. In boarding school, while dating Rudy, English is still a “party favor” to her, requiring a dictionary to fully understand whether she has received an insult or a compliment. By the time she dates John, however, words have become a near-obsession. It is significant that the failure of Yolanda and John’s relationship is marked by difficulties communicating. Yolanda’s obsession with language also extends to her name. She has always been upset about being called Yo or Yoyo, the shorthand ways her mother referred to her out of convenience. John takes it a step further and calls her Joe, an Americanized version of her name. How people refer to her becomes central to her identity, and when her name changes, she loses even more of herself. In the instance of John and Yolanda, the struggle surrounding words becomes so intense for Yolanda that it leads to a mental health crisis.
There is a notable parallel between Yolanda’s hospitalization and Sandi’s, in that both of them obsess over literature. Yolanda quotes authors’ words relentlessly, while Sandi consumes them. This parallel suggests that the girls’ crises occur not only due to personal circumstances, but due to something they share as they juggle between the world of their youth and present-day America. For Sandi, words reflect her humanity. For Yolanda, who becomes “allergic” to words, words are reality. Love—which she describes as the “most important” word to her—hurts. Instead of feeling a revulsion toward love, she feels it toward the word itself. This is not something that happened to her because of America, however; Yolanda feels equally allergic to the word for love in Spanish.
In addition to language difficulties, Yolanda’s relationship with John makes her feel like she is separated into different parts: her heart, her mind, and her soul. She wants to be a unified whole, which is why she gets so upset with John for making his pro-con list about whether they should get married. She thinks his heart should be attached to his head, but he makes decisions by separating the two. She does not understand that discernment can coincide with love.
Yolanda’s relationship with Rudy, on the other hand, focuses less on love and more on the cultural divide she is trying to cross, though words are still significant. Her attitudes about sex are still largely defined by her family and the more conservative culture she grew up in, while Rudy’s are more focused on fun than meaning. Rudy’s crass language is a turn-off for Yolanda, and Rudy is either unwilling or unable to communicate in any other way, leading to the demise of their relationship. Where language proved to be a barrier in her relationship with John, cultural attitudes and values prove to be the difficulty in her relationship with Rudy. In both instances, she is living in a world that is not her own, yet she is unable to fully assimilate back into her previous world.
Finally, Yolanda struggles to maintain her identity in the face of objectification. While Rudy sexually objectifies Yolanda, his parents culturally objectify her. Rudy’s sexually liberated parents encourage their son to have many sexual experiences. Rudy cannot see beyond this, and he sees Yolanda as a conquest, even five years after they stop seeing one another. His parents objectify her when they believe she will help their son learn more about different cultures. Rather than see her as a person in her own right, they see her as a means to an end. Yolanda’s relationship with Rudy ends in heartbreak for her because she is never seen as the whole human being that she is, valuable in her own right.
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