The third and final part to the book, How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, finally talks about their life back in the Dominican Republic before the family moved.
The first chapter all talks about how the family had to move to the United States. It was not really clear why the Garcia family had to even move, but they do. While they were still in the Dominican Republic, something was going on with the father of the family. They were looking for him and then a man named Victor was there instead. Whenever a police came, there had to be trouble around, so the family had a code name for that. They had mentioned ‘tennis shoes’ as the code phrase. In the end though, the mother told her daughters that they had to pack up their stuff because they had to leave.
After that, the chapters talk about one part when the girls were even younger. In the Dominican Republic, the sisters had a lot of cousins, and there was one for each of the sisters. The only sister that got stuck with a boy cousin instead of a girl was Yolanda. This talks somewhat about how Yolanda was the one who went through a tomboy phase and how the aunts wanted her to start hanging out with the girls instead for a while. A situation happened in this chapter. The boy cousin that hung out with Yolanda had a toy that Yolanda really wanted to trade with. So she told him that she would give him anything for that toy that was a model of the Human Body. In return for the toy, Yolanda’s cousin, Mundin, wanted her to pull her pants down and to show him what was down there. When Yolanda finished, I think she felt a little ashamed since her cousin had said that she looked just like the dolls.
I think that was really the part in which Yolanda might have changed her image since her family wanted her to be around her girl cousins instead of being a tomboy hanging out around all the boys.
How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accent was a really confusing book, but in the end, everything made better sense to me.
