Love, independence, sexuality; these are very big themes within the first one hundred or so pages on this book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.
In the first vignette, Antojos, we meet Yolanda. Yolanda returned to the Dominican Republic from America possibly to stay on a permanent basis. Over the time she had been gone, Yolanda forgot much of her native language, making it difficult to communicate with her family. She stuck out physically from the rest of her family because she dressed informally and wore her hair long and natural, whereas her cousins wore designer pantsuits and color their hair. She didn't fit in linguistically because she forgot much of her Spanish and could not express herself well. She also had a dramatically different perspective on class than the rest of her family. For some reason I believe Yolanda went back to the Dominican Republic to find out who she really is, because if she was happy in America she would have stayed.
In the second vignette, The Kiss, Sophia had this ongoing conflict with her father for a struggle over control of her sexuality. For a long period of time, Carlos (Sophia's father) forbade her from spending the night with her boyfriend. To enjoy any intimacy, Sophia had to go on vacation. Her desire for sexual relations frustrated her to the point where when her father denied them from her, she ran away. For so long she was denied sexual freedom, and it broke the relationship between her and her father. She believed it was her right to explore her sexuality however she pleased while also enjoying the privacy and independence of adulthood, while her father believed that the presence of a 'loose' woman in his house disrespects his parental and male authority.
In vignette three, The Four Girls, childhood stories are told about all the girls by the mother. Some are positive - like when Carla really wanted red sneakers, and the family improvised with white sneakers so she could have them - and some were negative - like when Sandra was in the mental hospital. Each of the stories were told with the mother's ability to create a reality and history for the family that is more comfortable and positive by redefining the more difficult moments her daughters experienced.
*I'm way over the word limit now.
The fourth and fifth vignettes are about Yolanda – her descent into madness and her inability to communicate with other people, along with cultural differences between Dominican and American attitudes toward sex and relationships.
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