Why the Garcia Girls Should Be In The Norton Anthology
By Aodhán Ridenour
When Ezra Pound said “Make it new” at the beginning of the twentieth century, he
sparked a fire that needed two significant forces to flourish: experimentation and demographic
change. Julia Alverez’s novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents represents a log pile of
intersections with Pound’s famous statement. From the novel’s peculiar narrative construction
and direction, the counterculturalist undertones, to the intimate semi-autobiographical stories of
outsider experience, Garcia Girls adheres to—and challenges—the somewhat ambiguous
rulebook for inclusion in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. As the introduction of
Norton states, “The vitality of contemporary American literature, evident throughout the most
recent selections in this volume, is fueled by two great engines, one artistic and one
demographic” (Levine 4). Además, the surging Latino-American population in the United States
represents a demographic of readers and people who can ethnically (deeply) identify with the
novel’s themes and context.
A natural first question at the center of this discussion is: What does it mean to be
“American”? By nomenclature alone, the title of the Anthology itself reflects its own tendency to
steal, dismantle, and perpetrate, to wit: the word “America” belongs to all of America. Even
though they may prefer not to be called as such, Canadians, Mexicans, Jaimaicans, Peruvians,
Chileans, Icelandians, etc. are all “Americans.” Much as Norton has done with the work of
authors for over sixty years, the United States has appropriated the word “American.” At any
rate, while most of the included authors were born in the United States, including Alvarez, the
primary factor for inclusion is not where an author is born, but rather whether their work
contributes significantly to a particular sector of life in the United States. In Our Migrant Souls,
Héctor Tobar illuminates a dimly understood reality that weighs on the backs of Latino
Americans: “Our humanity and our complexity exist outside broadcast and printed culture”
(Tobar 6). His statement serves as the torch with which Latino American authors must carry into
the legacies of “American Literature.” Our Migrant Souls is a journalistic and personal account
of the migrant experience and diaspora—the latest demographic used to sustain a literary fire big
enough to warm each of the cold, cold Norton employees.
In alchemizing the forces of experimentation and demographic, Alvarez has produced a
text which should be included in The Norton Anthology of American Literature between at least
two other memorable works. Firstly, because Garcia Girls is a novel (and I do think it is a novel,
after all), I propose it be considered in relation to at least one novel of similar length and genre.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is a sound and plausible relative to Garcia Girls for several
reasons. Most demonstrably, the reflective, disorienting structure of both narratives proves their
experimental qualities. As the introduction to The Norton states, “Unconventionality itself can be
a fertile and endlessly engaging convention” (Levine 12). The excerpt of Slaughterhouse Five
included by The Norton (the first chapter) is an example of the divergent structure because
Vonnegut literally shares the novel’s ending. In addition to the chronologically discombobulated
structure, the tone of both novels is notable, and crucial for purposes of proving its experimental
nature. Vonnegut utilizes “black humor” to discuss the horrific atrocities of the Dresden
bombings as well as the absurdity of war in general. Alvarez utilizes a combination of magical
realism and “absurdist realism” to express the pathos of a young immigrant girl in the United
States. One chapter of Garcia Girls in particular, “Daughter of Invention,” matches the tone and
subject matter commonly utilized by Vonneguet to point out cultural absurdities. Vonnegut’s
characters and plots are typically concerned with some type of exquisite universe-altering
technology. This inventive usage of a device in literary terms is also demonstrated by Yolanda’s
mother, Laura, who was infatuated by commercial invention. As noted here “‘Maybe, just
maybe, there’s something they’ve missed that’s important,” Laura Garcia’s attitude towards the
United States economy is hopeful, though replete with a subtle tonal jocularity (Alvarez 138).
The delivery is borderline satire, but when compared to true satire, could more so be called
“extrapolated autobiography.” Moreover, both novels are indeed semi-autobiographical.
Vonnegut is paving the way for Alvarez when he says “All of this happened, more or less”
(Vonnegut 300). Through vivid and thematic scenes, the semi-autobiographical essence of both
works provide a distinct lens through which to view the lives of their narrators.
Alvarez was born in New York City and moved to the Dominican Republic at three
months old, where her family lived for the next ten years. When her father found himself
“entangled” with a failed plot to overthrow the island’s military dictator, Rafael Trujilio, the
Alvarez family fled back to New York and began their life again as immigrants (Alvarez, 2023).
Her life story resembles the basic geographical movement of Yolanda Garcia, and was clearly a
major inspiration for the novel’s narrative. Garcia Girls, therefore, is not only
semi-autobiographical; it is also the story of one family who “dropped out,” leaving friends and
family for a life away from violence and revolution. The Beat Generation work, Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road, represents another experimental semi-autobiographical narrative that vividly
recounts the experience of an outsider. Sal Paradise leaves New York and drops into the gritty,
captivating world of a spiritual beatnick. Por otra parte, much as Carlos Garcia (father) still
“[reads] the Dominican papers, already days old,” in the chapter “Daughter of Invention,” Sal
Paradise from On the Road is still connected to the capitalism of the United States in Chapter 1
of On the Road: “We had six weeks to save up the money for the truck and began working and
counting every cent” (Kerouac 295). The dialectic reality of a “drop out” is that they never could
have dropped out of anything without the prior existence of the thing they are dropping out of.
(Hence, literary periods being established post hoc. Norton is exceedingly concerned with
literary periods, as demonstrated by the intro. If I were to propose a new literary period—to be
included in a future Norton anthology— it would be “Diasporism.” The attributes of said
literature would be altered tradition, alienation, disorientation, and expansion of language). As
with Garcia Girls, On the Road presents an expansion of the “English” language. Instead of
implementing Spanish words and lexicon, On the Road presents a selection of inner-societal
dialects and tonalities, such as “mad,” “crummies,” or “kicks,” therein illuminating a specific
demographic: “drop-outs” from a traditional society into a divergent realm.
By nature, the immigrant experience is disorienting. It is like a platypus, or an axolotl:
what is it, and how did it happen, anyhow? Our Migrant Souls provides insight into this complex
mystery, and reinstates the fact that the reality of Latino people in the United States is not only
inherently beyond the scope of the average non-Latino American U.S. citizen; it is often beyond
the knowledge of the immigrants themselves. The Garcia girls were lucky to be relatively
affluent and that they were able to stick together as a family. As Tobar is able to elucidate in his
inventive form, “[one] of my students describes the feelings of her mother upon learning of the
death of her parents in Mexico, some twenty years after the mother migrated to the United States
as an undocumented immigrant” (Tobar 185). For Alvarez, a non-native English speaker, the
discombobulation and cultural loss is inescapable—much as the difficulties of pinning down a
social identity can be for a young immigrant. The sensation is especially jarring for those whose
perspective may be shaped by multiple extremist cultures and foreign environments, such as the
Garcia girls who are privy to diverse adult beliefs, prejudices, and demands. The backwards
delivery of the narrative is also reflective of an immigrant entering the United States without first
learning English. Only once Yolanda has grown older can she holistically reflect upon her
displacement from her origin. New worlds, times changed, conversations had—these are factors
which aid in the construction of a backwards narrative. When delivered by means of
disconnected short stories, and by adding ambiguous magical realist elements, it is reflective of a
story told through the eyes of a child—an immigrant child who represents the fastest growing
population in the United States. Together, the inventive qualities of How the Garcia Girls Lost
Their Accents and its featured demographic provide the necessary fuel to synthesize a literature
which sheds a lucid brilliance upon the Latino American experience, thereby making it a
distinguished candidate for inclusion in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Eleventh
Edition.
Works Cited
Levine, Robert S. ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1945-present (ninth
edition): Table of Contents (vii-xix) and Introduction (3-24).
Tobar, Héctor. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of
“Latino.” 1st ed., MCD, 2023.
“About — Julia Alvarez.” Julia Alvarez, www.juliaalvarez.com/about. 3 December, 2023.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by
Robert S. Levine, 10th ed., W. W. Norton, 2023, (300-307)
Álvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Algonquin, 1991.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S.
Levine, 10th ed., W. W. Norton, 2023, (291-299)
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