How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Characters)

Characters

La Bruja

"La Bruja" ("The Witch"), as the girls call her, is the racist woman who lives in the apartment underneath the family in New York City. She calls them "spics" and tells them to "go back to where you came from."

Carlos

Child of Sofía and Otto. His birth — the first boy in two generations — helps reunite Papi and Sofía.

Doña Charito

A German woman who lives in the same neighborhood as the family in the Dominican Republic. "She was an islander only by her marriage to Don José," having met him in Madrid on a tour of the Prado, the national museum. Doña Charito is an artist who requires strict obedience to her teaching methods when she conducts art classes for the cousins. She did not want to take students at first, but payment in American dollars changed her mind. Many consider her husband Don José to be crazy, a judgment that appears to be confirmed when Sandi discovers him chained to the wall, carving statues.

Chucha

Chucha, the family's devoted Haitian cook, practices Voodoo and often casts spells to ward off evil spirits. She was taken in by Laura's parents during the massacre of black Haitians engineered by the Dominican dictator Trujillo. Her dark skin and spells cause the other maids to avoid her and look down on her. Nevertheless, she has been with the family so long that she gets her way as often as not. She narrates the very last portion of "The Blood of the Conquistadores."

Edmundo Alejandro de La Torre Rodríguez

See Mundín de la Torre

Carmen de La Torre

The girls' aunt, who married Tío Mundo. Tía Carmen is the "reigning head of the family." Hers is the largest house in the family compound since she is the widow of the head of the clan. When the girls come back to visit the island, they stay with her. After Fifi's escapade with Manuel Gustavo threatens the girls' visits, it is "Tía Carmen's love [that] revives our old homesickness."

Edmundo Antonio de La Torre

Don Edmundo Antonio de la Torre, the girls' maternal grandfather, is a "kindly, educated" man who "entertained no political ambitions." Yet Trujillo forced him to accept a "bogus" diplomatic post, which Papito reluctantly accepted in order to appease his hypochondriac wife. The family referred to him as a saint, due largely to his patience with his wife.

Flor de La Torre

The cousins refer to Tía Flor, the wife of Tío Arturo, as "the politician" because she flashes a broad smile "no matter the circumstances." Flor wants no part of the sisters' consciousness-raising, telling them, "Look at me, I'm a queen. I can sleep until noon, if I want. I'm going to protest for my rights?"

Lucinda de La Torre

The eldest child of Tío Mundo and Tía Carmen, Lucinda is the cousin "who has never minced her words." She helps the older sisters help thwart the romance of Sofía and Manuel Gustavo, knowing that the once-independent Sofía could end up stuck on the island. Nevertheless, as an adult Lucinda adopts the island taste and "looks like a Dominican magazine model."

Mimi de La Torre

Tía Mimi is the unmarried daughter of Papito and Mamita, and is known as "the genius in the family." She spent two years at an American college, and the family fears she has been spoiled for marriage because she is still single at twenty-eight. She has a great love of reading which inspires Yolanda.

Mundín de La Torre

When the sisters are living on the island with their cousins, Mundín is most often paired with Yolanda. The two get in trouble for being in the gardener's shed, where Yolanda has promised to "show him [she's] a girl" in exchange for his modeling clay. When the sisters are older and they come back to visit Santo Domingo, Mundín takes them out and shows them the motel where lovers go. When he is in college in America, the sisters insist, "he's one of us but back on the Island, he struts and turns macho."

Yolanda Laura María Rochet de La Torre

Doña Yolanda Laura María Rochet de la Torre, the girls' grandmother, is known for her willfulness and "tyrannical constitution." She convinces her husband to accept the "bogus" foreign post because she likes to make shopping trips to New York City. Her inability to deal with her fading beauty causes her to become ill in later years.

Rudy Elmenhurst

Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, is the shallow, insensitive college boy who becomes Yolanda's first love. She admires his "ironic self-assured face" and his quick thinking when he tries to ask her out. They see each other constantly for a whole term, while Rudy tries to take advantage of the "hot-blooded" woman he believes Yolanda should be. Yolanda is a shy virgin, however, and he leaves her when she won't have sex with him, which fills her with self-doubt. When he returns five years later demanding the same thing, Yolanda happily throws him out.

Dr. Fanning

Dr. Fanning is Papi's generous American benefactor. He found the medical fellowship for Papi so he could leave the Dominican Republic and tries to help him find work in New York. He has little patience, though, with his wife when she drinks too much. The Garcías relationship with the Fannings illustrates their drastic change in social status: while in Santo Domingo, the Fannings stayed in the family compound and the Garcías "treated them like royalty." In the States, however, Dr. García is embarrassed by his new beholden relationship with the Fannings.

Sylvia Fanning

Sylvia is the boisterous and hard-drinking wife of Dr. Fanning. Sandi is not sure why the handsome Dr. Fanning has married this "plain, bucktoothed woman." When she drinks, she gets flirtatious and uninhibited. At dinner, she flirts with Papi and gets up on stage to dance with the entertainers. She is also very generous, offering to buy the girls dolls, although she is blind to the discomfort this causes Mami and Papi.

Dr. Carlos García

Youngest of his father's thirty-five children, Papi becomes a successful doctor in America after he narrowly escapes persecution in his homeland. However, his daughters consider him to be "heavy duty old world." Even when his girls are successful adults, he feels the need to protect and look after them, giving them cash on his birthday. Although his dreams are filled with his fears of being harassed by the secret police as he was back in the Dominican Republic, he is still homesick for his homeland. He "stubbornly clings to the memories and accents of the old world." When the situation on the island calms down, he wants to move back, even though "for the rest of his life, he would be haunted by blood in the streets and late night disappearances."

Laura de La Torre García

When Mami comes to America, she has "her own little revolution brewing" against traditional Latino concepts of a woman's place. As she takes adult courses in real estate and international economics and business management, she dreams "of a bigger-than-family-size life for herself." She "still did lip service to the old ways," but at the same time, she nibbled "away at forbidden fruit." Mami does not want to move back "to the old country where she was only a wife and a mother. Better an independent nobody than a high-class house-slave." She is also a very proud woman, who continually scribbles her inventions on notepads, insisting, "she would show them. She would prove to these Americans what a smart woman could do with a pencil and pad." Yet Mami sometimes embarrasses her daughters with her "old world" ways. She often speaks in malaprops ("It takes two to tangle, you know") and her matching shoes and bag disqualify her as a "girlfriend parent" and so is considered a "real failure of a Mom." In her article in the American Book Review, Elizabeth Starcevic writes, "she merges the self-confidence of her wealthy background with a receptivity toward the new challenges. Energetic and intelligent, she is always thinking of new inventions. Her creativity is stymied, yet she finds other outlets in the activities of her children and her husband. She is a vivid, alive character whose contributions to the necessary adjustments of her new life are both critiqued and appreciated by her daughters."

Manuel Gustavo García

Manuel Gustavo is the traditionally macho, illegitimate child of Papi's brother, Tío Orlando. When Sofía falls in love with him after she is sent to live with her aunt in Santo Domingo, he tries to take complete control of her life. Sofía's sisters consider him "a tyrant, a mini Papi and Mami rolled into one" and so hatch a plot to save Sofía from him.

Carla García de La Torre

Carla, the oldest sister, is thirty-one and a child psychologist when the novel opens. She feels the need to continually analyze those around her in order to make sense of her world. She insists her mother did not give her enough attention when she was a child, as explained in her autobiographical paper, "I Was There Too." She claims that the color system her mother used to clothe her daughters "weakened [their] identity differentiation abilities and made them forever unclear about personality boundaries." She also "intimated that [Mami] was a mild anal retentive personality." After moving to America, Carla has difficulty adjusting to her new school. Her discomfort over her maturing body adds to her sense of displacement. Even after Mami accompanies her to school because of the pervert who exposed himself to her, Carla is haunted by the taunts of classmates.

Fifi García de La Torre

See Sofía García de la Torre

Joe García de La Torre

See Yolanda García de la Torre

Lolo García

See Dr. Carlos García

Sandi García de La Torre

See Sandra García de la Torre

Sandra García de La Torre

Sandra is considered to be "the pretty one," with "blue eyes, peaches and ice cream skin, everything going for her!" Although her lighter skin confers prestige, she wants to be darker like her sisters. While at graduate school, she becomes anorexic and suffers a breakdown. She thinks she is turning into a monkey and so she reads a lot of books to try and retain her humanness. When she is eight, her parents decide she has artistic abilities and so send her for instruction. Sandi's independent spirit surfaces, however, and she rebels against the strict art teacher. She is "not ready yet to pose as one of the model children of the world." Looking back on the time she had broken her arm, she notes, "months of pampering and the ridicule of my cousins had turned me inward. I was sullen and dependent on my mother's sole attention, tender-hearted, and whiney." Sandi no longer draws, but she is still spirited: she is the one who requests Cokes and Barbies from the Fannings during their dinner, despite her mother's warnings not to.

Sofía García de La Torre

Sofía, the youngest daughter, is twenty-six when the novel opens. She was always considered the maverick out of all the sisters, although her mother considers her to be lucky. Unlike her sisters, she drops out of college. Her Americanization, especially her lack of sexual restraint, angers her father and causes tension between them. Her hasty and impulsive marriage to a German she met while on vacation causes a further rift between them, and Papi refuses to speak to her for several years. Her need for her father's attention, though, is evident when she works hard to plan a special party for his seventieth birthday. Yet, she retains "old antagonism toward her father." She also proves herself to be impressionable, at least when she is young. After her mother finds some marijuana stashed in her room, she is sent to live with her relatives in Santo Domingo where she becomes a "Spanish-American princess," according to her sisters, as many of her cousins had done. She also falls in love with a traditionally macho man whom she lets run her life, until she is "rescued" by her sisters.

Yolanda García de La Torre

When the novel opens, Yolanda García de la Torre is confused about where she belongs. When she returns to the Dominican Republic for a visit, her cousins consider her to be "like one of those Peace Corps girls who have let themselves go so as to do dubious good in the world." She refuses to be a "Spanish-American princess" like her cousins, yet she has not yet been able to find an alternate definition for herself. Deciding that "she has never felt at home in the States," she returns to her homeland for a visit, wondering if she can find a place there, but the land seems strange to her. She had hoped to be a poet, but she has not been able to write much lately. Like her sisters, Yolanda felt alienated from her classmates while she was growing up. The narrator describes her as "caught between the woman's libber and the Catholic señorita." She feels that she is a "peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles." In college she curses her immigrant origins because she feels she doesn't fit in with everyone else in the experimental 1960s — she refuses drugs and sex. At the end of the novel, she admits that taking a kitten away from its mother when she was young haunts her still, and that a similar violation "lies at the center of my art."

Yoyo García de La Torre

See Yolanda García de la Torre

Gladys

The family's outgoing pantry maid in Santo Domingo. Gladys wants to go to New York to become an actress, but Mami looks down on her as "only a country girl." Carla enjoys her singing and her company. After Carla gives Gladys her toy bank, Mami and Papi find out and fire her.

Victor Hubbard

A Yale classmate of Tio Mundo' s, Victor Hubbard poses as an American consul at the American Embassy, but he is really working for the CIA. He was sent to the Dominican Republic to groom "every firebrand among the upper-class fellas" for revolution and has been trying to protect the men in the de la Torre family. He helps the family escape to New York. In his spare time, he has sex with young island women.

John

Yolanda's first husband. He seemed to be in love with her but continually tried to categorize her.

Mami

See Laura de la Torre García

Mamita

See Yolanda Laura María Rochet de la Torre

Nivea

Nivea is one of the family's maids, a "black-black" whose mother named her after the American face cream she used in hope of lightening her baby's skin. Nivea's complaints "were bitter and snuck up on you even during the nicest conversations."

Otto

Sofía's husband, considered the "jolly, good-natured one among the brothers-in-law." The sisters call him "the camp counselor." Mami's favorite story about Sofía involves how she met Otto, a German chemist, at a market in South America. Ironically, it was his involvement with Fifi that led to her falling out with Papi.

Papi

See Dr. Carlos García

Papito

See Edmundo Antonio de la Torre

Dr. Payne

Yolanda's therapist. She thinks she is falling in love with him.

Pila

Pila, the family's Haitian laundry maid in Santo Domingo, fascinates the sisters because she has one eye, mottled skin, and brings spirits and "story devils" to the house. She steals from the family and soon after leaves.