Garcia Girls part 2

In the second part of the book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, the story got a whole lot more interesting. The first part of the book was set up in such a way that I did not really understand what was going on. The author jumps into the book in a way that makes it seem like we automatically know what is going on. By the end of the first part, I was still stuck at that state of confusion throughout the book. When I began to read the second part, it was dated back 20 years earlier. For that reason, the short stories were giving more background information about the Garcia family which helped a lot in understanding the book better.

In this section of the book, we find out about the first couple of years that the Garcia family was in the United States. Because the story was going backwards in order, the other chapters started off with the family first being in the state for a year. One of the sisters, Carla, was being harassed while she was at school by a group of white boys. They teased her mainly for the reason that she was a foreign student, but they also made fun of her because of the way her body was transforming. She was going through puberty which she was unaware of.  She was a target for as while until the group of boys got tired.

Another incident happened with Carla when she was walking home from school. The family thought that they lived in a good neighborhood, but they were somewhat mistaken. While walking home, Carla was being stalked by a man driving in his car. As the car approached her, Carla got nervous and then the man wanted her to come to his window. The main reason Carla didn’t want to go over there was because she didn’t want to speak to him in English which was a language she didn’t quickly grasp. Finally, the horror that happened was that the man was a pervert who had showed Carla his genitals. Scared, Carla ran home to tell her mother of the incident in which she called the police.

The main subject of this part of the story was to show the innocence of the family when they are newly arrived in the United States. The entire book is centralized on the theme of innocence. The first part of the book shows how all innocence was lost between the family. The second part of the book shows how the family still held on to that innocence and I predict that the final section of the book will show the beginning to everything.