The Garcia Girls Two

     Today, during the Socratic Seminar - or whatever Sutherland now calls it for his class - my group realized that the title, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, may actually be referring to how the Garcia Girls lost their innocence. We came to this idea after we discussed the second section of the book and clarified the organization of the book because innocence is a common theme that arises in both the first and second section of the book, and because the second section presents the circumstances faced by the sisters that impact and lead them into becoming the characters they are in the first section.
     At first, when my group started discussing about the second section, we looked at the third vignette where Carla, the oldest of the four sisters, met this practically naked man in a car on her way home. My group talked about whether this was the point of time where Carla lost her innocence or not because she experienced something that did not impact her life positively.
     Next, we re-clarified that the story moves from present to past so the second section of the book actually happened before the first section and the third section happened before the second section. As we clarified this, we noted that the second section is related to the sisters losing their innocence because they did and experienced things they were not suppose to yet, and the first section was about the sisters after they had lost their innocence. Using these two details we noticed, we predicted that the third section will be about the four sisters before they lost their innocence because that section of the book may be about the time where the family was still on the "Island" because the conflict that forced them to move to the United States had not happened yet.
     Then, we noticed that the sisters losing their innocence can be related to the title of the book because as the Garcia sisters adapted to life in the United States, they lost touch with their native culture, leading them to the loss of their "accents," and they experienced things that were not exactly describable, leading to the sisters' loss of innocence.