The Daughter of Invention

The story’s two-part structure—with the first half focusing on Laura and the second on Yoyo—demonstrates how immigration and assimilation to American culture operate on different generations of the García family. Laura and Yoyo are both experimenting with modes of self-invention in their new lives in America. Laura’s commitment to inventing is a way of being acknowledged by those around her. The number of her different roles and identities are indicated by her names in the story: Laura, Mami, and Mom. She is Laura, a Dominican mother (mami), and an American mother. Her daughter, Yoyo, takes on many names throughout How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, but in “Daughter of Invention” she uses Yoyo, a nickname for Yolanda that translates from Spanish into “I, I.” This double “I” demonstrates the juxtaposition of Laura and Yoyo’s experiences, in which both characters seek to define themselves in their new lives.

A recurring theme in the story is Language, Communication, and Writing. Each family member relates to English differently. Laura commits to reading the New York Times and to speaking English, though she mixes up idioms and uses Spanish words while speaking to her family. Carlos, on the other hand, reads only Dominican newspapers and insists on speaking Spanish so the girls don’t lose their native tongue. Yoyo, writing alone in her room upstairs while everyone else watches TV, finally experiences feeling like herself when writing in English. Language, in the process of the family’s assimilation to the United States, is a way for each family member to express their relationship to the old world, their new world, and to each other. Laura and Yoyo both commit to speaking English, signifying a desire or necessity to refashion the way they connect and communicate with the world around them. This desire manifests in their respective inventions: Laura’s gadgets and Yoyo’s writing. Carlos, however, commits to speaking Spanish, even as his daughters begin to no longer understand him, symbolizing his desire to return home. This demonstrates how language can serve as a means of connecting with a new culture and environment, but also can disconnect family members from each other as they build their identities in America. With refashioning comes acceptance but also a loss of their old lives.

This tension of new and old manifests in the events surrounding Yoyo’s speech at school. The school, for Yoyo and her sisters, is a site of difficulty. They’re confronted by their differences as immigrants, with other children throwing rocks at them. They want to leave, but Yoyo also experiences acceptance and praise as she gains confidence using the English language. She hates the idea of giving the speech at Teacher Day because she knows she is expected to speak the praises of authority figures who represent a place that doesn’t accept her identity. When she finds Walt Whitman, however, she is inspired by his irreverence toward authority. Yoyo is drawn in by the poet’s celebration of an invented self, not one that follows the steps of authority. Laura’s love and admiration of Yoyo’s speech demonstrate the way both characters are committed to refashioning their identities and celebrating their individuality. Laura gives up inventing not because she does not think her inventions are good but because someone else succeeded off an idea she had on her own. Yoyo sees the potential of writing and mastery of language as a way to both be herself and rebel against authority—something her father rejects.

Carlos’s rejection and fury at Yoyo’s speech embody the disconnection between the old and new worlds. His rage at Yoyo’s celebration of self over the teacher in her speech reveals his fear of rebellion and his ongoing trauma from living under a dictator. Before leaving the Dominican Republic, he lived in fear of being accused of dissent, and now he feels his daughter is planning to reject authority openly. Yoyo, though, is trying on some distinctly “American” ideals in her speech. Whitman embodies a certain self-determination that she and her sisters recognize as being a part of this new world. She realizes, for instance, that giving a speech in praise of her teachers will be a sure way to lose the respect of her peers. The “reckless” path might earn her the respect of her peers, and, most significantly to Yoyo, it feels most like herself (246). Yoyo recognizes that Carlos is disconnected from the potential of her speech when she returns to the old world to deliver the strongest insult she could—“Chapita! You’re just another Chapita!” (248)—comparing him to a dictator. The anger this accusation incites in her father represents the fraught position of his own identity in the new world.

The end of Laura’s inventions marks the beginning of Yoyo’s speech writing. The story turns toward Yoyo, as though to mark the passing of the older generation’s hopes to the younger generation. After Carlos rejects Yoyo’s speech and destroys her language so it is no longer readable, Laura helps Yoyo refashion a speech that is nothing new but is instead “wrought by necessity” (251). The new speech represents a submission to the authority that Yoyo seeks to reject. Laura and Yoyo write something together that serves the function of getting Yoyo success, demonstrating that part of assimilation is quieting the truest, most reckless, parts of oneself to achieve a goal. The most notable part of the speech is the one Laura took from Carlos’s valedictorian speech, signifying the necessity of blending Carlos’s ideas of how to assimilate with Laura and Yoyo’s.

The end of the story concludes with Carlos giving Yoyo the typewriter Laura promised her earlier in the story. The three are united in this way at the end, though each has to give up something in the process. Carlos acknowledges his daughter’s independence by investing in her identity as a writer. Laura stops inventing and thus makes space for Yoyo to become an inventor herself. Yoyo has to concede her speech to her father’s will but is given a gift that will support her self-fashioning over time. The tensions between their various modes and desires for assimilation and acknowledgment resolve through the gift of a machine that will allow Yoyo to continue to articulate the truest parts of herself, in the language of the new world.