"How the García Girls Lost Their Accents" is the first novel by a Dominican-American woman to receive widespread acclaim and attention in the United States. The book portrays ethnic identity as problematic on several levels. Alvarez challenges commonly held assumptions of multiculturalism as strictly positive. She views much of immigrant identity as greatly affected by ethnic, gendered, and class conflict. According to critic Ellen McCracken, "Transgression and incestuous overtones may not be the usual fare of the mainstream’s desirable multicultural commodity, but Alvarez’s deployment of such narrative tactics foregrounds the centrality of the struggle against abuse of patriarchal power in this Dominican American’s early contribution to the new Latina narrative of the 1990s."