Foil
Character Role Analysis
"The four girls" versus "the hair-and-nails cousins"
How much has the immigration experience changed Carla, Sandi, Yoyo and Fifi? We can tell by comparing them to their cousins who stayed on the Island. As kids, Yoyo and her sisters are just like their cousins; so much so that it's hard to tell the families apart. Each sister has her own best friend cousin (or bffc, our new favorite acronym), and they all happily wreak havoc together.
But something changes after Carlos and Laura move their family to the United States. All those bffc relationships have to break up. That's when "the four girls" really become "the four girls"; they're not indistinguishable from their cousins anymore. The cousins in the Dominican Republic continue to live privileged but strictly controlled lives; the four girls have to get used to second-hand stuff and suburbs, but eventually they also get a taste of the "American teenage good life" (2.1.6): boys and dances and football games.
From then on, whenever the four girls return to the Island, they feel different. They even start to look different. The female Island cousins earn the title "the hair-and-nails cousins" (check out the family tree at the beginning), because they spend so much effort trying to look like supermodels. The four girls think that's kind of lame. When Fifi spends a semester on the Island and starts wearing makeup, her sisters know she's going over to the dark side. Yoyo worries: "She's turned into a S.A.P. [...] A Spanish-American princess" (2.1.54). (Ouch.)
The four girls have a lot more freedom than their "over-chaperoned girl cousins" (2.1.34). Plus, they get to brag about it; they enjoy shocking "their Island cousins with stories of their escapades in the States" (1.1.24).
The hair-and-nails cousins don't understand why the four girls are so annoyed by all the strict rules governing female behavior. And the four girls roll their eyes at their cousins' lack of understanding. Then they give up trying to lecture their cousins. There's no use trying "to raise consciousness" of feminism on the Island; "It'd be like trying for cathedral ceilings in a tunnel, or something" (2.1.84).
By the time the García girls reach adulthood, the differences between their lives and those of their cousins are striking. No, it's not just the way they dress—the cousins in colorful, tight jersey dresses, and Yoyo like kind of a hippie. It's also their lifestyles, and the confidence that goes with it. Yoyo sees her cousins as stable, domestic and happy, while "she and her sisters have led such turbulent lives—so many husbands, homes, jobs, wrong turns among them" (1.1.55).