This summer, the Tillamook School Board voted to remove Julia Alvarez’s novel “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” from Tillamook High School’s 10th-grade honors English curriculum.
“How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” originally published more than 30 years ago, closely mirrors Alvarez’s own life experience. It tells the story of four sisters growing up in two cultures when their family flees from the Dominican Republic to New York.
The book is labeled a notable book by such groups as the American Library Association and The New York Times, and it earned Alvarez the PEN Oakland/Jefferson Miles Award for excellence the year it was published. Alvarez is a critically acclaimed author, known for having “blazed a trail for a generation of Latino authors,” as stated in a PBS documentary.
The book became a subject of discussion for Tillamook leaders following complaints from students in the 10th-grade honors English class last spring, along with their parents, as reported by the Tillamook Headlight Herald. Complaints centered around several sexually explicit passages in the novel.
Julia Alvarez's novel 'How the García Girls Lost Their Accents' at the Salem Public Library on Sept. 19, 2024. The Tillamook School Board recently voted to remove the book from Tillamook High School's 10th-grade honors English curriculum.
Natalie Pate, Natalie Pate / OPB
Tillamook School District administrators worked with community members and the Tillamook Education Association to review Alvarez’s novel. The process is outlined in the district’s complaint review policy.
“The majority of the committee felt that this text was not suitable for use as curricular material for 10th-grade English Language Arts,” said Superintendent Matt Ellis in a letter to the board this August.
The recommendation to remove the book passed on a 4-3 vote by the committee — four members voted not to retain the book in the class’s curriculum, two voted to retain it as part of the curriculum while offering students alternate texts to read, and one voted to retain it without restriction, according to the Headlight Herald. The board would later solidify the decision to remove it.
“However,” Ellis said in his letter, “the novel will still be available to students through our school libraries.”
Ellis also recommended the school board review its policies and procedures regarding things like curricular adoptions, challenges and complaints.
The small coastal school district is an example of similar conversations affecting schools and public libraries across the state and country.
Tillamook action part of broader pattern of restricting books
Attempts to ban or restrict books are on the rise nationally.
Challenges of unique titles across the country surged 65% in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest level ever documented by the American Library Association.
The ALA defines a “challenge” as any attempt to remove or restrict materials based on the objections of a person or group. “Banning” is the removal of those materials.
It isn’t just about a person expressing a point of view. These are formal attempts to remove materials, “thereby restricting the access of others,” according to the library association.
Challenges come in several forms, from formal complaints or requests for removal to hiding, stealing, defacing or discarding items.
There’s been a growing push to challenge titles at public libraries in addition to school libraries. Experts said groups and individuals demanding the censorship of multiple titles — often dozens or hundreds at a time, according to the association — are driving much of the latest surge.
One trend happening here and nationally is that libraries receive removal requests from people living in other parts of the country. The Corvallis-Benton County Public Library, as one example, has implemented a stopgap policy that requires complainants to be eligible for a local library card.
Though challenges can come from varying ideological platforms, about half of the books targeted nationally in recent data focused on LGBTQ+ people and people of color, according to the ALA.
Oregon data shows similar trends. According to the Oregon State Library’s “Oregon Intellectual Freedom Clearinghouse” 2024 report, there were 63 official challenges in the last year, a 44% increase over the year prior.
Challenges occurred at 40 different libraries, schools and colleges, in both rural and urban areas, according to the report, though there were more challenges made in rural areas. They occurred in 20 of Oregon’s 36 counties, focused in western and northeast Oregon.
About 18% of the challenged titles were restricted or removed. The rest remained on the shelves as they had before — or were still under review when the report was published this month.
Youth or teen materials are disproportionately challenged every year, the report states. This pattern continued this year as well. The top three most contested titles — “Beyond Magenta” by Susan Kuklin, “Flamer” by Mike Curato and “Heartstopper” (Vol. 1) by Alice Oseman — are all about the LGBTQ+ community and are written for teens.
Parents, authors step up to oppose restrictions on ‘García Girls’ book
At its August meeting, the Tillamook School Board approved the committee’s decision to remove Alvarez’s novel on a 3-1 vote, with Board Chair Kris Lachenmeier voting against it. The board’s fifth member, Jeannie Christensen, was absent. According to the meeting minutes, several people spoke in support of or expressed concerns about the book during public comment.
Since then, hundreds of community members, illustrators and authors have spoken out against removing the book from the English curriculum, with many calling on the school board to reconsider. Some have submitted op-eds to local news outlets as well.
Complaints shared in the Sept. 9 meeting also addressed the process used to review and remove the book, as reported by the Headlight Herald. Board members stood by the decision in the recent meeting.
Among the authors questioning the decision was Alvarez herself.
“When I arrived in this country as a young immigrant in 1960 with a traumatized family fleeing a bloody dictatorship, my sisters and I were confronted with many challenges, with no ‘roadmap’ as to how to understand this brave new world,” Alvarez wrote in a letter to the editor of the Tillamook County Pioneer.
Alvarez is not a Tillamook resident, but her agent said community members asked her to weigh in on the controversy.
“Thankfully, I found wonderful teachers and librarians who introduced me to books and became my guides here,” she wrote. “It is because of them that I became a writer and also a teacher, spending over 44 years teaching every grade level, from elementary school to high school and college.”
But Alvarez said there was still something missing — no books were available back then that reflected the stories of people like her and her family.
“Part of my motivation in writing that first novel was to try to understand, through character and story, the challenges we faced as a family,” Alvarez said. “It was the novel I wished I had been able to read and share with my classmates in the hope that it would deepen our understanding of each other.”
Since “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” was published in 1991, Alvarez has written several other novels, poetry collections, essays, nonfiction titles and children’s books. Among her awards, Alvarez received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2013.
“García Girls” has been challenged in other parts of the country before. In a recent op-ed in the Tillamook County Pioneer, community member Jim Heffernan wrote about a town on the East Coast banning the book back in 2008: “I’ve been accustomed to small minded attitudes in places like rural North Carolina, but I thought we were better than that in Tillamook.”
Julia Alvarez's novel "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents" sits on a shelf at the Salem Public Library on Sept. 19, 2024.
Natalie Pate, Natalie Pate / OPB
In her recent letter, Alvarez mentioned the parent of three Tillamook school children who “took the time to read the contested novel, evaluate its contents, attend meetings to listen to all concerns, and after this thoughtful process, wrote a letter to the editor suggesting a more thoughtful approach.
“[The parent] understands that to cancel books and eliminate voices from our schools and libraries undermines a core value in education: to create thoughtful, well-informed, big-hearted imaginations in our students,” she wrote. “[The] commitment to defending a diverse and expansive curriculum coming from a member of the community gives me hope.”
Alvarez’s novel focuses on the experiences of a family of Latino descent. More than a quarter of the approximately 2,000 students enrolled in the Tillamook School District identify as Hispanic or Latino — roughly the same as Oregon’s average.
While some who testified to the school board in favor of removing the book said they felt the content was inappropriate — with one going so far as to say that including it in the curriculum was “grooming” — others said they felt it reflected real-life stories.
The Headlight Herald reported that one parent testified during the August board meeting in favor of keeping the book, saying that as a Latina mother in the district, she felt the book reflected her mother’s lived experience as an immigrant. She also argued that students are exposed to more sexual material than what is in the book on the internet, according to the article.
OPB made multiple attempts to contact Board Chair Lachenmeier, Superintendent Ellis and a communications official for the district for this story. We did not hear back.
“Having come from a dictatorship where books were censored, and discussions were discouraged, I know how important it is that we protect not just our homes, communities and borders but also our bookshelves,” Alvarez wrote in her letter.
She added that it’s important that students, guided by their teachers, engage with characters, situations, challenges, tragedies and triumphs that they are facing or will face in their lives.
“Stories are our shared legacy as a human family,” she said, “and our children are the poorer for being prevented from claiming that heritage.”