How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer

How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer is a 2005 American comedy written and directed by Georgina Garcia Riedel. It is Reidel’s first time directing a full-length film. The story is about three generations of Mexican-American women in small town Arizona. It features TV and film actress America Ferrera as Blanca Garcia, a teenage girl looking for love who finds herself confronted with the complexities of intimate physical relationships.

Her mother and grandmother, played by Elizabeth Pena and Lucy Gallardo, respectively, also find romantic adventures during the same summer, with radically different approaches and outcomes. Exploring issues of desire and fidelity, How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer was generally well received by critics and was screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Both audiences and critics alike praised its frank themes of how male-female relationship issues transcend age and experience and how cultural taboos and mores influence the women’s behavior.