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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, 4th Ed.
Julia Alvarez

Born: New York, New York; March 27, 1950
Also Known As: Julia Altagracia Maria Teresa Alvarez

Principal Long Fiction
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991
In the Time of the Butterflies, 1994
Yo!, 1997 (sequel to How the García Girls Lost Their Accents)
In the Name of Salomé, 2000
The Cafecito Story, 2001
Saving the World, 2006

Other Literary Forms
Julia Alvarez has written in several genres, something for which, she says, "I blame my life." Her publications include the nonfiction Once upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (2007), which she was invited to write. She also has written numerous essays, including the autobiographical Something to Declare (1998). Her favorite genre is poetry, and she has published many poems in literary journals, plus several books of poems, including The Other Side/El otro lado (1995) and Seven Trees (1998), which features prints by her daughter-in-law, artist Sara Eichner. She also has drawn on her Latino heritage for a substantial number of books for children and young adults, notably Before We Were Free (2002) and How Tía Lola Came to Stay (2001).

Achievements
Julia Alvarez's books have been published in at least eleven languages, and are widely available around the world. Some are bilingual (English and Spanish) editions. She has won a number of prizes for her poetry, including from the Academy of American Poetry in 1974, and was awarded a Robert Frost Fellowship in Poetry in 1986. Three of her works, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Before We Were Free, were chosen as Notable Books by the American Library Association (ALA); the latter also received the ALA's Pura Belpré Award, presented for outstanding literary works for youth and children that "best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience." Alvarez has received honorary degrees for John Jay College of the City University of New York and from Union College of Schenectady, New York. Her works have contributed substantially to the Latina voice in contemporary American literature.

Biography
Julia Alvarez was born Julia Altagracia Maria Teresa Alvarez in New York City in 1950, the second of four daughters, but her family returned to the Dominican Republic when she was still an infant. Her mother and her father, a doctor, both came from large, affluent Dominican families that had respect for and connections to the United States. Alvarez and her sisters grew up in a large and traditional extended family; she remembers the men going to work and the children being raised with their cousins by a large group of aunts and maids. She came to recognize the restrictions these women faced: One aunt was trained as a physician but did not practice; another aunt, known as the one who read books, was unconventional and unmarried. This "reading aunt" gave Alvarez a copy of the classic collection of folktales One Thousand and One Nights, introducing her to her "first muse," Scheherazade, a princess who was dark-skinned and resourceful. Alvarez, fascinated by the possibilities of storytelling, would draw on her experiences with her aunts, maids, cousins, and siblings for several of her novels, notably How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

Alvarez was ten years old when her father's involvement in a plot to overthrow Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was discovered. With the help of a U.S. agent, the family escaped and returned to New York City. Although Alvarez yearned for this "homecoming," the adjustment was difficult for all. Her father had to retrain as a physician. The family lived in a small apartment in Queens, isolated from other Dominicans and without the support of their extended family. Alvarez herself was homesick and faced the prejudice of her classmates. This experience as an immigrant would be a major focus of her writing.

Alvarez went to college in the late 1960's and early 1970's, struggling to reconcile her traditional Dominican background with her new and chaotic culture. She earned her bachelor's degree at Middlebury College in Vermont in 1971 and her master's degree in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1975. She married and divorced twice before she was thirty years old, unable to combine marriage with the life of writing that had become her passion. For a number of years, she worked at part-time and temporary academic jobs to support herself. Both Alvarez's professional and personal lives stabilized at the end of the 1980's. In 1988, she began a long-term association as a professor at Middlebury; in 1998, she entered a new arrangement with the college, becoming a writer in residence so that she would have more time for writing.

In 1989, Alvarez was married a third time, this time to Bill Eichner, a doctor and son of a Nebraska farm couple. This relationship gave Alvarez a new culture to negotiate, a new appreciation for farming and gardening, and a new project. She and Eichner started a sustainable organic-coffee farm and a school to teach reading and writing to illiterate coffee farmers and their families in the Dominican Republic. This project is the subject of the novel A Cafecito Story, which Alvarez calls an "eco-parable" and a love story, written primarily for young readers.

Analysis
If Julia Alvarez's life were a novel, postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist critics, especially, would be interested in analyzing it. She has referred to herself as a "Dominican hyphen American," adding, "As a fiction writer, I find that the most exciting things happen in the realm of that hyphen--the place where two worlds collide or blend together." This is the place postcolonial writers call the liminal space, the "place between." It is the place where Alvarez has lived her life, and it is the setting of her fiction.

Alvarez considers herself an American, but her writing is concerned with both Dominican and American culture and with the dilemma of immigrants trying to bridge the gaps. Because she is aware that most of her American readers, like her young American classmates from the past, will not be familiar with anything Dominican, she also patiently works to bridge this gap as well. It is understandable, given this focus, that some scholars consider her a Caribbean writer, connecting her to Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid, among others.

Alvarez's sense of living in liminal space and having to deal with the collision of cultures is mirrored in the fragmented form of her novels, which some scholars consider short stories; in her fluid use of time; and in her use of multiple points of view. This style results in a confusion between reality and fiction. While Alvarez addresses general concerns of the postcolonial and postmodern, her novels focus primarily on how these issues affect women. Through her numerous female characters, she examines sexism in Latino culture, pressures faced by women living in dictatorships, and misogyny in both external and internalized forms. It is not coincidental that her most intriguing characters are women who rebel against the existence of repressive boundaries (for example, Yo in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Miranda in The Time of the Butterflies).

Alvarez is not only interested in examining cultural, ethnic, and gender boundaries; another main concern in her work is language--its use to define and limit, especially immigrants and the lower classes, and its possibilities for a writer, especially a bilingual one. Her childhood experience in an oral culture, her own love of poetry, and her struggles to learn English and to maintain her fluency in Spanish all contribute to her thoughtful use of language in her writings.

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Alvarez's first novel is based on the experiences of her own family. The book is divided into three sections by time, which moves backward in this account. Each section is subdivided into five vignettes, stories focused on a single character or group of characters. To aid her readers, Alvarez provides a genealogical chart at the beginning of the book, tracing both the de la Torres's (Mami's family) and the Garcías to the conquistadores. Readers also become aware of where the four García girls--Carla, Sandra (Sandi), Yolanda (Yo), and Sofia (Fifi)--fit in these two large and important families. Alvarez has noted that Yo's name is a play on the Spanish word for self or "I"; indeed, Yo is the storyteller in this work.

The first section (1989-1972) details Yo's return to the Dominican Republic after a five-year absence, looking for a home but not finding it. This section presents the aging of the parents, and the marriages and struggles, including Sandi's breakdown, of the adult "girls." Section two (1970-1960, the ten years after the family's exile) focuses on the parents' struggle to adjust to American life, the father's acceptance that conditions in his homeland mean staying in the United States, and the tensions between the parents and their daughters, who are having their own problems in the United States in the 1960's. During this period, the parents decide that summers with the family on the island will help solve the problems, but the sisters have to "rescue" Fifi from the prospect of a traditional island marriage with her sexist cousin, Manuel. The final section, 1960-1956, depicts life on the island before the family's exile, when America was represented by toys from FAO Schwarz. Because of the reverse chronology, readers get a clear picture of what the García family gained--and lost--when they were exiled.

In the Time of the Butterflies
Alvarez's second novel is a fictionalized account of the story of the three Mirabel sisters, Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa (Maté), who were brutally murdered by Trujillo in November, 1960, shortly after the Alvarez family fled to the United States. Las Mariposas (the butterflies, which was the code name of the sisters) were among the founders of the underground resistance to which Alvarez's father belonged. Alvarez refers to this book as one she felt compelled to write.

In this account, Alvarez focuses on the characters, beginning with the surviving sister, Dede, in 1994, as she is waiting to talk to a "gringo writer," clearly Alvarez, coming to interview her about her sisters. Dede, now in her sixties, still maintains a museum in honor of Las Mariposas; she has become their storyteller. Although the rest of the book is written in the first person, from the rotating viewpoints of the three butterflies, Dede's sections are third-person, limited point of view, which emphasizes her distance from the others and their story.

In the Time of the Butterflies is divided into three parts, starting in the late 1930's and moving to November 25, 1960, the day the sisters were murdered. Each sister has one chapter in each of the sections; Dede speaks the epilogue, using first person for the first time. Each sisters is presented clearly. Patria, the oldest, is the most traditional. A devout Catholic, she marries young and focuses on her husband, his family farm, and her children. She is brought to the revolution through the church: along with her priest and others, she is radicalized during a retreat in the mountains after they witness a government massacre of peasants, one of whom looks like Patria's young son.

Minerva is always rebellious, understanding even as a youth the nature of Trujillo and his dictatorship. She is attracted to a mournful classmate, whose sorrow she finds has been caused by Trujillo's murder of all male members of her family, including a young brother. Minerva witnesses Trujillo's seduction of the most beautiful and accomplished young woman in her school, whose life is destroyed by this attention. Minerva's own beauty attracts Trujillo's notice, and she puts herself and her family in jeopardy when she publicly slaps him. She becomes a revolutionary early, is attracted to two young radicals, and marries one of them.

Alvarez presents Maté, the youngest sister, through the pages of Maté's diary. At first, the entries seem typical of any young girl and are even a bit silly. As the story progresses, Maté matures, and the diary and its ominously torn-out pages symbolize how even innocent thoughts can be dangerous in a dictatorship.

Dede stays outside the intrigue because of the attitude of her husband, but ironically, she divorces him after the death of her sisters. Dede, though devastated by her loss, rallies to take care of her extended family, including her sisters' children. Hers is a feminist voice, criticizing the sisters' husbands, who are eventually released from prison and go on with their lives and to new families. The epilogue suggests, however, that she is finally ready to embrace her own life, including herself, "the one who survived," as part of the story.

In a postscript, Alvarez discusses her connection to the history of the Mirabel sisters and her approach to telling their story. She has also included an essay titled "Chasing the Butterflies" in Something to Declare, which discusses her 1986 trip to the Dominican Republic and her first interviews with people who knew the Mirabel sisters or had witnessed parts of their last day. In the Time of the Butterflies was made into a feature film (2001) starring Salma Hayek.

Yo!
Alvarez has said that Yo! is not a sequel to her successful first novel, but there is a clear connection. Yo, the writer of her own successful novel, has angered her family and friends for turning them into "fictional fodder." This novel is their answer; in fifteen separate pieces, the novel presents varied perspectives on Yo, including an ironic one from her mother, a poignant one from a landlady, a frightening one from a stalker, and a tender one from her father. Alvarez creates believable characters with distinctive voices, at the same time she presents a complex portrait of Yo.

Elsie Galbreath Haley

Other Major Works
Poetry: Homecoming: Poems, 1984 (revised and expanded 1996 as Homecoming: New and Collected Poems, 1996); The Other Side/El otro lado, 1995; Seven Trees, 1998; Cry Out: Poets Protest the War, 2003 (multiple authors); The Woman I Kept to Myself, 2004.

Nonfiction: Something to Declare, 1998; Once upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA, 2007.

Children's Literature: The Secret Footprints, 2000; How Tía Lola Came to Stay, 2001; Before We Were Free, 2002; Finding Miracles, 2004; A Gift of Gracias, 2005.

Edited Text: Old Age Ain't for Sissies, 1979.

Bibliography
Johnson, Kelly Lyon. Julia Alvarez: Writing a New Place on the Map. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. The first book-length examination of Alvarez's writings. Johnson explores shared themes, ideals, and issues of understanding cultural identity in a global society. Notes that Alvarez embraces the notion of mestizaje, the mixing of races.

Luis, William. "A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents." Callaloo 23, no. 3 (Summer, 2000): 839-849. A study of Alvarez's tale of the search for identity in the "space" between two homelands.

Oliver, Kelly. "Everyday Revolutions, Shifting Power, and Feminine Genius in Julia Alvarez's Fiction." In Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom, edited by Christa Davis Acampora and Angela L. Cotten. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. In this collection of essays on the power of creativity to transform the lives of women of color, Oliver explores how Alvarez's female characters use their everyday genius to counter, for example, sexism and misogyny. Oliver places this "feminine genius" on similar footing with the genius of larger-scale revolutionary acts.

Sirias, Silvis. Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. A basic guide to Alvarez's works, with chapters on four of her novels. Includes chapters examining Alvarez's life as well as the Latino/Latina novel.

Socolovsky, Maya. "Patriotism, Nationalism, and the Fiction of History in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salome." Latin American Literary Review 34, no. 68 (July-December, 2006): 5-24. Socolovsky is concerned with Alvarez's ability in these novels between remembering historical events and the risk of hagiography, or forgetting the events by overmemorializing them.