Salem Press

	The point is," he concluded, "`La vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.'" He stood by the window and watched Mami watering her fussy bushes as if she could flush roses out of them. "My father," he turned to me, "used to say that to my mother: `Life is a dream, Maurán, and dreams are dreams.’
- from El Doctor

Notable Latino Writers
Julia Alvarez

Born: New York, New York; March 27, 1950

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.

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.

Nonfiction: Something to Declare, 1998.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: The Secret Footprints, 2000; How Tía Lola Came to Stay, 2001; Before We Were Free, 2002; Finding Miracles, 2004.

EDITED TEXT: Old Age Ain't for Sissies, 1979.

Although she was born in the United States, Julia Alvarez (HOO-lee-ah AHL-vah-rehz) spent her most formative years in the Dominican Republic, having moved there with her parents when she was less than a month old. In her parents' native land, during her first decade of life, Alvarez was immersed in a rich culture through her exposure to an enormous extended family. Her father, the twenty-fifth legitimate child of her grandfather, not only had many sisters and brothers but also countless half-sisters and half-brothers, the fruits of his father's extensive liaisons. The family, many of its members living in close proximity to one another, was a warm if somewhat unwieldy group whom Alvarez describes as being "shabbily genteel." They, along with their servants (who in most cases had been with the family for years and were regarded almost as family), were inveterate storytellers. One of their greatest pleasures was to gather for family meals or family vacations, in the course of which they amused one another by weaving yarns, both fictional and real, to the delight of all who heard them. Alvarez, growing up in such an atmosphere, developed an early affinity for writing.

What to Read: How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Set in New York City and the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez's novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) traces the lives of the four García sisters--Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia--as they struggle to understand themselves and their cross-cultural identities. The novel is structured in three parts: 1989-1972, 1970-1960, and 1960-1956. The sisters' mother, Laura, comes from the well-known, wealthy de la Torres family, who live in the Dominican Republic, and the third part of the novel narrates the Garcías' flight from their homeland and its political problems.

When the Garcías emigrate to the United States, they plan to stay only until the situation in their homeland improves, and the sisters struggle to acclimate themselves to their new environment. The second part of the novel traces the sisters' formative years in the United States. In addition, part 2 narrates the García girls' summer trips to the Dominican Republic--their parents' way to keep them from becoming too Americanized. During these trips the García sisters realize that although they face great struggles as immigrants, they have much more freedom as young women in the United States than they do in the Dominican Republic.

Part 1 of the novel begins with Yolanda, who is known as the family poet, returning to the Dominican Republic as an adult. She discovers that the situation in her country has not changed. When she wants to travel to the coast alone, her relatives warn her against it. This early chapter establishes Yolanda as the primary narrator and introduces the tension between the traditions of the island and the new and different culture of America. In this first part readers learn about the girls' young adult lives, primarily about their sexual awareness, relationships, and marriages. Virginity is a primary issue, for the sisters' traditions and customs haunt them as they negotiate their sexual awakenings throughout their college years in the United States. It is in this first part that readers learn precisely how Americanized the García girls have become, and the rest of the novel focuses on how they have gradually lost their "accents."

Angela Athy

Living on their properties two hours out of the capital, the Alvarez family came under increasing political pressure from the regime of Generalisimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who seized power in 1930 and became increasingly despotic as his reign continued. The Alvarezes had at first been tolerated by the Trujillo regime because the family appeared apolitical. (Julia's grandfather had been the Dominican Republic's delegate to the United Nations.) Her father, a physician, joined in a plot to overthrow Trujillo. After his involvement in this plot became known, he escaped the country with his family in August, 1960, shortly before a certain arrest and possible execution for his subversive activities.

The second of her parents' four daughters, Julia was ten when she was abruptly uprooted, leaving a traditional Dominican culture in which the men went to work every day while the women, attended by servants, remained at home to raise their children. When the family arrived in New York, her father was not licensed to practice medicine in the United States (although after several years he was able to resume his profession), so they were suddenly reduced to a hand-to-mouth existence in a strange culture; a small, grubby apartment in Queens was their new home.

Alvarez relates much of their struggle in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, a story that deals with another matter close to the author's heart. One of the teachers in a Catholic school she attended in New York recognized Alvarez's ability to use language well and encouraged her to master English. Alvarez did so but in the process began speaking Spanish with an American accent, which made her feel alienated from her roots, especially when, after Trujillo's assassination, she traveled back to the Dominican Republic. Having ceased to speak Spanish as native speakers of the language do, she rankled at this loss that made her feel separated from her Dominican roots.

Linguistic concerns are central to much of Alvarez's thinking and writing. Her mother, educated at a boarding school in Boston during the 1940's, spoke English well, although her father never used the language easily. Alvarez touches on language and its implications in several of her books, including ¡Yo! and Something to Declare. When discussing mature topics, she is most comfortable using English because when she was growing up, she was used to hearing English spoken when people talked about secretive matters or about adult topics.

Alvarez's earliest formal education was in the Dominican Republic at the Carol Morgan School, an establishment run by an American missionary who was a friend of her family. When the family moved to the United States, Alvarez attended public and parochial schools before entering Abbot Academy, a New England boarding school. At seventeen, she entered Connecticut College in New London, remaining there for two years before transferring in 1969 to Middlebury College in Vermont, from which she received a bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1971.

Alvarez expressed an early desire to be a poet, and her interest in writing never waned. She enrolled in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and, in 1975, received a master's degree in creative writing from that institution. She then embarked on a two-year stint of running poetry workshops in nursing homes, schools, and prisons under the auspices of the Kentucky Arts Commission. Out of this experience grew the opportunity for Alvarez to run poetry workshops for the elderly in North Carolina. During the summers of 1979 and 1980, she attended the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Ripton, Vermont, which is sponsored by nearby Middlebury College. In 1979 she accepted a position teaching English at the Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, where she remained for two years.

A summer residency in fiction from Yaddo, the noted writers' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, enabled Alvarez to concentrate fully on her writing. This was followed by a two-year teaching position as a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Vermont in Burlington. For the 1984 academic year, Alvarez was Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The appearance of her first book of poems, Homecoming, in 1984 paved the way for her appointment to an assistant professorship in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985, a position she held until 1988, when she moved to Middlebury College to teach literature and creative writing. She held this position, rising to the rank of full professor, and became writer-in-residence there.

In 1989, Alvarez married Bill Eichner, an ophthalmologist, with whom she settled on a farm close to Middlebury. The couple became owners of a coffee plantation in the Dominican Republic, and on its grounds Alvarez and Eichner built a school to provide an education for the workers' children.

Alvarez entered the most productive period of her creative life following her marriage to Eichner. Her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, was a critical success and was awarded the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles award for excellence in literature. This novel was followed in 1994 by an important work of historical fiction, In the Time of the Butterflies, the chilling story of how Generalisimo Trujillo, rebuffed when he makes sexual advances toward a young, virginal girl who is a member of the prominent Mirabel family, has his vengeance, which results in the deaths of three of the four daughters of that family. This novel was optioned by a prominent film company and made into a movie in 2001.

Alvarez's first children's book, The Secret Footprints, was followed by How Tía Lola Came to Stay. Her third children's book, Before We Were Free, again touches on the despotism of the Trujillo regime, this time seeking to inform a youthful audience of some of the excesses of the period from 1930 to Trujillo's assassination in 1961.

R. Baird Shuman

Learn More
Alvarez, Julia. "Julia Alvarez." http://www.alvarezjulia.com/. Accessed March 22, 2005. The author's website contains a list of books, articles, and interviews, scheduled appearances and biographical information.

Bing, Jonathan. "Julia Alvarez: Books that Cross Borders." Publishers Weekly 243 (December 16, 1996). A concise view of Alvarez's writing, dealing mostly with In the Time of the Butterflies and Homecoming.

Henao, Eda B. The Colonel Subject's Search for Nation, Culture, and Identity in the Works of Julia Alvarez, Rosario, Ferré, and Ana Lydia Vega. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 2003. Examines fiction written in English and Spanish by women writers from the Dominican Republican and the Puerto Rican cultures. Describes how these writers' works challenge traditional and stereotypical assumptions about the representation of women.

Lyons, Bonnie, and Bill Oliver. "A Clean Windshield: An Interview with Julia Alvarez." In Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Alvarez deals with the effect that Dominican politics had upon her writing. She discusses her Dominican upbringing.

Mujcinovic, Fatima. Postmodern Cross-culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alverez. Modern American Literature 42. New York: P. Lang, 2004. A literary and cultural analysis of the work of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American women writers, including Alvarez. Mujcinovic views these writers' work from a contemporary feminist, political, post-colonial, and psychoanalytical perspective.

Ortiz-Marquez, Maribel. "From Third World Politics to First World Practices: Contemporary Latina Writers in the United States." In Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women's Literature and Film, edited by Ghosh Bishmupriya and Bose Brinda. New York: Garland, 1997. Places In the Time of the Butterflies in a political context.

Postlewate, Marisa Herrera. How and Why I Write: Redefining Hispanic Women's Writing and Experience. Currents in Comparative Romance Language and Literature 131. New York: P. Lang, 2003. Analyzes the works of Alvarez and three other Hispanic women writers to describe how their work redefines autobiographical writing.

Sirias, Silvio. Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. This compact volume offers an excellent concise overview of the body of Alvarez's writing.