Interrelated stories narrated by the four Garcia sisters describe their difficulties adjusting to New York City after leaving the Dominican Republic. Her popular first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, was published in 1991. The immigrant experience and bicultural identity is the subject of much of Alvarez’s fiction and poetry. In the Time of the Butterflies was a finalist in 1995 for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, selected a Notable Book by the American Library Association in 1994 and chosen as one of the Best Books for Young Adults by the Young Adult Library Services Association and the American Library Association in 1995. Alvarez says she wrote the book as a testament to these remarkable women who “have served as models for women fighting against injustices of all kinds.”
The book has alternating first-person narratives from the three martyred sisters and the fourth surviving sister, Dedé. When asked why she wrote In the Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez said that “being a survivor placed a responsibility on me to tell the story of these brave young women who did not survive the dictatorship.” In the Time of the Butterflies is a fictional account of the murders of the revolutionary Mirabal sisters. “Language is the only homeland, Czeslow Milosz once observed, and indeed, English, not the United States, was where I landed and sunk deep roots.” “I consider this radical uprooting from my culture, my native language, my country, the reason I began writing,” Alvarez has said. She was homesick and faced alienation and prejudice. The Alvarez family settled in Queens, N.Y.Īlvarez was 10 years old when her family returned to the United States, and she had a difficult time adjusting to immigrant life and learning English.
They returned to the United States in August of 1960, four months before the founders of the underground, the Mirabal sisters, were brutally murdered by the government. When her parents became involved in an underground movement to overthrow Trujillo, the Alvarez family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic in order to escape imprisonment. Three months later, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic after a self-imposed exile from General Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 17, 1950, the second of four daughters.
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