Julia Alvarez: 1950—: Author

Dominican author Julia Alvarez has given voice to the themes of displacement, alienation, and search for identity in her poetry and fiction. Thrown into a foreign language and culture as a child, Alvarez found refuge in books and writing. She discovered through words she could build her own worlds that both revealed and transcended the meaning of her life. Alvarez became a nationally acclaimed author in 1991 at the age of 41 with the publication of her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accent. Her writings include four novels, two collections of poetry, a book of essays, and two children's stories.

From Latina to "Gringa"

Although Alvarez was born in New York City on March 27, 1950, soon after her birth her parents returned to their native home of the Dominican Republic, where her father, a doctor, ran a local hospital. The second of four sisters, she was reared close to her mother's family, amidst a slew of cousins, aunts, uncles, and maids. When Alvarez was ten years old, her father became actively involved in the underground coalition poised to overthrow dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. As a result, the police set up surveillance on their home and Alvarez's father was warned by an American agent that his arrest was imminent. To avoid this fate the family fled the country.

Their destination was New York, where Alvarez's father had secured a fellowship at a hospital. For Alvarez, the mystique of the United States loomed large in her ten-year-old mind. "All my childhood I had dressed like an American, eaten American foods, and befriended American children," Alvarez told American Scholar. "I had gone to an American school and spent most of the day speaking and reading English. At night, my prayers were full of blond hair and blue eyes and snow.… All my childhood I had longed for this moment of arrival. And here I was, an American girl, coming home at last."

Once the plane landed in New York, Alvarez's story-book image of life in the United States was quickly shattered by the harsh realities of life as an immigrant. Uprooted from her culture, her native language, and extended family, Alvarez, once a vivacious child who made friends easily, became introverted. Her father took her to a library, and Alvarez discovered her love for the written word. "Back home, I had been a very poor student, a tomboy, and a troublemaker, so my father was eager to encourage this new trend in [me]," she told Library Journal. Books became her new home. She explained to Frontera Magazine, "Coming to this country I discovered books, I discovered that it was a way to enter into a portable homeland that you could carry around in your head. You didn't have to suffer what was going on around you. I found in books a place to go."

At the age of 13 Alvarez left home to attend boarding school. Already an avid reader, she realized her desire to write after an English teacher gave her class a writing assignment, asking them to write an essay about themselves. What began as homework turned into self-discovery. Years later Alvarez reflected that it was her feelings of alienation and displacement that pushed her toward a life as an author. She is fond of quoting exiled Polish poet Czeslow Milosz, who said, "Language is the only homeland." By the time she had reached high school, Alvarez knew with certainty that she wanted to become a writer.

Student, Itinerant Poet, and Teacher

In 1967 Alvarez enrolled at Connecticut College. "I grew up in that generation of women thinking I would keep house. Especially with my Latino background, I wasn't even expected to go to college," she told Publishers Weekly. "I had never been raised to have a public voice." Yet the appeal of writing outweighed her cultural and family heritage, and under the tutelage of encouraging teachers, Alvarez began to take her writing seriously. For her efforts she won the Benjamin T. Marshall Prize in poetry at Connecticut College in 1968 and again in 1969. After attending the Breadloaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, she transferred to the school. In 1971 she was awarded the Creative Writing Prize, and in the same year earned her B.A. from Middlebury, graduating with highest honors. With her confidence growing, Alvarez enrolled at Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies. In 1974 she won the American Academy of Poetry Prize; the following year she was awarded a M.A. in creative writing.

After her graduation, Alvarez became something of an itinerant poet, writer, teacher, and lecturer, claiming 15 different addresses over the next 13 years. From 1975 to 1977 she served with the Kentucky Arts Commission as one of three poets in the state's poetry-in-the-schools programs. In 1978 she was involved with pilot projects funded by the National Endowment for the Arts: a bilingual program in Delaware and a senior citizen program in North Carolina. Alvarez enjoyed her years of travel. She told Publishers Weekly, "I felt like the [Walt] Whitman poem where he travels throughout the country and now will do nothing but listen. I was listening. I was seeing the inside of so many places and so many people, from the Mennonites of Southern Kentucky to the people of Appalachia.… I was a migrant poet. I would go anywhere."

In 1979 she began her career as a teacher of English and creative writing. After two years as an instructor at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts, Alvarez joined the faculty at the University of Vermont in1981. In 1984 she moved to George Washington University, where she served the year as the Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer. In 1985 she became an English professor at the University of Illinois. During the winter of 1988 she served as the resident writer in an artists' colony in the Dominican Republic. In the same year she returned to her alma mater, Middlebury College as an assistant professor of English. She was awarded tenure in 1991 and named full professor in 1996. Two years later, she remitted her professorship to become the college's writer-in-residence, which allows her to continue to teach creative writing on a part-time basis and advise Latino students and English majors.

Poet and Author

In 1984 Alvarez published her first collection of poetry, Homecoming, featuring a 33-sonnet sequence entitled "33." The poem, which fills nearly have the book, is exercise in self-examination carried out by Alvarez, who at the age of 33, found herself confronting middle age with no permanent home, no family of her own, and no specific career plan. The poems in Homecoming often focus on the search for love and the pain of failed relationships, with such verse offerings as "Are we all ill with acute loneliness,/chronic patients trying to recover/the will to love?" In the section entitled "Housekeeping," Alvarez delves into the meaning found in mundane daily tasks, such as folding clothes, sweeping, washing windows, and making bread. In 1996 Alvarez published an expanded edition, Home-coming: New and Collected Poems, this time featuring 46 sonnets to match her age at the time.

In 1991 she published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. In many ways a fictional account of Alvarez's own experiences, the book is a series of 15 interrelated stories about a family from the Dominican Republic who immigrates to the United States. Like Alvarez's family, the García family consists of four sisters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia. The story, which covers a 33-year span, examines the struggles of the girls-turned-women as they attempt to reestablish their identity after leaving their privileged social standing in the Dominican Republic to forge new lives as immigrants in the United States. Alvarez received high praise for How the García Girls Lost Their Accent; Ilan Stavans in Commonweal referred to it as a "delightful novel, a tour de force that holds a unique place in the context of the ethnic literature from which it emerges."

In 1994 Alvarez published her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, a 300-page fictional account of the lives of three sisters, Patria, Minerva, and Maria Terese (Mate) Mirabal, who were assassinated in 1960 during the last days of the Trujillo dictatorship, just four months after Alvarez and her family had fled the country. Revered for their martyrdom, they are known in the Dominican Republic as las mariposas, meaning the butterflies, which served as their code name during the resistance. Upon its publication, Kay Pritchett noted in World Literature Today, "With In the Time of the Butterflies a superb, heartrending story, Julia Alvarez has again displayed her fine talent as a novelist. Especially noteworthy is her ability to maintain an equilibrium between the political and the human, the tragic and the lyrical. What we remember most is not the harshness of the times but the Butterflies themselves, along with a delicious flavor of their homeland." In 1999 Showtime produced the film version of In the Time of the Butterflies.

The Other Side/El Otro Lado, Alvarez's second collection of poems, was published in 1995. The poems, organized into five sections, lyrically follow Alvarez through her journeys as a Latina immigrant. She begins with the poem "Bilingual Sestina," an account of leaving the Dominican Republic to enter a new land of strange language and cultural. Alvarez ends the collection having come full circle back to her native land in the title poem "The Other Side/El Otro Lado," in which she writes, "There is nothing left to cry for,/nothing left but the story/of our family's grand adventure/from one language to another." This collection of poems introduced Alvarez's poetry to many readers who had only previously known her fiction.

Alvarez's third novel, ¡Yo!, published in 1997, is a continuation and an elaboration of the life of Yolanda from How the García Girls Lost Their Accent. Whereas the other sisters have made peace with their lives as Dominican-Americans, Yolanda still feels torn between two cultures. Her life in the United States has taught her independence and assertiveness, which made her a female oddity in her native land. Yet despite her failings, Alvarez leaves room in her tale for Yolanda to seek redemption and find wisdom.

Something to Declare, published in 1998, is a nonfiction accounting of Alvarez's personal experiences of both alienation and assimilation as a "hyphenated American," along with a rendering of her life as a writer and teacher. In a People Weekly review, Laurie Jamison wrote, "A likable storyteller, [Alvarez] also writes with candor and humor about her picky eating habits, her decision not to have children and her vagabond life as a writer and teacher." Alvarez titled her book Something to Declare after having decided that most questions posed to her by her readers can be summed up as "Do you have anything more to declare?' These 24 autobiographical stories are her response.

Alvarez returned to historical fiction in In the Name of Salomé, published in 2000. The novel, which covers more than 100 years, tells the story of Salomé Urena de Henriquez, the nineteenth-century poet laureate of the Dominican Republic, and her daughter, Camila Henriquez Urena. Salomé, who is considered a national hero because of her patriotic and revolutionary poems, died of tuberculosis when her daughter was three years old. Struggled with her mother's death, Camila was taught by her aunt to end her prayers with the irreverent yet comforting saying, "In the name of the Father, the Son, and my Mother, Salomé." Publishers Weekly referred to it as "one of the most moving political novels of the past half century."

Children's Books

After In the Name of Salomé, Alvarez's next two literary efforts were children's books. In 2000 she published The Secret Footprints, which was geared for children from ages four to seven and based on a traditional Dominican fable. In 2001 Alvarez published How Tia Lola Came to Stay. Written for children from ages 9 to 12, the book tells the story of nine-year-old Miguel, who struggles to adjust to his mother's divorce and subsequent move from New York to Vermont. Life is turned on end yet again when Miguel's colorful aunt, Tia Lola, comes from the Dominican Republic to stay with the family.

Much of Alvarez's writings come from her personal experiences of alienation, marginalization, and the need for self-discovery. "People think that we write because we know things," she explained to Jean Charbonneau of the Denver Post. "But we write because we want to find things out, in the way that stories only can help us understand, without giving any real answers, but with all their richness, in a way that facts and figures don't do it." Alvarez has struck a common chord, not only among Latinos, but also with a larger audience that find much to contemplate and learn from homelands that Alvarez creates with words.

Selected Writings

Novels

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991.

In the Time of the Butterflies, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994.

¡Yo!, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1996.

In the Name of Salomé, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2000.

Poetry

Homecoming, Grove Press (New York, NY), 1984, revised edition, Dutton, 1995.

The Other Side/El Otro Lado, Dutton, 1995.

Seven Trees, Kat Ran Press, 1999.

Other

Something to Declare (essays), Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998.

The Secret Footprints (children's picture book), illustrations by Fabian Negrin, Knopf, 2000.

How Tia Lola Come to Stay (young adult), Knopf, 2001.

Sources

Books

Authors and Artists for Young Adults. Gale Research, 2001.

Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. Gale Research, 1996.

Periodicals

Americas, January/February 2001.

Commonweal, April 10, 1992.

Denver Post, July 9, 2000.

Library Journal, August 1998; September 1999; May 2000; September 2000.

The Progressive, July 1995.

Publishers Weekly,April 5, 1991; July 11, 1994; April 24, 1995; March 18, 1996; October 14, 1996; December 16, 1996; July 13, 1998; September 21, 1998; May 15, 2000; August 14, 2000; February 26, 2001.

World Literature Today, autumn 1995; autumn 1997; winter 2001.

On-line

Contemporary Authors Online, www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC

Frontera Magazine, www.fronteramag.com/issue5/Alvarez

Middlebury College, www.middlebury.edu/~english/faculty.html

—Kari Bethel