Julia Alvarez

Author of In the Time of the Butterflies

     While Julia Alvarez was born in New York in 1950, her family moved back to the Dominican Republic when she was a few weeks old because of her mother's homesickness. In 1960 when she was ten, the family returned to New York because of her father's involvement in a plot to overthrow Trujillo resulted in his permanent self-exile. These events, plus other memories of the Dominican Republic, inform Alvarez's second novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). The Alvarez family settled in the Bronx where Julia's father opened a medical practice. Alvarez credits the move and subsequent cultural dislocations with her becoming more introverted and with her turning to the world of books for solace. Her life in the Bronx became the source of the highly autobiographical first novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). In the novel, the four Alvarez girls are fictionalized as the four Garcia girls, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia, who need to make all sorts of acculturating changes from life in the Dominican Republic to life in the United States.

     Julia Alvarez received a bachelor's degree from Middlebury College in Vermont where she currently teaches. She has also served as visiting writer and professor at a number of other colleges and preparatory schools. Alvarez's first major publication was a volume of poetry, Homecoming (1984). She has continued to write poetry as well as fiction and drama and has also edited a volume of petry. Her short fiction and poems have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies. Currently she has been promoting her third novel, ¡Yo! (1997), revisiting the characters from How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and focusing on Yolanda Garcia, nicknamed Yo, who has become a novelist.

     Alvarez's storytelling style, drawing on non-Western and feminist traditions, is non-linear. Many critics prefer to see How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents as a collection of short stories because of the episodic nature of the tales. That novel also inverts normal chronological story telling by beginning with the most recent events in the Garcia girls' lives and moving backwards. That novel, as well as In the Time of the Butterflies, gathers strength from Alvarez's shifting narrative perspectives and having each character tell the story from her own point of view. In an interview with Catherine Wiley in The Bloomsbury Review, Alvarez comments about Native American writer Louise Erdrich by saying, "Native American people experience the truth....[as] something you get at, that's right there, but the truth is all points around the truth, around the circle. Each little perspective somehow is what the truth is" (Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 93, p. 5). This comment also applies to Alvarez's own work in which different characters tell their views of the truth, but the catual truth is visible only when all of the points can be viewed together, when all of the voices have finally been heard.

     Appalachian State University will be hosting Julia Alvarez as its Convocation speaker on September 4, 1997, after all of the incoming freshmen will have read In the Time of the Butterflies, her fictionalized account of the political martyrdom of three of the Mirabal sisters in the Dominican Republic in 1960.

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