© Latinas in History 2008

  ALVAREZ, JULIA (1950– )
“That night I woke with a start in the claws of a bad dream I could not remember. In those days we slept with mosquito nets strung from four poles at each corner of the bed. Everything in the dark assumed a spectral appearance through white netting…” Julia Alvarez. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.

Although born in New York, Julia Alvarez was raised in the Dominican Republic. In 1960, her father’s opposition to the regime of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, forced the family to flee the country to the United States. Alvarez’s first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), garnered the author critical praise as an evocative storyteller. While García Girls parallels autobiographical elements of Alvarez’s own experiences, her second work, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), focuses on the history of the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were murdered for their political resistance to the Trujillo regime. In 1997 Alvarez returned to characters in García Girls in her novel Yo!, and continued to explore the complexity of Latina bilingual-bicultural experiences in U.S. culture. Alvarez’s essays appear in a range of magazines, from Latina magazine to the Sunday magazine section of The New York Times. Alvarez has also published several award-winning collections of poetry, and a novel depicting the life of Salome Ureña, In the Name of Salome (2000).

LINKS

 

Julia Alvarez
Books by Julia Alvarez
Emory Biography
VG

Writers on America
Las Mujeres

Gale
Bookreporter.com

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