Liberty

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Liberty

JULIA ALVAREZ
1996

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
PLOT SUMMARY
CHARACTERS
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

"Liberty" is a story by Julia Alvarez, an American writer of Dominican origin. It is set during Alvarez's childhood in the Dominican Republic in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The story was first published in 1996 in Writers Harvest 2: A Collection of New Fiction, which remains in print. It is also available in Elements of Literature:Fourth Course (Holt Rinehart Winston, 2000) and in Literature & Language Arts: Third Course (Holt Rinehart Winston, 2003). The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed child of about ten who is one of four young girls living in their family home with their parents. Her parents are worried about the political situation in the country and are planning to emigrate from their native country to the United States to secure their freedom. The story centers on a pet dog named Liberty who must be left behind when the family leaves their home. During the course of the story the young narrator is presented with some difficult and cruel situations that she does her best to understand and learn from. In style and subject matter, "Liberty" is typical of Alvarez's work and shows why she is one of the most acclaimed contemporary writers in the United States.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 27, 1950, to parents from the Dominican Republic who were staying in the United States

at the time. When Alvarez was three months old, her parents returned with their family to the Dominican Republic, where Alvarez remained until she was ten years old; in 1960, the family fled political oppression in their homeland and returned to the United States, settling in New York City. As a new immigrant in an unfamiliar world, Alvarez felt insecure, and she turned to writing as a way of understanding herself and her life. Encouraged by her teachers, she decided when she was in high school that she wanted to be a writer.

In 1967, Alvarez enrolled in Connecticut College, transferring to Middlebury College in 1969. In 1971 she received her bachelor of arts degree summa cum laude. Pursuing her goal of becoming a writer, Alvarez entered a creative writing program at Syracuse University in 1973, receiving her master of fine arts degree in 1975.

Alvarez then held various positions teaching creative writing. From 1975 to 1978, she taught in the poetry-in-the-schools programs in Kentucky and Delaware. From 1979 to 1981, she taught English and creative writing to grades nine to twelve at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts. During the 1980s, she taught creative writing at the University of Vermont (1981-1983), and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1985-1988). In 1991, she became a professor in the English department at Middlebury College.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Alvarez published numerous poems and short stories in literary magazines. In 1991, she published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, about four sisters who immigrate from the Dominican Republic to the United States and face the challenge of becoming integrated into American culture. This novel was Alvarez's breakthrough as a writer, winning her favorable reviews and a national reputation. It was selected as a notable book by the American Library Association in 1992. Alvarez followed this with another novel, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), based on the true story of the murder of three sisters in the Dominican Republic in 1960 and the resistance in that country to the repressive dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo.

Alvarez's short story "Liberty" was published in Writers Harvest 2: A Collection of New Fiction in 1996. The following year her novel ¡Yo!, about a Latina girl named Yolanda, appeared. Another novel, In the Name of Salomé, was published in 2000, followed by Finding Miracles (2004), a novel about a fifteen-year-old girl who was born in the Dominican Republic but was adopted by American parents and came to live in Vermont. Alvarez's sixth novel, Saving the World, was published in 2006.

Alvarez has also published volumes of poetry, including Homecoming: New and Selected Poems (1996) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004). She has also written nonfiction, including a collection of autobiographical essays called Something to Declare (1998) and Once upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (2007), about the Latin American tradition, which is continued in Latino communities in the United States, of celebrating a girl's passage into womanhood at the age of fifteen. Alvarez has also written a number of books for young readers. As of 2008, Alvarez was writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.

PLOT SUMMARY

Section 1

"Liberty," which is divided into five short sections, is narrated by a young girl of about ten who witnesses events at her family home that she does not fully understand. The story is set in an unnamed Latin or Central American country that is likely the Dominican Republic.

In Section 1, the narrator's father brings home a puppy, but his wife, the narrator's mother, does not like the look of the dog and tells her husband to return it. He protests that the dog is a gift from the American consul, a man he calls Mister Victor, in gratitude for all that Papi and his family have done for him since he was appointed as the U.S. representative to their country.

Mami complains that what she really wants is not a dog but visas, so that they can leave the country and enter the United States. The narrator does not understand what is going on and is puzzled by the fact that when Mami and Papi discuss leaving the country, they look frightened. Papi tries to reassure his wife that the visas will arrive soon. He also says that they will keep the dog in a pen in the yard. The dog will not be allowed in the house, and Papi is certain that it will be well behaved. In deciding what to call the rambunctious puppy, Mami suggests the name Trouble, but Papi says the dog will be called Liberty, and he quotes the U.S. Constitution about the importance of liberty. He thinks the dog will bring them luck.

Section 2

Mami proves to be right about the dog being troublesome. He eats the flowers, knocks things off tables, and tears up the yard. Mami yells at him to no avail. Mami grows frustrated with the dog and angry with her husband's attempts at humor. It transpires that she has changed her mind and no longer wants to emigrate to the United States. She does not like it when the American consul visits their house and talks with her husband about serious matters. She does not want any bad things to happen, she says. She does not go into any details because she does not want her daughter to hear.

The narrator tells the reader more about herself. She enjoys playing with Liberty. She had always been more adventurous and more likely to get into trouble than her three sisters. She offers to take Liberty back to his pen to get him out of her mother's way. As she takes Liberty away, she notices that her mother, who had been talking to her father, has started to cry.

The narrator describes Liberty's fenced-in pen, in the middle of which stands a doghouse, which her father painted green. Liberty does not like going in the pen, and on this occasion he heads for a shady tree in the front yard that cannot be seen from the house. The narrator follows him but is shocked when she sees two men she does not know behind the hedge. One of the men has grabbed Liberty's collar and is pulling on it. The girl begins to back away but one of the men grabs her arm.

The men give the dog back to her and tell her not to tell anyone that she has seen them. The girl does not understand what is going on but is grateful to get Liberty back. She comforts the dog and leads him back to his pen. Then she goes back to the house, planning on telling her parents what has just happened.

Section 3

The narrator tells of how Mister Victor spends large amounts of time at their house. He and Papi, as well as any visiting relatives, go to the back of the property to talk, presumably so that they can be assured of privacy. The narrator reports that her mother found some wires in the study behind a portrait. The wires connect to a little box outside, suggesting that the house is being spied on electronically. The girl's mother says it is not safe to talk in the house about certain topics. But she does not explain to the puzzled girl what the situation is.

The girl's mother refuses to say what is wrong, but the girl observes that she is always crying. In spite of this, the narrator seems to be enjoying herself, eating foods normally forbidden. One day Mister Victor talks to her about the dog. She gets Liberty to show Victor some of the tricks she has taught him, and he laughs.

The narrator listens to the men of the house, including some visiting uncles, as they talk about an upcoming hunting expedition, but a lot of what they are saying makes no sense to her. They are in fact talking in a coded language to veil their meaning, but she does not understand this. She feels that life is about to change dramatically, and she puts her arm around her dog for comfort.

Section 4

The girl learns that their visas have arrived and that they are to depart for the United States that night. Her mother tries to pretend that she is happy with this news and gives each child a job to do to prepare for their departure. The narrator says she wants to take Liberty with her to America, but her mother says this is not possible. The girl begs her to change her mind, to no avail. The distressed girl then begins to cry, and soon her mother is crying, too. One of the girl's aunts tries to comfort her by telling her that she will find liberty in America. The girl does not understand what she means; the aunt does not explain but tells the girl that they must go and pack.

Section 5

Late that night someone comes and tells the family it is time to leave. The four sisters leave their bedrooms and sit on a bench and wait while the adults rush around. Mister Victor comes and tells them that they must wait a little longer. The narrator then slips away and goes to the backyard. She is afraid that the two scary men she encountered earlier will return after the family has gone, smash the place up, and find Liberty in his pen. She opens the pen for the dog and urges him to run away, but instead the dog follows her. She kicks him until he runs away from the house. At first the girl thinks she will meet Liberty again in the United States, but she then realizes that this will not happen. She hopes he will be there when she and the family return home, since her mother has promised that they will return.

CHARACTERS

Liberty

Liberty is the black and white puppy that Mister Victor gives to Papi and the family. He is a pure-bred dog, although his breed is not stated. Papi expects the dog to be well behaved, but he has not yet been trained, so he tends to make a nuisance of himself, to the annoyance of Mami. However, the narrator loves Liberty, and from the time of his arrival she plays with him rather than with her sisters. It is as if they are two of a kind, both being adventurous and often getting into trouble.

Mami

Mami is the narrator's mother. She is a tense, nervous, sometimes angry woman who is under a lot of strain because of the uncertainty of the family situation. It is enough for her to have to look after her four daughters without having a dog to worry about as well. She and Liberty do not get along. The dog is troublesome and does not obey Mami's commands, which only increases her frustration. Mami is also confused about what she wants. Initially she wants to emigrate to the United States, but she later changes her mind. It seems that the danger the family appears to be facing weighs heavily upon her mind. She no doubt wants the best for her daughters, but she is in a difficult position. The men wield the power in this family, and she is not in a position to question what they decide, so her frustration and anxiety continue to build. Her habit of punishing the children for their misdeeds appears not to be the best way to make them behave, as Aunt Mimi has apparently pointed out to her. The narrator likes to argue with her mother and try to get her own way, and Mami's frustration with her daughter is obvious from her impatient reply to the narrator's impossible request to take Liberty to the United States.

Tía Mimi

Tía Mimi is the narrator's aunt. Unlike anyone else in the family, she has been educated in the United States. She is intelligent and sophisticated and reads a lot. She takes an interest in the narrator, buying her a book on the Arabian Nights and promising her that she will "find liberty" in the United States. The narrator is fond of her and likes to listen to the intelligent way she talks. Tía Mimi obviously has a way with children, in contrast to the heavy-handed approach of Mami.

The Narrator

The narrator is a girl of about ten. She is one of the four daughters of Mami and Papi, and she is in fifth grade in school. She is an adventurous, inquisitive girl who tries hard to understand the world around her, although she is frequently mystified by the words and actions of the adults in her life. She seems to be a high-spirited girl who frequently gets into trouble, to the exasperation of her mother. The narrator describes herself as "the tomboy, the live wire, the troublemaker, the one who was going to drive Mami to drink, the one she was going to give away to the Haitians." In this sense she is rather different from her more conventional, feminine sisters, and she finds her ideal companion in Liberty, the puppy, with whom she forms a close bond. She plays with him as often as she can and wants to take him to the United States. When this proves impossible, she does everything she can to ensure that after she is gone Liberty does not fall into the hands of the two frightening strangers.

During the course of the story, the narrator grows in the sense that she discovers that there are bad people in the world, that life is not simple, and that one cannot always have everything one wants. She also shows great ingenuity and determination in making sure that her beloved dog Liberty has every chance of survival after they leave him behind on their journey to the United States. The difficult circumstances in which she finds herself force her to achieve a level of maturity beyond her years.

Papi

Papi is the narrator's father. He wants to emigrate to the United States so that he can return to school there. It appears that he is an admirer of the United States and the freedom it offers. There are certainly other reasons for his desire to leave his home country, since it appears that he and his family are under surveillance by the government. However, no details are given about why this is so. Papi befriends Mister Victor, the American consul, who helps him obtain visas for himself and his family, as well as having given them the gift of the puppy. Papi does not want to offend Mister Victor by refusing the puppy, even though his wife is not pleased with the addition to the family. Papi appears to be a good husband and father who wants the best for his family. He is an optimistic man who looks on the bright side of things.

The Two Intruders

The intruders are two men, perhaps government agents of some kind, who may be spying on the activities of the narrator's family. The narrator encounters them crouched behind a hedge. They are both wearing sunglasses, and one of them, who is fat, is pulling hard on Liberty's leash. The other man grabs the narrator's arm. She is frightened by them and does not know who they are or what they want. It is her first encounter with "mean and scary people."

Mister Victor

Mister Victor is the American consul; he gives the puppy to Papi. It appears that Victor has only recently been appointed as consul and that Papi and his family have done much to make him welcome in their country. Mister Victor in turn has befriended the family and is frequently over at their house, talking seriously, perhaps about the political situation in the country, with Papi and the narrator's uncles. It is Mister Victor who facilitates the granting of visas so that the family can leave the country. Mister Victor appears to be a kind man, speaking gently to the children. From the childlike point of view of the narrator, Mister Victor "had a funny accent that sounded like someone making fun of Spanish when he spoke it." The narrator likes Mister Victor because of his laugh and the fact that his freckled face makes him look as if he and Liberty are somehow related.

THEMES

Liberty

The theme of liberty is associated with the United States. Liberty means freedom from oppressive control by others; to live in liberty means to have individual rights and freedoms protected under constitutional rule. The concept of liberty is most famously referred to in the Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, which proclaims that all men are endowed by God with "unalienable rights," including "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"—the words quoted by Papi in the story as he explains why he would like the puppy to be named Liberty. (The narrator makes a small error when she says that her father was quoting the U.S. Constitution, since the words he used are from the Declaration of Independence.) He and his family look to the United States as a land of freedom, where their liberties will be preserved, in contrast to their own country, in which they appear to be under hostile surveillance by the government.

The narrator's entire family appears to share this view of the United States as a land of freedom. The girl's aunt, for example, tells her that she will find liberty in the United States. However, the narrator is too young to have any idea of political concepts such as liberty and thinks at first that she will find Liberty, her dog, in the United States. For her, liberty means the freedom from the usual restraints imposed on her by her parents, as when she enjoys a "heyday of liberty" when her mother and father are too preoccupied with their difficult situation to pay as much attention to her. Liberty for this ten-year-old means such trivia as getting away with "having one of Mister Victor's Coca-Colas for breakfast instead of my boiled milk with a beaten egg." At the end of the story she does guess that with regard to finding liberty in the United States, her aunt means something other than finding her dog, but she is not yet old enough to understand what that meaning might be. For the reader, however, the last line in the story does disclose a wider meaning. The girl says that when she returns to her native land she hopes that "my Liberty will be waiting for me here." She is referring of course to her dog, but the words also convey the need for political freedom in her country of origin, which appears to be suffering under an oppressive government.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Write a story in the first person, with a child of about ten as the narrator. Show the child observing the adult world and understanding it as best he or she can, and make it clear that the child does not grasp many things. End the story by showing how the child has in some way grown or matured in his or her understanding of life through the events he or she has narrated.
Read one of two other works by Alvarez, either In the Time of the Butterflies or How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Give a class presentation in which you summarize what the novel is about and describe how it sheds light on either life in the Dominican Republic in the late 1950s and early 1960s or on the experiences encountered by Spanish-speaking immigrants in the United States.
Interview several students or other people in your community who are first-generation or second-generation immigrants, from a Spanish-speaking country if possible. Ask them about their experiences in adjusting to life in the United States. Mention such things as language, culture, and education. Write an essay based on your interviews in which you examine the lives of immigrants in your community.
Research the history of U.S. policy toward the Dominican Republic throughout the twentieth century. What were the principles that governed U.S. policy? How did it change over the years? Write an essay in which you discuss your findings.

Loss of Innocence

The fifth-grade child who narrates the story knows little about the harshness of life. She is one of four children in a close-knit, loving, extended family. But during the course of the story she is exposed to some of the cruelty and danger that exists in the world. Her first shock comes when she encounters the two intimidating strangers on the family property. One of them pulls hard on Liberty's leash, almost breaking the dog's neck (at least as the narrator views the incident), and the other one grips her arm hard enough to leave fingerprint marks on her flesh after releasing her. This is a glimpse for the girl of

the brutal world that exists beyond the security of her own home; indeed, it has invaded her previously invulnerable home. As she says, it was the first time she had "come across mean and scary people."

The girl must also face the fact that sometimes events proceed out of her control and against her wishes; she must leave her beloved dog behind when the family emigrates to the United States. Another important lesson she learns, and a sign of the maturity that is forced early upon her, is that in certain circumstances she may need to appear cruel in order to ensure the best interests of a creature she loves, in this case her dog. This happens at the end of the story when she is anxious to ensure that the two men will not be able to ill-treat Liberty when they return to the property after the family has gone. She kicks the dog, gently at first, in order to stop him from following her and to encourage him to escape. When the dog continues to follow her, she kicks him harder, until he whimpers and then runs off. She has learned to act decisively and courageously when a loved one is threatened. As her father has said to her, "All liberty involves sacrifice," and as she absorbs this lesson she necessarily loses some of her childish innocence about life.

STYLE

Child's Point of View

Alvarez's story is told in the first person by a young girl. This means that all the events are described from the point of view of the child. Much of the effectiveness of the story consists in the fact that the girl does not understand the events that are going on around her. No one tells her the real situation. This is cleverly dramatized when she overhears the men talking in a kind of code about their plans. Not aware of the code, she has no idea of what they are discussing. Also, she does not understand that the discovery of the wires in the house shows that the family is being spied upon. Her lack of understanding gives the story a sense of mystery. The reader has to put together the pieces that the child misses. However, while the child may not understand everything that is going on, she is fully responsive to people's moods and to the atmosphere in the home. She has the ability to feel, and that is another factor that allows the reader to become emotionally engaged in the story.

Past Tense and Present Tense

Almost the entire story is told in the past tense. But in the last section, beginning with "Late in the night someone comes in and shakes us awake," the narrator switches to the present tense, and this continues for the remainder of the story. This is an unusual device, since an author would normally be consistent in use of tense in a short story. However, changing to the present tense for the final section creates a greater sense of immediacy and urgency for the reader, who has the illusion of being there as the story reaches its climax.

Liberty as Symbol

It is significant that the dog is named Liberty. Living up to his name, he shows how much he likes to be free. He does not obey the rules that the humans, especially the girl's mother, make for him, and he does not like being confined in his pen. It is entirely appropriate that after being given some prods by the narrator, Liberty escapes to freedom at the end. He may be taking his chances in the outside world, but that will be better than being at the mercy of the two thugs who may return. The dog as a symbol of liberty therefore supports the theme of the importance of liberty: It is better to take risks and remain free than to allow others to dictate the course of one's life.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1950s-1960s: The Dominican Republic suffers under the repressive dictatorship of President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Opposition groups backed by the United States plot Trujillo's assassination, which occurs in 1961.
Today: The Dominican Republic has a democratic system of government and holds regular competitive elections. In May 2008, President Leonel Fernández, head of the centrist Dominican Liberation Party, wins election to a third four-year term. His success largely stems from his ability to keep the nation's economy prosperous. However, many people in the Dominican Republic remain poor and unable to meet their basic needs.
1950s-1960s: During the repressive atmosphere of the Trujillo dictatorship, high-quality fiction writing does not flourish in the Dominican Republic. One of the nation's most talented writers, Juan Bosch, goes into exile rather than live under Trujillo's regime. After Trujillo's assassination and the civil war of 1965, a new generation of writers emerges to make major contributions to the literature of the nation.
Today: Dominican writers, including José Alcántara Almánzar, Manuel de Jesús Galván, Manuel del Cabral, Juan Bosch, and Julia Alvarez, have international reputations for their work. Many of these writers cover the Dominican diaspora experience. A novel by Viriato Sención, originally written in Spanish and translated into English as They Forged the Signature of God (1995), includes reference to the difficulties experienced by Dominican immigrants in New York City.
1950s-1960s: In response to the political and economic turbulence in their country, a large number of Dominicans immigrate to the United States, with the majority settling in New York City; Paterson, New Jersey; southern Florida, especially Miami and Fort Lauderdale; and Lawrence and Boston, Massachusetts.
Today: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2006, there are approximately 1.2 million people of Dominican descent in the United States. This figure includes those born in the United States as well as those born elsewhere. The states that contain the largest Dominican populations are New York, New Jersey, Florida, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Political Oppression in the Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola, between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. "Liberty" is set during a particularly difficult time in the history of the Dominican Republic, when unrest and opposition to the brutal regime of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was on the rise. Trujillo first came to power in 1930. He was a military man who had risen to the rank of brigadier general in the national armed forces. After waging a campaign consisting of intimidation and terror in the national presidential election of 1930, Trujillo declared himself the winner and became the country's president. He proved himself to be a corrupt leader, amassing a personal fortune through the ownership of many of the country's industries. He ruthlessly eliminated any political opposition, using torture and murder to accomplish his goals and setting up a feared secret police, known as the SIM. (It is likely that the two men whom the narrator in "Liberty" finds hiding on the family property are members of the SIM.) In 1937, Trujillo ordered the mass killing of Haitians who lived on the border between Haiti, on the western third of the island, and the Dominican Republic. Many of the Haitians were unemployed, having crossed the border looking for work. Between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand Haitians were massacred.

During this period of the 1930s and 1940s, the United States supported the Trujillo dictatorship, which preserved the appearance of democracy, holding regular elections and granting women the right to vote. The economy also grew, with large investments in public works. Many schools were built during these decades. The national foreign debt was eliminated. The United States therefore overlooked the tyrannous and brutal nature of Trujillo's rule. However, after World War II, opposition to Trujillo began to grow in the Dominican Republic, and U.S. support for the dictator began to wane. A visit to Washington, D.C., in 1952 improved Trujillo's standing in the United States, but five years later the Dominican economy went into decline as a result of excessive borrowing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the era in which "Liberty" is set, opposition to his rule grew. Julia Alvarez's father was involved in a failed plot to overthrow Trujillo. Before he was implicated in the plot, some Americans friends helped him to acquire a visa that allowed him and his family to emigrate from the Dominican Republic to the United States.

Trujillo responded to the growing opposition to his regime with more brutal repression. One of the most notorious of the regime's crimes was the killing of the three Mirabal sisters, Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa, in 1960. These three sisters were members of an underground revolutionary group known as J14 that was dedicated to the overthrow of the Trujillo dictatorship. The murders created an international outcry and effectively ensured Trujillo's overthrow, which was made more certain by the continuing deterioration of the nation's economy. Trujillo was assassinated in May 1961 by a group of conspirators who had received arms from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The U.S. government was fully aware of the assassination plot.

Latino Literature in the United States

Latino American literature refers to works written by those of Spanish-speaking heritage, including Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, and many other groups. When Alvarez first began to write, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were few opportunities for women of her ethnic heritage to be published by major publishers or be accepted into the canon of American literature. This applied to most nonwhite writers, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos. However, during the 1970s the situation began to change. One of the first Latino novels to gain wide mainstream readership was Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anya, which was published in 1972 and by the end of the 1980s had become an established classic. The success of The House on Mango Street, by the Mexican American Sandra Cisneros, was a breakthrough for Latina literature in 1983, as was the 1985 English language publication of The House of the Spirits, a novel by the Chilean American Isabel Allende that became a best seller. In 1989, the Cuban American writer Oscar Hijuelos won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. In this late-1980s publishing environment that was becoming favorable to minority writers, several Latina writers emerged, including the Mexican Americans Ana Castillo and Denise Chávez, the Puerto Rican Americans Judith Ortiz Cofer and Esmeralda Santiago, and the Cuban Americans Cristina García and Himilce Novas. Alvarez's own breakthrough novel, published in 1991, was How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. She was the first Dominican American female writer to publish a novel that enjoyed mainstream success. Another Dominican American writer, Junot Díaz, who like Alvarez spent much of his childhood in the Dominican Republic before immigrating to the United States in 1974, published his acclaimed short story collection Drown in 1996, the same year that Alvarez's story "Liberty" appeared.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Alvarez is known primarily for her novels and her poetry; she has not published many short stories, and since "Liberty" was published as a single story in an anthology that also contains stories by other writers, it has not received attention from reviewers. However, the story is typical of her work in that it concentrates on a female protagonist and draws on Alvarez's own background as a child in the Dominican Republic. The story exhibits much of the style that has won critical praise from reviewers of Alvarez's other works published during the same decade. Perhaps most relevant is How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, a novel that can also be seen as fifteen interrelated short stories, some of which take place in the Dominican Republic during the same period in which "Liberty" is set. In a comment on this novel that might also apply to "Liberty," Ilan Stavans, in Commonweal, states, "Alvarez has an acute eye for the secret complexities that permeate family life. Although once in a while she steps into melodrama, her descriptions are full of pathos." Similarly, Kay Pritchett, writing in World Literature Today, praises Alvarez's novel In the Time of the Butterflies, about the Mirabal sisters: "She masterfully orchestrates the four voices, using throughout a simple prose that is pleasantly fresh and feminine." The same could well be said of Alvarez's use of the child's voice in "Liberty."

CRITICISM

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey has a Ph.D. in English. In this essay on "Liberty," he discusses the autobiographical elements in the story, as well as some of its political implications.

Although "Liberty" is an isolated short story published in an anthology, it fits neatly into the main body of Julia Alvarez's fiction. Much of the inspiration for Alvarez's fiction has come from her own life. Her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), is semi-autobiographical, as she fictionalizes some actual events in order to tell a good story. Likewise, "Liberty" is clearly based on Alvarez's own childhood experience just before she and her family left their homeland to immigrate to the United States, but the main element of the plot, centered around the dog called Liberty, is fictional (although the family did own a pet dog).

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

The Dew Breaker (2004), by Edwidge Danticat, is a novel about the legacy of torture in Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship, which lasted from 1957 to 1986. Haiti occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola, bordering the Dominican Republic. The author was born in Haiti and now lives in the United States. The novel focuses on the life of one man in particular who tortured people in Haiti and then moved to New York City, where he lives an outwardly stable and placid life. However, the author shows how the legacy of torture lives on, affecting not only the man himself but also his family and the entire Haitian American community.
Amy Tan's best-selling novel The Joy Luck Club (1989) focuses on four Chinese American families and the generational conflicts within them. The younger, American-born women rebel against their mothers, who were raised in China and still cling to the traditional values of their culture. Tan's book has much in common with Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.
Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (1999), by Michele Wucker, is an American journalist's examination of the troubled relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Wucker provides a lively portrayal of the cultures of both countries, their relationships to the United States, and the experiences of Haitian and Dominican immigrants in the United States.
Alavarez's historical novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) takes place in the Dominican Republic in 1960. It is about the murder of the three Mirabal sisters, who had been working to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship. The novel paints a vivid picture of life under Trujillo's rule and was nominated for the 1995 National Critics Circle Award.

"Liberty," published in 1996, and the novel published five years earlier almost overlap at one point. This occurs in the novel chapter "The Blood of the Conquistadores," which takes place in the Dominican Republic during the time when Alvarez was a child there. Even more so than does "Liberty," that chapter gives a picture of what it was like living in a police state under the Trujillo dictatorship. Two armed agents of the SIM, the dictator's secret police, arrive at the family home to interrogate the mother and father. Like the two strangers in "Liberty," they wear dark glasses, which give them an intimidating appearance. The father hides in a closet in the bedroom.

The chapter in the novel gives a clue to the coded talk between the men that the child in "Liberty" overhears. In that story, the men talk of hunting goats, but the father cannot accompany them because "his tennis shoes were missing." In the chapter in the novel, the mother gives instructions to call Victor Hubbard, the American consul (who appears to be the same Mister Victor present in "Liberty"), and tell him to come over straightaway to pick up his tennis shoes. It is clear from the context that the talk of tennis shoes is a coded reference to the gun that Papi has, which was smuggled to him by Victor, who in addition to being the American consul is the CIA chief in the Dominican Republic who has helped to organize the plot against Trujillo. Also, Trujillo is nicknamed "The Goat," which explains the reference to hunting goats. It is also revealed in this chapter that one of the family, a cousin of the girls, was arrested and tortured in prison but chose to commit suicide rather than betray his friends. This chapter therefore makes explicit what "Liberty" only implies: the great danger the family was living in and the fear that they, too, might soon be arrested.

Alvarez sheds more light on "Liberty" in her book of essays, Something to Declare, published in 1998. When she was only about five or six, as she relates in "Our Papers," the SIM arrested her grandfather and kept him in jail for two days. He was not subjected to torture, as so many people were, but was forced to sell some of his land at a very low price to the dictator's daughter. This was typical of how Trujillo and his family built up their immense private wealth, by forcing people to essentially give up what was rightfully theirs so that Trujillo and his associates could build their business empire. It is estimated that by 1939, within a decade of his taking power, Trujillo and his family owned more than half of all the industries in the Dominican Republic.

In 1960, as Alvarez records in "Our Papers," her entire family was under virtual house arrest. Because her father was a member of the underground opposition to Trujillo, the family knew that it was only a matter of time before he would be taken away. Her uncles were also involved in the plot to overthrow Trujillo. At night, a black car with SIM agents inside would be parked in their driveway, preventing them from going anywhere. "The men talked in low, worried voices behind closed doors," reports Alvarez, exactly as the men do in "Liberty." Her mother wore a worried expression all the time, and the parents shielded the children from the truth, again as happens in "Liberty." Her father was fortunate in that he had friends in the United States who helped him apply for a two-year visa to train as a heart surgeon. The Dominican Republic had no heart surgeons at the time, a fact that persuaded the regime to grant him the visa. Just as the child in "Liberty" is told that they will at some point be returning to the Dominican Republic, so the young Julia was told that the visit to the United States would be temporary. Alvarez writes that, according to her aunt, had they announced that they were leaving for good, they would all have been killed.

Other details in "Liberty" also turn out to be autobiographical. As Alvarez writes in "First Muse," another essay in Something to Declare, she was a badly behaved, unruly child who hated going to school. She thought that their living under a dictatorship was the reason why she was forced to spend such long, boring days at school, and she would refuse to do her homework. But she did discover the pleasures of reading, thanks to a gift from her maiden aunt Tití, who like the narrator's aunt in "Liberty," gives her a copy of The Thousand and One Nights (sometimes known as Arabian Nights). Through reading of the adventures of the fictional heroine, Scheherazade, the young Alvarez learned the power of stories. In "Family Matters," another essay in Something to Declare, Alvarez directly states that her fiction has been inspired by events that happened to her and by the stories told by her family, but she adds a caveat:

I don't mean that my fiction slavishly recounts "what really happened," but that my sense of the world, and therefore of the world I re-create in language, comes from that first encompassing experience of familia [family] with its large cast of colorful characters, its elaborate branchings hither and yon to connect everyone together.

What really matters to the reader, of course, is not the extent to which a story is autobiographical but the themes and meanings that it conveys as a work of literature standing on its own merits. In this sense, one very noticeable element in "Liberty" is the highly positive presentation of the United States and everything it stands for. Every reference to the United States is a favorable one. Papi approvingly quotes the Declaration of Independence, hailing "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," to explain his naming of the dog. He even promises that Liberty will be well behaved, like "an American dog." The dog symbolizes the great virtue of liberty for which the United States is renowned. This message is reinforced for the narrator by her aunt, who assures her, even though she does not grasp the meaning, that she will find liberty in America. The positive impression of the United States is further reinforced by the family's friendship with Mister Victor, the American consul, who gives them a dog "for all we'd done for him since he'd been assigned to our country." At one point, Victor practically lives at their house. Although this character is only briefly sketched, he is presented in an attractive light. He speaks kindly to the narrator about Liberty, and he laughs when she shows him the tricks she has taught the dog. Victor has a freckled face, and his coloring even resembles that of Liberty, prompting the narrator to comment that she "had the impression that God had spilled a lot of his colors when he was making American things," another fairly idealistic portrayal of the United States.

These aspects of "Liberty" offer a marked contrast to how the character of Victor Hubbard the American is portrayed in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Hubbard is overtly described as a CIA agent whose title as consul is only a front. He was sent to the Dominican Republic solely for the purpose of organizing the plot to overthrow the dictator, and he is presented as an amoral man who simply follows his orders, whatever they might be (and he gets contradictory messages from his superiors in Washington), without identifying with the cause of the Dominican people. Tellingly, when he receives the summons to rescue the family from the interrogations of the two SIM agents, he is in a bordello where he is indulging his interest in young adolescent girls. Thus, through the character of Victor Hubbard, the United States is presented in a much more critical light than it is through Mister Victor in "Liberty." This accords with comments made by Alvarez in "First Muse," one of the personal essays in Something to Declare, about the ambivalence of the United States toward the Dominican Republic, as American involvement was dictated by considerations that were not always related to the real needs of the Dominicans: "The powerful country to the north … had set our dictator in place and kept him there for thirty-one years." The comment is accurate; the United States had indeed been a supporter of the Trujillo regime for decades. As Bernard Diederich states in Trujillo: The Death of the Goat:

Ironically, some of the weapons used to destroy Trujillo had been provided by the same Americans who had helped him to power thirty-one years before, who had forged the political support system to maintain him and who had turned a blind eye when his excesses drew public censure abroad.

Such an understanding of the role of the United States in the politics of the Dominican Republic is of course beyond the capacity of the young girl who narrates "Liberty." She knows nothing of the Cold War, the post-World War II struggle between the United States and its Western European allies against the Soviet Union and its allies, a struggle that led the United States to embrace all kinds of unsavory third-world dictators as long as they were strongly anti-Communist. All the narrator knows at the time is that "a world without Liberty"—that is, her dog—"would break my heart"; only later, with the coming of maturity, will she be able to grasp the deeper meaning of her words and the complexities that such a sentiment involves.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on "Liberty," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez

In the following excerpt, Martinez argues that Alvarez will be remembered as one of the "initiators of Latina literature."

History demonstrates that literary periods are launched by daring, intrepid writers or poets who appear to have suddenly sprouted from nowhere. Later these writers are acclaimed as initiators of movements, but the many years they barely subsisted while writing tomes that languished in wait for a publisher are rarely remembered.

Think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, now recognized as one of the "fathers" of the so-called Latin American Boom of the late 1960s, when (mostly male) writers erupted onto the international stage with their novels dubbed as magical realism. Or the two Mexicans—Laura Esquivel and Angeles Mastretta—recognized for launching a "boom" of women writers in the 1980s, when women's novels finally began to be published in greater numbers. Just as Garcia Marquez and the writers of his generation were not the first to create a great Latin American novel, Esquivel and Mastretta are not the only significant women writers of the 20th century. But in each case they will forever be remembered as those who launched a literary period.

Julia Alvarez occupies a similar place in U.S. literature as one of the initiators of Latina literature, principally novels written in English by women of Latin American heritage. While members of the largest minority population in the U.S. had been producing novels and poetry throughout the 20th century, few who published before Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street or before the beginning of the now-recognized Chicano/Latino era are famously remembered.

"I feel very lucky to happen to have been a writer at the watershed time when Latino literature became a literature that was not just relegated to the province of sociology," Alvarez says. "But I still feel there is a certain kind of condescension toward ethnic literature, even though it is a literature that is feeding and enriching the mainstream American literature … [And], definitely, still, there is a glass ceiling in terms of the female novelists. If we have a female character, she might be engaging in something monumental but she's also changing the diapers and doing the cooking, still doing things which get it called a woman's novel. You know, a man's novel is universal; a woman's novel is for women."

The content of novels written by women may be different, but Alvarez feels that all stories come from the same source: "The great lesson of storytelling is that there is this great river that we all are flowing on of being a human being and a human family. So, when the market comes up and says ‘Latina writers,’ and this is for this or that market, it is [simply] part of how things are broadcast out there, but really, that's not what the writing is about. It's about interconnectedness. And sure, Faulkner is from the south, or such and such poet has an Irish background and you can hear it in the lines; that is a way to get a handle on this mysterious current of narrative that is so important to us."

In Alvarez's case, she is the ubiquitous Dominican-American writer. Her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, based on the heroic Mirabal sisters who lived in the time of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, is now a staple of college literature classes. Her first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, published in 1991—along with Cisneros' The House on Mango Street in 1984 and Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban in 1992—officially launched the new movement of Latina writers. Their "hyphen" experience, straddling borders or cultures in the U.S. as people of Latin American or Caribbean descent, foments new critical ideas. The current generation of Dominican-American New York writers (Angie Cruz, Loida Maritza Perez, Nelly Rosario, and Junot Diaz) now hopes to achieve the success Alvarez has had.

A certain element of luck, and very precise publicity, played a role in the now easy recognition of Julia Alvarez and Sandra Cisneros. In 1990 they and two other writers—Denise Chavez and Ana Castillo—posed for a group photo arranged by their New York agent Susan Bergholz to promote their forthcoming novels. The one-page photo article ran in the magazine Vanity Fair under the title, "The Four Amigas," a publicity stunt that helped usher in a Latino literary generation.

"That was a shock to me," Alvarez says, "One of the things that surprised me was the publicity machine that happens around books, and that people take pictures. I only knew how to love a book and go to the library and get the next book by the writer. You don't think of all the publicity stuff.

"I was just so happy that I had this novel coming out because I was up for tenure, and my chairman basically said, ‘you know if you don't have a book, it's not going to be a pretty story.’ So when I heard that Garcia Girls was taken and would be published, I just thought of it as the book that would get me tenure. But then it did so well that seven years later, I gave up tenure to become a full-time writer."

Her first novel was followed by Butterflies in 1994, a sequel to Garcia Girls called ¡Yo! in 1997, and another historical novel, In the Name of Salome, in 2000. In a period of fifteen years Alvarez has released fifteen books: four books of poetry, a collection of essays titled Something to Declare, four children's books, and A Cafecito Story, which counters global capitalism and demonstrates the need for a slow process of growing and preparing excellent coffee beans. Last April, she embarked on a multi-city book tour to promote her latest novel, Saving the World. It was a grueling schedule, with 24 stops in five weeks, but she appeared radiant late in the tour, sparkling with enthusiasm during her readings.

The slender woman with dark, curly hair and hazel eyes is a vegetarian, which may account for her physical stamina, but she also possesses a vibrancy of spirit that draws people in. Her ophthalmologist husband, Bill Eichner, accompanied her on the tour. At each juncture, they presented a gift of organic coffee, brewed and served to those who turned out to hear her. She explained how she was researching a new historical novel when the September 11 tragedy occurred in 2001 and that that occurrence had influenced her to create a second story, alternating a contemporary character's angst with the historical journey of a small expedition that transported the smallpox vaccine across the world. She quotes from Dante, stating that her modern character is experiencing a "dark night of the soul, which we now pathologize and call depression." Alvarez's voice is soft but her words are very clearly enunciated: "It is about being a human being. With stories we have these ways of deeply connecting as human beings."

After the reading, she takes questions, and responds candidly to each. Does her story have a moral or a message? "Sometimes things happen to us, and [since] we humans have created narrative, at times like this we bring it to bear on what has happened. I do think narratives are important and powerful, but novels don't answer questions, they're not solutions."

Someone asks whether she first writes in English or Spanish. When Alvarez responds, "I am not truly bilingual, I am English-dominant," there is silence in the room, as though the audience is surprised by that revelation. Her works, like those of many other Latino writers, are translated to Spanish by other individuals.

Despite the fact that she and her husband purchased farmland in the Dominican Republic in 1996 to help foment a cooperative of independent coffee-growers, they do not visit the island regularly. In 2004, they sold some of the tracts to others who wanted to help in the project, and Alvarez spends most of her time at her permanent residence for nearly two decades in Weybridge, Vermont. It is quite near the Canadian border, and there are many more residents of French and German heritage than Latinos; her reality is more of a snowy setting than a tropical one. She frequently states, "I live in sleepy Vermont. I live on a dirt road." The surrounding community consists mostly of farms and the nearest town is Middlebury, where Alvarez holds the position of Writer-in-Residence at Middlebury College. She describes her routine as time spent in the college library or in her home office. "I go to work every day and I do the work, the same way that my neighbor goes and takes care of his sheep, and Bill goes to the office. That's just what I do, and what I am focused on."…

Like other well-known writers at the inception of a literary period, Alvarez will forever be remembered as the first Dominican-American writer and one of the first Latinas in a decade of a great deal of attention for this group. What is her impression of the critical reception of her work?

"You know, you move intuitively as a writer, using craft. Then later people will see or point out, or you yourself will see a couple or more basic themes running through there, but you didn't know you were spinning it, even intentionally."

It is the reader that matters most to her. In fact, she feels that no story is "alive" until the reader has absorbed it. "What you hope for with a story is that it opens up some little insights, some knowledge of character and of self that wasn't there before, that it nurtures the human spirit and gets passed on, so that we're able to make different choices and be a little more aware of each other, of the human experience.

"Why does Whitman say, ‘Look for me under your boot soles’ at the end of Leaves of Grass? He doesn't mean that literally. He is dead, he is under our boot soles, or our shoes, but he is alive while we are reading this poem, he's inside us. At the end of The Woman I Kept to Myself, there's a poem entitled ‘Did I redeem myself?’ and the last two lines are: ‘And you, my readers, what will you decide when all that's left of me will be these lines?’"

Source: Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez, "Julia Alvarez: Progenitor of a Movement: This Dominican-American Writer Weaves Passionate Sensibilities through Her Works with the Gift of Seeing through Others' Eyes," in Americas (English Edition), Vol. 59, No. 2, March-April 2007, pp. 6-14.

Jonathan Bing

In the following interview, Alvarez discusses her family's flight from the Dominican Republic, an experience that informed "Liberty," and her status as an immigrant writer.

In 1991, Julia Alvarez made a resounding splash on the literary scene with her first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, whose narrators, the four vibrant and distinctive Garcia siblings, captivated readers and critics. Like their author, the characters emigrated to middle-class Queens, N.Y., from the Dominican Republic, and the novel provided a keen look at the island social structure they wistfully remember and the political turmoil they escaped.

The second-oldest sister, Yolanda, now a well-known author, is the protagonist of Alvarez's third novel, ¡Yo!, out next month from Algonquin (Forecasts, Oct. 14). Alvarez brings to Yo's portrait an empathy of shared experiences, anxieties and hopes.

In 1960 at the age of 10, Alvarez fled the Dominican Republic with her parents and three sisters (her father was involved in the underground against the dictator Raphael Trujillo). She has since roamed this country, teaching writing in far-flung schools and communities, before finally putting down roots in Middlebury, Vt., and writing two books of poetry and three novels, including 1994's In the Time of the Butterflies (Algonquin).

A current exhibit at the New York Public Library, "The Hand of the Poet from John Donne to Julia Alvarez," displays snapshots of the author in the Dominican Republic (she travels there at least once a year), riding horseback, dancing the merengue and obstreperously bartering for plantains. When PW catches up with Alvarez, it is in the rare-book room of the Middlebury College library, where a standing-room-only audience has gathered to hear her read from the new novel. Brushing unruly, dark bangs from her lively face, her voice inflected by a faint Latin twang, she shows few signs of the butterflies fluttering in her stomach, induced by the prospect of reciting her work on her own turf.

"I couldn't sleep last night before this reading," she confesses, later ushering PW into the living room of her secluded ranch house, which is brimming with plants, cacti and photographs of her extended family. Alvarez, who first came to Middlebury to attend the Breadloaf Writers' Conference as an undergraduate in the late 1960s and is now a tenured professor of English, has lived here permanently since 1988, and it is here that she met her husband, an ophthalmologist. Yet she expresses ambivalence at the thought of becoming something of a local fixture.

"I see myself marginally in the academic community, which I think in part is good for a writer, because it keeps you on your toes," she says. "When I first moved here, people would come up to me and say things that I hadn't told them. Or remark upon things that I didn't know they knew. I didn't realize that everything's connected. There's no anonymity. The good part of that is, as a friend said, ‘Julia, you've always wanted roots. But now you realize that once there are roots, there are worms in the soil.’"

In conversation, Alvarez is an ebullient blend of insecurities, tart anecdotes and spitfire judgments, often punctuated by a deep, chesty laugh. Scooping up an obese marmalade cat named Lucia, she babbles half in English and half in Spanish into its fur, then offers us a glass of wine and sits cross-legged on a leather ottoman, recalling the tumult of a childhood bifurcated by conflicting cultural milieus.

"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 says. "I had never been raised to have a public voice."

Herself the second-oldest, Alvarez was sent to boarding school in her early teens under the protective wing of her older sister. "My parents were afraid of public school. I think they were just afraid in general of this country. So I went away to school and was on the move and not living at home since I was 13 years old."

Like many political refugees, Alvarez soon found the displacements of language and geography to be the stuff of art. As an adolescent, she says, the act of writing helped to allay the pain of acculturation and the stigma of being an outsider. "I came late into the language but I came early into the profession. In high school, I fell in love with how words can make you feel complete in a way that I hadn't felt complete since leaving the island. Early on, I fell in love with books, which I didn't have at all growing up. In the Dominican Republic, I was a non-reader in what was basically an oral culture and I hated books, school, anything that had to do with work."

Alvarez went to Connecticut College, but after winning the school's poetry prize, she departed for Breadloaf and Middlebury, where she earned her B.A. in 1971. After an M.F.A at Syracuse University, she lit out for the heartland, taking a job with the Kentucky Arts Commission as a traveling poet-in-residence. For two years, Alvarez traversed the back roads of the Bluegrass State, with Leaves of Grass as her Baedeker. "I would just pack up my car. I had a little Volkswagen. My whole car was a file system. Everything I owned was in there.

"In some communities I'd give workshops or talk at night in the local church. I loved it. I felt like the 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 who thought I had come to do something with poultry."

When that job ended, other teaching jobs beckoned, and Alvarez careened around the country for more than a decade. "I was a migrant poet," she laughs. "I would go anywhere."

With no fixed address, Alvarez gradually assembled her first collection of poetry, which Breadloaf director Bob Pack placed with Grove. Aptly called Homecomings, it featured a 33-sonnet sequence called "33," which portrays the emotional vertigo Alvarez suffered on her 33rd birthday, facing middle age without a secure job, a family of her own or a career blueprint to sustain her. Alvarez nevertheless greeted the book's publication, in 1984, with great trepidation. "It was scary," she says. "I thought ‘Oh, my God, what if my parents read this? There are love affairs in here. Maybe I can go out and buy all the copies.’"

She has since reprinted Homecomings and issued another book of verse with Dutton (The Other Side, 1995). Now, however, she writes poetry less frequently than fiction. "I think what's hard for me about writing poetry is that it is so naked," Alvarez explains. In retrospect, it's not surprising that her emergence as a novelist coincided with her first tenure-track job at Middlebury. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, a novel displaying a historical sweep and mobility of voice not found in her poetry, was a natural next step after years of rootlessness.

"It used to turn me off, the idea of writing something bigger than a poem," she reflects. "But you grow as a writer and you start to imagine other possibilities."

Susan Bergholz, certainly the most influential agent of Latino fiction, whose clients include Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros and Denise Chávez, has represented Alvarez since placing Garcia Girls with Shannon Ravenel at Algonquin. As Alvarez remembers, Bergholz approached her at a reading she gave in New York after winning a 1986 G.E. Foundation Award for Younger Writers. "She was interested in my work, so I sent her a bunch of things. She really plugged away at that stuff, sending it around and talking to people and finally she landed Shannon. I'm very grateful to Susan as the person who really fought that battle for me, which—because of my background and because of my self-doubt—I probably would not have fought for myself."

Yet when Garcia Girls first reached Ravenel, "there was no book there," Alvarez says. "I sent portions of it to Shannon and she said: ‘There's a bigger story here you're trying to tell.’"

Today Alvarez can't imagine publishing with a larger house at any price, provided that Ravenel stays put. "Shannon helped form me as a writer. She often helps me to think of how to put my books together. Sometimes, I'll say, ‘our book’ and she'll say, ‘Julia, it's your book.’ Maybe a place could initially offer you more money or more razzmatazz. But I was 41 when Garcia Girls came out. If I were writing to make a whole lot of money, I would have given this craft up a long time ago. I'm doing the writing because it's the way I understand my life. It's what I do and I want a place that is sympatico to that."

THE BUTTERFLIES INTERVENE

Alvarez's trajectory as a novelist has hardly followed a predictable scheme. Her second novel revisits the last days of the Trujillo regime and retells the story of the three Mirabal sisters, Patricia, Minerva and Maria Teresa—actual political dissidents called Las Mariposas (the Butterflies)—who in 1960 were murdered by Trujillo's henchmen. The event galvanized the political insurrection that led to Trujillo's assassination in 1961. "It's always been a story I wanted to tell. But I didn't know how to do it. They seemed to me such enormous, mythical figures. I didn't know how to touch them and make them real. I thought it would be a sacrilege even to do that in some people's eyes. But I knew it was a story I wanted to tell."

Alvarez had previously tackled the subject in an essay in a small press book on heroic women, but in returning to the island to research the novel, she made an astonishing discovery: there were, in fact, four sisters, and the eldest, Dédé, had survived and was still living in the Dominican Republic. Alvarez interviewed Dédé and began to piece together the minutiae of the sisters' lives. "I understand the politics of a four-daughter family with no boys in a Latino culture," she notes.

All of Alvarez's novels are constructed from multiple viewpoints, ranging freely from sassy gossip to animated autobiography, but always concealing a forceful political undercurrent. She attributes her interest in voice to the storytelling traditions of Dominican life. "We didn't have TV, we didn't have books. It was just what people did. That was our newspaper."

Yo, of course, means "I" in Spanish, but Alvarez has shrewdly left the self at the center of the novel absent. Yolanda isn't granted a voice in the novel. Instead, Alvarez builds the book around the memories of those who have suffered the manipulations of the budding author. The liberty a writer takes with her family and background is a subject of increasing importance to Alvarez as her books grow more popular. "My sisters had a hard time with Garcia Girls. But I think they're proud of me, and I think the books have helped them understand their lives better. Sometimes they will remember something that I think I invented. Now it's almost like the stories in that book are part of the memory pool."

In 1993, Vanity Fair ran a splashy profile of Alvarez, Castillo, Cisneros and Chávez (all are indeed friends) under the rubric "Los Girlfriends," portraying a cliquish set of Latina writers sharing the same literary concerns and themes. It's precisely such hype and labeling that ¡Yo! set out to interrogate. "One thing I didn't like about it from the beginning, which didn't have to do with the people involved, is I thought how I would feel if I was a Latino writer and I saw the Girlfriends and these are the [only] Latino writers. I felt there should have been 100 writers on either side of us. Not that I think it was a terrible thing. I just wonder and worry about what all of this publicity and labeling comes to."

Discussing the extravagant antics of book marketing, the 22-city tour she is about to embark on and the persistent film interest in her work (Butterflies has been optioned to Phoenix Pictures), Alvarez grows antsy. "As you talk, I realize I am always that immigrant. This, too, I am experiencing and watching. But I don't put faith in it. In a minute, it can be swept away." She needn't worry. Once an author without an address, a language or a homeland to call her own, Alvarez now has a loyal readership that in years to come will undoubtedly only grow larger.

Source: Jonathan Bing, "Julia Alvarez: Books That Cross Borders," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 243, No. 51, December 16, 1996, pp. 38-39.

SOURCES

Alvarez, Julia, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Plume/Penguin, 1992, pp. 195-224.

———, Julia Alvarez Web site, http://www.juliaalvarez.com (accessed August 20, 2008).

———, "Liberty," in Writers Harvest 2, edited by Ethan Canin, Harcourt Brace, 1996, pp. 192-200.

———, Something to Declare, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998, pp. 16, 125-26, 135.

"Ancestry Maps," ePodunk, http://www.epodunk.com/ancestry/Dominican-Republic.html (accessed August 20, 2008).

Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook, s.v. "Dominican Republic," https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/dr.html (accessed August 20, 2008).

Diederich, Bernard, Trujillo: The Death of the Goat, Little, Brown, 1978, p. 5.

Pritchett, Kay, Review of In the Time of the Butterflies, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Autumn 1995, p. 789.

Sirias, Silvio, Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, 2001.

Stavans, Ilan, Review of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, in Commonweal, Vol. 119, No. 7, April 10, 1992, pp. 23-25.

U.S. Census Bureau, "Selected Population Profile in the United States," http://factfinder.census.gov.

Varnes, Kathrine, "Julia Alvarez," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 282, New Formalist Poets, edited by Jonathan N. Barron, Thomson Gale, 2003, pp. 16-23.