Las Mujeres - Alvarez, Julia
Julia Alvarez - Biography
Nationality: American, Dominican
Occupation: Writer, Poet
In her poetry and prose, Julia Alvarez has expressed her feelings about her immigration to the United States. Although she was born in New York City, she spent her early years in the Dominican Republic. After her family's immigration to America, she and her sisters struggled to find a place for themselves in their new world. Alvarez has used her dual experience as a starting point for the exploration of culture through writing. Alvarez's work voices many of the concerns of Hispanic women and has received critical acclaim.
Life in the Dominican Republic
Reminiscing on her youth in an article in American Scholar, Alvarez wrote, "Although I was raised in the Dominican Republic by Dominican parents in an extended Dominican family, mine was an American childhood." As she described her family background, her father's once-wealthy family had supported the wrong side during the revolution while her mother's parents benefitted from their support of the people in power. They lived on her mother's family property. Life in the compound was somewhat communal; Alvarez and her sisters were brought up along with their cousins and supervised by her mother, maids, and many aunts.
Although her own family was not as well off as their relatives, Alvarez did not feel inferior. None of the cousins were allowed to forget that she was born in America. Her father, a doctor who ran the nearby hospital, had met her mother while she was attending school in America. While such extravagances as shopping trips to America were beyond their financial means, Alvarez's family was highly influenced by American attitudes and goods. If her mother could not buy her daughters American clothing, she made sure that Alvarez and her sisters were as fashionable as their cousins. The children ate American food, attended the American school, and for a special treat, ate ice cream from the American ice cream parlor. American cars were bought at the American dealership, shopping was done at the American's store, and American appliances were flaunted in the compound. The entire extended family was obsessed with America; to the children, it was a fantasy land.
As Alvarez acknowledges in her article in American Scholar, her family's association with the United States may have saved her father's life. The members of her mother's family were respected because of their ties with America. Alvarez's uncles had attended Ivy League colleges, and her grandfather was a cultural attaché to the United Nations. The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, could not victimize a family with such strong American ties. He would not destroy them for their money, and he hesitated to struggle with them for political reasons. When Alvarez's father secretly joined the forces attempting to oust Trujillo, the police set up surveillance of the compound. It was rumored that, respected family or not, her father was soon to be apprehended. Just before the police were to capture her father in 1960, a U.S. agent, known to Alvarez as Tio Vic, warned him; he ushered the family into an airplane and out of the country. Describing the scene as their plane landed in America in American Scholar, Alvarez wrote, "All my childhood I had dressed like an American, eaten American foods, and befriended American children. 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."
Experiences Acculturation Problems in the United States
Alvarez's homecoming was not what she had expected it to be. Although she was thrilled to be back in America, she would soon face homesickness, alienation, and prejudice. She missed her cousins, her family's large home in the compound, and the respect her family name demanded. Alvarez, her parents, and her sisters squeezed themselves and their possessions into a tiny apartment. As she related to Brújula <> Compass, the experience was like a crash: "The feeling of loss caused a radical change in me. It made me an introverted little girl." Alvarez became an avid reader, immersing herself in books and, eventually, writing.
Alvarez went on to college. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature and writing and became an English professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. She received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Ingram Merrill Foundation in addition to a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for excellence in multicultural literature. She published several collections of poetry including Homecoming, which appeared in 1984, and by 1987 she was working on a collection of stories. When Alvarez published How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents in 1991, the 290-page novel received considerable attention. The past decade had seen a surge of ethnic novels, and Garcia Girls came to be known as a notable example of the genre.
WORKS
Selected writings
* Homecoming. New York: Grove Press, 1984.
* How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Plume, 1991.
* In the Time of Butterflies. New York: Penguin USA, 1995.
* The Other Side/El Otro Lado. New York: New American Library, 1996.
* Yo! New York: Algonquin, 1997.
Source
Notable Hispanic American Women, Book 2. Gale, 1998.
