Julia Alvarez

March 27, 1950 Present

A Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist

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 Julia Alvarez was born in March 20, 1950, just three months later, her family moved back
to their home land of the Dominican Republic. Her childhood life was shattered as the police
found evidence that her father was in an underground rebellion to over throw the dictator Rafael
Leonidas Trujillo Molina because they had surrounded her home with surveillance cameras, but
before they could do anything her father got a warning by an American agent. Taking the warning
to heart her family fled the country when she was at the tender age of 10, to a place where
Trujillo power could not reach them. Their destination was New York, where Alvarezs father had
secured a job in a hospital.
This could not have happened if her father had no ties to the U.S, but thankfully the did.
The only way they couldve survived was because of the connections of Alvarezs mothers family
are respected: her uncles all attended Ivy colleges and her grandfather was a cultural attach to
the United Nations.
The dictator would no dare to cross path with such a family to the U.S, he made no mare
against their wealth and hesitated to struggle with them for political reasons. Her family is
untouchable.
Even if they were safe, Alvarez felt homesick, missing her family from the cousins to the
uncles/aunts. Staying at an apartment with her sisters and parents, made her have a large
amount of free time, making her become a little rebellious and becoming into her tomboy stage.
Seeing this her father took her to the library. There he taught her the art of words.
As Alvarez was growing up in the United States she had noticed many things in the early
sixties. The country was locked in the Civil Rights struggle, womens movement, Equal rights
Amendment movement, multicultural studies and pretty much any kind of movements. Those
were the days were you cut your root, to cut your ties to the past and the old ways in order to
have the privilege of being an American citizen.
Even though they were painful moments, Alvarez took opportunities of those moments
for expansion and self-creation. All those times she did not see her self an American girl or a
Dominican girl, but a girl who desperately wanted a place to fit in, a place to belong. As time
progressed she had discovered that the world of imagination was a portable homeland where
everybody belonged. Slowly, but surely America changed and began to listen to its people voice

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to wanting to change, to wanting to be accepted, to wanting to be free. Not the freedom of
problems or inequalities or even hypocrisies. Freedom was the opportunity to change the shape
of the country, to help people to continue to bond of many that one nation was really indivisible
with liberty and justice for all, not only our selves but other as well. Although Alvarez was bullied
because of her classmates spouting racism to her, she didnt let it get to her, she continued
writing from her experiences in America and wishing at times to become an actual American
girl, when the teasing got to her.
She once explained Coming to this country I discovered books, I discovered that it was a
way to enter into a movable homeland that you could carry around in your head. You didnt have
to suffer what was going around you, I found a place to go. After high school, Alvarez earned
her bachelors degree from Middlebury College (1971) and her masters degree in creative
writing from Syracuse University (1975). She spent the next two decades traveling the country
with the poetry-in-the-school programs and teaching English & Creative Writing to elementary,
high school, and college students. She was interested in poetry because of Langston Hughes with
his poem I, too, sing America Hughes was saying that he too belongs in America even if were
raised different it does not matter what place we are form, what matters is what we do to this
land in order to be accepted and acknowledge. Because of this poem Alvarez continued on and
made her first novel in 1991 How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, rather than criticism, which
many new authors get, she raised so much praise that she received grants of the National
Endowment for the arts and The Ingram Merrill Foundation, in addition to receiving a PEN
Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for excellence in multicultural literature. Alvarezs second novel,
In the time of the butterflies was published in 1994. This book received a favorable reaction from
viewers, some of whom admired her work to have the ability to express the range of feelings
bought by the revolution happening in the story. In the same year the novel was a finalist for the
National Book Critics Award.
After her two successful novels were published, Alvarez published a collection of poems
entitled The Other Side/ El Otro Lado in 1995. The books and poems were similar themes of power
of language and having ties to two cultures. Since she was raised to be Dominican for the first
ten years of her life she couldnt just leave it behind so she visited her native land four or five

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times a year, to check on her coffee bean farm in which she and her husband, Bill Eincher that
she married in 1989, and most of all for her people. The profits from the farm are used to create
a learning center for Dominican children and adults.
Throughout the years, Alvarez had published many novels and book each having made by
an experience of her life. Many in which she writes about strong women like in the Garcia girls in
one novel, the indomitable women in her own family in her essays. Alvarez says those characters
are inspired by muses who never wrote a book, but stirred my imagination with their pluck, and
sometimes their failures.
Alvarez had quit her job in teaching and moved to her coffee farm in which she spends
her time with her husband. Teaching the community who are willing to learn to read and wright,
no matter what age to children to adult.
This, her life, was accomplished because she survived because her father took the
warning to heart from the American agent because of the acceptance America had to cultures.
She might have not been a writer if not for her father who made an effort in Alvarez childhood
by getting her interested in books, but most of all to her imagination to change a single
experience to something memorable.

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 References

1. url: http://www.juliaalvarez.com/about/
2. url: http://www.enotes.com/topics/julia-alvarez
3. url: http://www.notablebiographies.com/A-An/Alvarez-Julia.html
4. url: http://www.neabigread.org/books/timeofthebutterflies/readers-guide/about-the-
author/
5. url: http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Julia_Alvarez.aspx
6. url: http://www.lasmujeres.com/alvarezjulia/
7. url: http://www.ttbook.org/julia-alvarez
8. url: http://immigrationtounitedstates.org/335-julia-alvarez.html
9. url:http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/publication/2008/06/20080625200016eai
fas0.5940515.html#axzz4LNMCfgjT
10. url: http://www.mprnews.org/story/2006/04/12/juliaalvarez


Picture references
1. url:http://www.syracuse.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/03/all-
american_writer_julia_alvarez_talks_immigrant_experience_red_pickup_before_g.html

2. url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Alvarez

3. url: http://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/9718-julia-alvarez

4. url: https://infograph.venngage.com/p/51959/julia-alverez

5. url: http://quotesgram.com/img/al-alvarez-quotes/2818855/

6. url: https://www.pinterest.com/lory53/julia-alvarez/

7. url: http://www.juliaalvarez.com/napa/butterfly-power.php

8. url: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11206.In_the_Time_of_the_Butterflies

9. url: http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Alvarez-Julia.html

10. url: http://www.tialolastories.com/tia-lola-tias.php