![]() ![]() Bloodthirsty and corrupt, Trujillo.Join us in conversation with award-winning novelist and poet Julia Alvarez and Queens College professor and author Vanessa Pérez-Rosario.īorn in New York City in 1950, Julia Alvarez’s parents returned to their native country, Dominican Republic, shortly after her birth. The family's return to the Dominican Republic was not without risk since her father had originally been forced to flee to Canada, where he lived for nine years, after his involvement in a failed student underground movement to overthrow the dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Her family lived in New York for just three weeks, however, before they returned to their native country, where Alvarez lived until she was ten years old. Julia Alvarez was born to Eduardo and Julia Alvarez on March 27, 1950, in New York City. As Alvarez says in Homecoming (1984), all in all, the development of her voice as a writer reflects her maturation from a young poet "claiming woman's voice" into a more versatile author who, in claiming her voice as a woman and a Dominican-American, deals head-on with "the further confusions of bilingual, bicultural self." Although her primary focus is on women and how all of these issues impact on their lives and her own, her later fictional work has broadened in a deliberate move to include men's voices as well. Other issues central to Alvarez's work are family: patriarchy and the struggles of women against the circumscribed roles assigned to them within traditional Dominican culture, and relationships between men and women. As a fiction writer, I find the most exciting things happen in the realm of that hyphen-the place where two worlds collide or blend together." In a review of In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), Ilan Stavans quoted Alvarez as saying, "I am a Dominican, hyphen, American. Language provides the means for Alvarez to negotiate her hyphenated existence as an immigrant and to shed light on such issues as acculturation, alienation, class, race, and politics. The difficulty of doing so by other means has left her with a sense of not fully belonging to either her native Dominican homeland or her adopted American one. ![]() The author has repeatedly addressed her ability to shed the sense of herself that she describes in her book of essays Something to Declare (1998) as a "foreigner with no ground to stand on" through language (writing). The English language became the homeland in which Alvarez landed and where she has grown as a woman, teacher, poet, novelist, and essayist. Although Spanish was her first language and its influence is felt throughout her work, it remains the language of her early childhood. When there's no other ground under your feet, you learn quick, believe me." Language is a central issue in Alvarez's work, as is her experience as a Dominican-American navigating between two languages and two cultures. The phrase also appears in her third novel, ¡Yo! (1997), where the title character, Alvarez's alter ego, is complimented on her spoken English by her American landlady, to whom Yo responds, "Language is the only homeland. ![]() Language is the only homeland." These words of the poet Czeslaw Milosz serve as the epigraph to the 1995 edition of Homecoming, Julia Alvarez's first collection of poems. ![]()
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