Only ten years old in 1960 when her family escaped their homeland, Julia Alvarez fled the brutal “justice” of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Her father had been active in an anti-Trujillo underground plot that was detected by the Dominican police. Before they could detain him, Alvarez’s father fled with his family to New York and remained in the United States thereafter. Alvarez made her fictional debut with How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which is set in the United States. Her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, takes place in the Dominican Republic and concerns the destiny of three actual anti-Trujillo female activists.
Dominican overview. An island sits between Puerto Rico and Cuba in the Caribbean Sea. Called Hispaniola or Española, the western third of this island is inhabited by Haiti. On its eastern two-thirds is the Dominican Republic, an area that was controlled mostly by Spain from 1493 to 1822, then by Haiti until 1844. A shaky independence followed, marred by civil strife, periods of U.S. intervention, and 31 years under Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina—an allegedly benevolent dictator who, in fact, resorted to torture and thinly disguised murder.
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