A native of the Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez moved with her family to New York to escape Trujillo's regime when she was ten years old. Based in part on her early experiences as an immigrant, her novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents follows the exploits of four sisters who move to the United States from the Dominican Republic. One of the sisters, Yolanda, is the protagonist of Alvarez's novel ¡Yo! Alvarez addresses Trujillo's brutal dictatorship in her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, which is based on the true story of the Mirabal sisters who were murdered at the hands of Trujillo's secret police. The novel was later adapted into a film of the same name starring Salma Hayek, Edward James Olmos, and Marc Anthony.

In 1984, Sandra Cisneros, a Mexican American writer, published The...