In a second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, Alvarez provides a fictional account of three historical revolutionary figures, the Mirabal sisters, who grew up during the Trujillo dictatorship and lost their lives bravely attempting to overthrow it. The tyranny of dictatorship and the problem of exile arise as additional themes in her writing. The family is forced into exile, just as Alvarez’s own family was when her father got involved in the underground resistance to Trujillo. In the story, the Garcia family relocation isn’t a free choice the father is working in the underground resistance against the ruthless dictator, Rafael Trujillo, and faces imminent imprisonment. Gender and race are also recurring topics.
Personal identity is one of those deeply human themes Alvarez returns to regularly. But standing up to their father was a different matter altogether.” Yet they do stand up to him to chart their own paths and arrive at a sense of self. Those were the days when wearing jeans and hoop earrings, smoking a little dope, and sleeping with their classmates were considered political acts against the military-industrial complex. “His daughters,” explains the narrator, “had had to put up with this kind of attitude in an unsympathetic era. “I don’t want loose women in my family,” the father says.
How will four young girls raised in the Dominican Republic make the transition into American society with its significant language as well as cultural differences? Along the way, they also confront their father’s old-world conservatism. Julia Alvarez has fascinated readers, and writers, too, since her highly successful debut novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, about the difficult process of assimilation into a new culture.
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