Julia Alvarez
Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the album Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.
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Jo Reed: Welcome to Art Works the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.
We have a special pod today—because this is the 25th anniversary of the publication of Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies—not only is In the Time of the Butterflies a Big Read title, on August 31st, Julia Alvarez is speaking in the NEA’s Poetry and prose Pavilion at the National Book Festival—so it seemed like an ideal time to revisit my interview with Julia. When the book was chosen for the Big Read, I sat down with Julia in her Vermont home for a long talk about Butterflies and her own journey as a young immigrant to the United States, and her finding her way as a reader and a writer. Julia Alvarez had spent her childhood in the Dominican Republic until the family fled the country because of her father's political activities.
In the Time of the Butterflies is Julia Alvarez’s second novel. Set in the Dominican Republic, In the Time of the Butterflies is a fictionalized account of the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were murdered by henchmen of Dictator Rafael Trujillo for their resistance to his regime. The girls were known in the underground by their codename Las Mariposas, or butterflies. The story of the sisters cut very close to the bone for Julia Alvarez.
Julia Alvarez: In the Time of the Butterflies is a book that helped me understand my country's story and my parents' story. But I think it was a book also that I had to write because it as a debt that I owed. If I can put it in those terms, I wasn't thinking of it analytically in the way that I have to repay this debt and tell this story. It was more that it was a story that was a pebble in my shoe that I couldn't shake out. We were the family that got out and came to the United States-- and here I am, an American writer, but this is a story that I left behind and there but for the grace of accidents and God and, and history, we got out and they didn't make it. And so what is the responsibility of those that survive? To remember, and to remind.
Jo Reed: When do you first hear of the Mirabal sisters?
Alvarez: Well I remember we got here August 6, 1960, end of November about four months after we left they were murdered. And about a week or two later there was an article in Time magazine. I remember opening this Time magazine and seeing this picture and seeing something about, you know, the Dominican Republic, and of course anything that I found in print that had to do with- with us, I was right there, and I remember my father coming and taking it away as if it was something I shouldn't be reading. And so soon thereafter, you know with the underground really got active in the Dominican Republic and there was a plot that succeeded in killing Trujillo and that was the same underground group that my father had been a part of and my uncle was part of that group, so he was taken away. So my cousins and my aunt, right next door to us, were suddenly under a house arrest, and that's when I really became aware and heard them talking, and heard about the Mirabal sisters. And imagine-- what a story, at that point, I only knew that there were three of them, but they were three sisters and- and they were killed. And they didn't make it out. And me and my sisters, we had made it out. So there was this strange feeling of, “why did we get to be the lucky ones?” I think that I identified when I read that feeling that they were figures inside me that I felt compelled to tell their story. As I got older, every time I'd go we started going back once the dictatorship days were over, every time people started talking about the dictatorship I would ask about the Mirabal sisters. It captured the imagination. You know these three young women who had been so brave and who, had been murdered on a lonely country road I, you know, it just kept being in my head. And I think the big thing is too is that even friends that were really well-informed and knew a lot about history, they had never heard of the Mirabal sisters. So I was constantly telling the story.
- And the decision to make it a novel as opposed to a piece of history, because you write nonfiction as well as fiction.
Twenty-five years ago, Julia Alvarez published In the Time of the Butterflies, which was chosen as a Big Read title in 2010. Set in the Dominican Republic, In the Time of the Butterflies is a fictionalized account of the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were murdered by henchmen of dictator Rafael Trujillo for their resistance to his regime. The girls were known in the underground by their codename “Las Mariposas,” or butterflies. Their story was very close to Avarez's own. She spent her childhood in the Dominican Republic, but her family got out. In this podcast, Julia Alvarez discusses how In the Time of the Butterflies came to be, the rich source material she finds in her family's immigrant experience, and how her life as a reader led to her life as a writer.