American Masters: "Julia Alvarez: A Life Reinvented" (Bosch and Company, Inc, Latino Public Broadcasting, ITVS, American Masters Pictures, VOCES, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, September 17) I watched an unexpectedly interesting episode of American Masters on KPBS: “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined.” Julia Alvarez is a Latina-American writer born in New York City on March 27, 1950 to parents from the Dominican Republic. Her father was Dr. Eduardo Alvarez and her mother was Julia Tavares, who came from a much wealthier and more socially prestigious Dominican family than her dad. Julia Alvarez was the second child born to this couple, who met in New York where he had emigrated because he was a vocal opponent of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal Right-wing dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to his assassination in 1961, either directly or through a figurehead president in what the Latin Americans call imposición. Three months after Julia’s birth the couple decided to move back to the Dominican Republic even though that meant being in direct danger from Trujillo’s government and in particular the SIM (“Servicio de Inteligencia Militar”), Trujillo’s equivalent of the Gestapo, KGB or STASI. SIM agents drove throughout the Dominican countryside in black Volkswagen “Beetles” with their dreaded initials stenciled on the back hoods. Alvarez’s other three siblings were born in the Dominican Republic, and in the film she’s shown revisiting the house where she lived with her parents there. Her guide mispronounces the word “hen house” as “penthouse,” and she laughs at the confusion even though she stresses that the two sorts of buildings had opposite functions. The “hen house” meant just that: a place where chickens were raised and eggs collected from them.

In 1960 the family was forced to flee back to the U.S. after Alvarez’s father was involved in a failed plot against Trujillo. In the Dominican Republic she’d enjoyed a fairly affluent lifestyle – she joked that each of the five Alvarez children had a separate nanny, where most Dominican women who emigrated to the U.S. had to work as nannies. In the U.S. the Alvarez family was stuck in a two-bedroom apartment, and could afford even that only because a couple of rich uncles were helping them financially. Alvarez’s biographer, Silvio Sirias, said that when her parents moved the family to the U.S. she “lost almost everything: a homeland, a language, family connections, a way of understanding, and a warmth.” In 1963 her parents sent her to Abbott Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where she started to develop an interest in both reading and writing poetry. In 1967 she started college at Connecticut College but later transferred to Middlebury in Vermont, where she ended up working as a teacher for decades. Alvarez published her first book of poems, The Homecoming, in 1984, and in 1991 she published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. This was a thinly disguised story of her own childhood in the U.S., and it evoked dramatically different reactions from her parents. Her dad loved the fact that his daughter was now a published and acclaimed novelist, while her mom and some of her sisters hated the book because it laid bare the family’s secrets.

In 1994 Alvarez published her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, about a real-life tragedy: the murder of the three Mirabal sisters in 1959. Inspired by the success of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, the Mirabal sisters, Minerva, Patria and Maria Elena, joined a revolutionary opposition called Las Mariposas (“The Butterflies”), only they were caught and summarily executed by agents of Trujillo’s SIM. Their bodies were put in a car and the car was pushed off a cliff to make it look they had died in an “accident.” (It reminded me almost inevitably of the murder of three Mississippi civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, in 1964 by local law enforcement officials in Philadelphia, Mississippi; their bodies, too, were packed into their car and disposed of in a nearby river.) When Alvarez started researching the book, she was startled to discover that a fourth Mirabal sister, Dedé, had survived because she’d been out of the country at the time. At one point, fearing alienating the Mirabal family the way she’d upset her own relatives in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez planned to change the names of the Mirabals and have them rebelling against a dictatorship in a fictitious country – but Dedé Mirabal talked her out of it and Alvarez published the book as an historical novel with the real names and locations. In 2001 the book was filmed as a made-for-TV movie by MGM and Showtime, directed by Mariano Barroso from a script by David and Judy Klaas, and starring Selma Hayek, Lumi Cavazos and Edward James Olmos.

In 1997 Alvarez and her husband, Bill Eichner (a white American eye doctor she’d married after two previous marital failures), went back to the Dominican Republic and met a group of local coffee farmers who were being driven off their land by giant agribusiness corporations. They bought them a farm which they named Alta Gracia – “Alta,” meaning “high,” because it was located in the mountain country where the best coffee is grown, and “Gracia,” meaning “grace” – and worked with the locals to run it for a few years until they ceded the enterprise to the farmers who staffed it. Though most of her subsequent novels weren’t mentioned here, in 1997 she published ¡Yo!, a sequel to How the García Girls Lost Their Accents focused on the character of Yolanda, inspired by Alvarez herself. In 2001 Alvarez published her first children’s book, The Secret Footprints, illustrated by Fabian Negrin and based on a Dominican legend of the Ciguapas, a sort of indigenous half-ape, half-human race whose existence is threatened by one of them, Guapa, who becomes too close to the humans. Alvarez has also published young-adult novels, including one called Return to Sender (2009) in which the middle-school-age son of a white Vermont dairy farmer falls in love with the middle-school-age daughter of an undocumented immigrant. Other works by Alvarez include Before We Were Free (2003), about the last days of the Trujillo regime; and In the Name of Salomé (2000), about a mother-daughter pair of Dominican writers who navigate the political upheavals of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

In 2020 Alvarez published Afterlife, her first novel for adult readers in 14 years, after she was brought face-to-face with mortality by the death of her mother and the suicide of her younger sister Mauricia, known as “Maura.” Maura had struggled with bipolar disorder for decades before taking her own life just after Alvarez and her husband had arranged for her to go to an assisted-living facility and receive psychiatric care. Alvarez’s most recent book is The Cemetery of Untold Stories (2024). The story of Julia Alvarez is incredible in more than one sense; like F. Scott Fitzgerald, her prose has the texture of poetry and is beautiful in its own right apart from whatever it’s describing. She’s certainly received accolades, including the Presidential Medal of Arts (which she got from then-President Barack Obama in 2014), but she’s also definitely an “outsider” in the mainstream of (white) American literature. Alvarez’s story is especially relevant right now, when the country is embroiled in an often nasty political debate about immigration and whether immigrants in general, and immigrants of color in particular, can ever be “real Americans.”

After the American Masters documentary on Julia Alvarez, PBS showed two mini-films, 15 minutes each, about two younger Latino/a artists. One was Alejandro Jimenez, the son of New Mexico farm workers who rose through his school ranks and ultimately attended college despite being told by a high-school official, “We thought you’d stay here and be a farmworker like your dad.” Jimenez ultimately became a poet in both English and Spanish, and the film shows him winning the Mexican national poetry slam contest in 2021 with a high-energy reading of a Spanish-language poem. The other was Maia Cruz Palileo, a Filipina-American, who realized early on that she was a Gay woman (it’s fascinating that she calls herself a “Gay woman” rather than a “Lesbian”) and who presents as short-haired and very butch. Palileo is a visual artist, and one of her projects is to take a series of photographs made by a white U.S. Army officer who, assigned to the Philippines in 1900 after the U.S. conquered the islands from Spain, took pictures of indigenous Filipinos. He derisively and patronizingly called them “our little brown brothers” and made clear his agenda was to teach them the ways of white “civilization.” Palileo took copies of his photos and cut them out as silhouettes to remove the images from their original racist context to recontextualize the people and restore their sense of pride in themselves. These two tag shows amplified the main themes of the Julia Alvarez story: what does the broader American culture gain, and what does it lose, by being open and welcoming to new arrivals? It’s an especially pressing question now, with Donald Trump poised on the edge of a Presidential election victory on a frankly anti-immigrant platform that demonizes them and blames all America’s problems on them, the way Adolf Hitler demonized the Jews.