27 pages • 54-minute read
Names/Nombres
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Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Authorial Context: Julia Alvarez and Latinx Literature
Julia Alvarez is a Dominican American novelist, essayist, poet, and educator who is one of the most significant figures in English-language Latinx literature. Alvarez was born in New York City in 1950, but her parents moved back to the Dominican Republic when she was just three months old. When Alvarez was 10, her father was involved in a failed plot to assassinate the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and the family had to flee the country. They returned to the United States, where the young Alvarez struggled to adapt to her new life.
In 1991, Alvarez published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which tells the story of a Dominican family living in the United States, trying to reconcile their Dominican culture with their new American life. She was part of a pioneering cohort of Latina writers, like Sandra Cisneros and Cristina García, who began publishing in the 1980s and ’90s, and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents was the first major novel written by a Dominican American author. Alvarez’s sophomore novel, the historical fiction In the Time of the Butterflies, published in 1994, received similar critical acclaim and is now considered a classic of Latina literature.
Much of Alvarez’s work, including essays like “Names/Nombres,” focuses on themes of language, identity, assimilation, and cultural hybridization. She explores how identity shifts and changes as individuals try to adjust to the dominant culture, examining the delicate balance between preservation and adaptation. She remains one of the most acclaimed Latina authors and has inspired an entire generation of Dominican American writers.
Historical Context: The Dominican Diaspora and Migration
From 1930 to 1961, the Dominican Republic was under the military dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. The regime suppressed opposition through murder and torture as well as other acts of extreme violence, including the infamous 1937 “Parsley Massacre,” in which Trujillo’s troops killed tens of thousands of Haitians living along the border with the Dominican Republic. In 1960, Trujillo’s men killed three of the four Mirabal sisters, who had been plotting a revolution; this inspired Julia Alvarez’s historical fiction novel In the Time of the Butterflies. That same year, Trujillo’s regime attempted to assassinate the president of Venezuela, and the United States, which had long supported Trujillo, broke ties with the regime. Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, and the country began to work its way toward democracy.
The violent repression that occurred during the Trujillo regime caused many Dominicans to flee their homes to escape persecution, including Alvarez and her family. However, in the early 1960s, migration from the Dominican Republic to the United States was relatively low, and “Names/Nombres” describes Alvarez’s experience of growing up as part of the only immigrant family in her community. The continued political uncertainty in the wake of Trujillo’s assassination, including a civil war that prompted US intervention in 1965, caused waves of Dominican migration to the United States. Dominican enclaves developed in major cities like New York, and today, nearly 2.5 million Dominican Americans live in the United States.
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