You didn't have to suffer what was going on around you.
Dusting by julia alvarez portable#
She explained to Frontera Magazine, "Coming to this country I discovered books, I discovered that it was a way to enter into a portable homeland that you could carry around in your head. "Back home, I had been a very poor student, a tomboy, and a troublemaker, so my father was eager to encourage this new trend in ," she told Library Journal. Her father took her to a library, and Alvarez discovered her love for the written word. Uprooted from her culture, her native language, and extended family, Alvarez, once a vivacious child who made friends easily, became introverted. Once the plane landed in New York, Alvarez's story-book image of life in the United States was quickly shattered by the harsh realities of life as an immigrant. And here I was, an American girl, coming home at last." … All my childhood I had longed for this moment of arrival.
Dusting by julia alvarez full#
At night, my prayers were full of blond hair and blue eyes and snow. "I had gone to an American school and spent most of the day speaking and reading English. "All my childhood I had dressed like an American, eaten American foods, and befriended American children," Alvarez told American Scholar. For Alvarez, the mystique of the United States loomed large in her ten-year-old mind. Their destination was New York, where Alvarez's father had secured a fellowship at a hospital. To avoid this fate the family fled the country. As a result, the police set up surveillance on their home and Alvarez's father was warned by an American agent that his arrest was imminent. When Alvarez was ten years old, her father became actively involved in the underground coalition poised to overthrow dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. The second of four sisters, she was reared close to her mother's family, amidst a slew of cousins, aunts, uncles, and maids. From Latina to "Gringa"Īlthough Alvarez was born in New York City on March 27, 1950, soon after her birth her parents returned to their native home of the Dominican Republic, where her father, a doctor, ran a local hospital. Her writings include four novels, two collections of poetry, a book of essays, and two children's stories. Alvarez became a nationally acclaimed author in 1991 at the age of 41 with the publication of her first novel, How the Garc ía Girls Lost Their Accent. She discovered through words she could build her own worlds that both revealed and transcended the meaning of her life. Thrown into a foreign language and culture as a child, Alvarez found refuge in books and writing.
Alvarez lives in Vermont and the Dominican Republic, where she visits relatives and tends the shade-grown coffee farm she started with her husband, Bill Eichner, a cookbook author and ophthalmologist.Dominican author Julia Alvarez has given voice to the themes of displacement, alienation, and search for identity in her poetry and fiction. She was also a finalist for the National Book Award. The author of eleven books, Alvarez has proved herself a talented and flexible writer and has won many prizes and awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Josephine Miles/PEN award. Equally essential to her work is the experience of what it means to be a writer. Often her work is autobiographical, but even when not, her characters are caught between worlds: cultural, lingual, economic, national, political, and familial. The shock of being transplanted from a tropical paradise amidst an extended and well-respected family to Queens, New York, where she and her family-mother, father, and three sisters-were viewed as outsiders, informs much of her writing. Julia Alvarez, born in New York City on 27 March 1950, lived in the Dominican Republic until 1960, when her family sought political refuge in the United States.
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