Why We Love Julia Alvarez

When I found out a few days ago that author Julia Alvarez is speaking this coming week at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston as part of the museum's Arts of Latin America Celebration (See links further down the page to find out more about these events), I felt a strong surge of excitement move through my mind and soul. Wow, what an opportunity I thought, to actually hear Julia Alvarez speak in person, a feeling which soon gave way to the question: Why is Julia Alvarez so special to me, to so many readers? Is it all about her undeniable storytelling gifts, or is there more to it, connections we feel to her on other levels. On a quest to find out what makes us love Julia Alvarez, I questioned many of my friends and relatives who are readers. I also reflected on my own reasons to feel so compelled by Julia's writings and proud of her success. I don't presume to have the answer to what moves huge numbers of readers world wide to purchase and read books by the celebrated author, but below I will layout some of the reasons that surfaced during my reflections these past few days on the topic of why we love Julia Alvarez.

When questioning friends and family I found that some of their answers do ring true for me as well. My daughter, for example, says "Maybe I like her because she was born in the US and raised in the Dominican Republic, just like me". That makes sense, shared history and background makes us feel closer to people, as if we were somehow family. I'm sure Dominicans at home and around the world feel that connection to Julia and to her stories.

Other respondents, women friends of different backgrounds, reported feeling a connection to Julia by the fact that she is a woman author who draws upon her life, family and experiences in a way that is empowering to women without being exactly a feminist, a term many women my age and younger consider anachronic. While we respect the feminist movement and are enormously grateful for its gains, we feel that what we need to see now is women acting upon those conquered freedoms, owning them for themselves, not to make a point but just to be who they are meant to be, the way Julia has. We see the best of us in her.

And of course there were many who reported they just love her stories for how they feel true and dynamic, powerful and profound. They love her versatility, how she is able to write a story with grit based on historical events that happened during the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in Dominican Republic ("In the Time of the Butterflies"), as well as a story with humor such as "How Tia Lola came to (visit) Stay", which while meant for younger readers can be thoroughly enjoyed by anyone, especially those who have lived through the Dominican immigrant experience. She can also produce a beautiful children story like "The Secret Footprints", about a little ciguapa (mythical creature of Dominican lore who has her feet facing backwards) who befriends a human boy; Add poetry and nonfiction to that and what you have is remarkable scope. As avid readers we love a good writer. What could make more sense than that?

My friends and family love Julia for some of the same reasons I do, it turns out.

If you have read my one previous hub, you know that I am a personal writer. This is not going to be a scholarly dissertation on the works of Julia Alvarez, but a reflection on how her life and work affects people like me. We've arrived at the point where I can't keep myself from telling you why I love Julia Alvarez, or more specifically, why she is special to me among other authors whose work I admire. It has to do with all three things mentioned above, and more.

I was born Dominican, in that we differ, but I was raised in the beautiful island of the Dominican Republic, raised in a family of educators and thinkers, and born to a mother and father who also opposed the Trujillo regime, as hers did. My mother wrote anti regime messages on the blackboards of the catholic school she attended as a High School student. She got away with it due to the discreet protection of the nuns, who calmly denied any knowledge of which student was responsible. Mom thinks they always knew. My dad, 10 years older than her, was more involved in underground movements. He claims he was simply a member of a kind of book club, and had not really intended to go into subversive action; but what is more subversive than reading unauthorized books to a totalitarian regime? Sooner or later he was involved, to the point of spending time in solitary confinement and having to flee the country at various times. I heard from the lips of my grandmother how she and my grandfather as newlyweds lost their land to Trujillo, who "purchased" by coercion choice lots identified by his scouts from their rightful owners at nominal prizes, giving them limited time to leave the land and no way to reclaim it. Given this family history, I feel especially connected to "In the Time of the Butterflies" and to Julia's background.

One other very personal reason why I love Julia Alvarez is that she is a teacher, as I am. Yes, I did come to teaching originally because I had to make a living, but along the way I fell in love with it, and that love has deepened through the years. Julia reports a similar experience with teaching in her biography on her own website. She is a Dominican educator in the US, just as me. Let me tell you a little story from one of my many learning days as a teacher, that will make this point come alive. On my first year working at the school I now work at, I had a group of about 15 students in a course titled Spanish for Native Speakers. The students were all orally fluent, but having grown in the US most had little or no formal instruction in the Spanish Language. The focus of the class was on helping them improve their reading and writing skills. On my first day I discovered that every one of my students was of Dominican descent. They were thrilled to find out I was too. The honeymoon ended when I gave them their first longer writing assignment, and on the day of the due date not a single student turned in the assignment. I was dumbfounded. What made you think that this would be OK? I asked them. One student said in a tone of complicity..."Well, you know, Ms Brea, We're Dominican..." I'm sure the child would have never said those words had he guessed that he was in for quite a lecture. I talked about how in all my years as a student, and later as a teacher in Dominican Republic, never once had I witnessed a display such as this. I told them how being Dominican was not about dressing gangsta' and listening to reggaeton, which aren't really Dominican cultural traits anyway, but about living up to the higher hopes of our country and the legacy of the many brilliant artists, thinkers and writers that we can call our countrymen. The reason/s why this group of students had accepted such self deprecating views of themselves and their roots is the subject for another hub, but my point is: I love Julia Alvarez because she is living proof of what I was trying to tell those kids. I love Julia even more because if she were to encounter a scenario as the one I described, she wouldn't even have needed to come up with an argument. She could have just stood there and let the class look at her in the knowledge of who she is, being herself the only needed proof.

I also love Julia because she is a brilliant writer in a language that isn't her native tongue. Even though Julia was born in the United States she was taken back to Dominican Republic at the age of three months, according to her own account on the biography page previously referenced. She also tells of the experience of facing spoken American English armed only with her classroom acquired English. I have been through that confusing moment when you realize that even though you have learned a fair amount of English at school, the language on the streets and on campus can be quite a different experience. I had lived in New York from ages 2 to 5, but returned home before I was enrolled in School in the United States. When I later arrived in the Sates at college age, I had scored high on all my English classes in school and in my first year of college spent in Puerto Rico, yet when I first heard people speaking to me in various regional accents I had trouble understanding a single word. It all became a soup in my head and I felt thoroughly inept. Your classroom training does eventually kick in when your ears get used to the accents, but it's quite a process. Just as Julia, I am a second language English speaker and writer. I still face challenges related to that reality every day; but I have faith in the fact that thinking masters language and as long as I know clearly what I need to say, I'll find a way of saying it. I don't hope to ever say it as well or as brilliantly as Julia, but I still love her for being a celebrated American writer whose native language is my own.

And finally I especially admire Julia for what we don't have in common. She is a woman of creative talent who has not compromised her dreams, and who has not denied the world the gift of her writing in favor of more predictable and stable choices. I certainly have struggled with that throughout my life. While I love what I do today, somehow the dream of making a living mainly as an artist has eluded me, perhaps due to lack of focus or belief in myself, having just too many different interests in my life, or whatever circumstances it may be. Looking at Julia and other successful creative women somehow keeps the dream alive in me, and it makes it feel ok, allowing me to tell the young people that I work with and live around that dreams can be achieved.

In short, I love Julia Alvarez because she is a creative woman of success, a dedicated educator, a Dominican of substance and a brilliant second language English writer. And for how graciously she is all of those things. If you, reader, are also an admirer of Julia Alvarez and her work, please leave a comment with your own reasons. Until the next hub!