![]() And here I was, an American girl, coming home at last." … All my childhood I had longed for this moment of arrival. 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. ![]() Dominican author Julia Alvarez has given voice to the themes of displacement, alienation, and search for identity in her poetry and fiction.
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