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Julia Alvarez

The passion to push the paradigm

December 1, 2020 - Harry Ransom Center

Detail of Julia Alvarez typescript

by DANIEL ARBINO
This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research? Learn about the series and click here to add your voice to the conversation. 

As a librarian at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin, I have been fortunate to carry values from my personal research journey and apply them to collection development and instruction. On a daily basis, I engage with researchers—faculty, students, scholars, and artists from Latin America and across the globe—whose own research journeys may begin years before they step through our door. [Read more…] about The passion to push the paradigm

Filed Under: Authors, Featured1, Research + Teaching Tagged With: archive, Julia Alvarez, literature, Research, What is Research?

DANIEL ARBINO
Daniel Arbino is the head of collection development at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas at Austin. He has published extensively in Caribbean and U.S. Latinx literature with an emphasis on post-colonial theory and critical race theory. His most recent publication is “When the Mirror Says Yes to Dark Beauty: Healing the Colonial Wound" in Inés Hernández-Ávila's "That's Tejana," Chiricú Journal (Fall 2019).

Transnational sisterhood and solidarity in the Julia Alvarez archive

February 13, 2018 - Sarah Papazoglakis

Image: Notecard card from Edgwidge Danticat to JuliaAlvarez; the image is titled Colored Girl. 

In 1999, five years after Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies was published, the United Nations General Assembly cited the novel as an important cultural text that helped to pass the resolution to designate November 25 an official International Day of Observance for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The date commemorates the November 25, 1960 assassination of the Mirabal sisters in the Dominican Republic under the brutal regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930–1961). [Read more…] about Transnational sisterhood and solidarity in the Julia Alvarez archive

Filed Under: Research + Teaching Tagged With: Dominican Republic, Edwidge Danticat, Fellowships, feminist, Julia Alvarez, literature

Meet the Staff: Andi Gustavson facilitates teaching with the collections

January 17, 2017 - Marissa Kessenich

Andi Gustavson, Instructional Services Coordinator at the Ransom Center, shares insight about collection materials. Photo by Pete Smith.

Meet the Staff is a Q&A series on Cultural Compass that highlights the work, experience, and lives of staff at the Harry Ransom Center.

An alumnus of The University of Texas’s American Studies doctoral program, Andi Gustavson first came to the Harry Ransom Center as a graduate intern. [Read more…] about Meet the Staff: Andi Gustavson facilitates teaching with the collections

Filed Under: Meet the Staff, Research + Teaching Tagged With: American Studies, Andi Gustavson, James Agee papers, Julia Alvarez, Meet the Staff, Undergraduate

Meet the Staff: Digital Collections Librarian Liz Gushee

June 30, 2015 - Gabrielle Inhofe

Meet the Staff is a Q&A series on Cultural Compass that highlights the work, experience, and lives of staff at the Harry Ransom Center. Liz Gushee has been the digital collections librarian at the Ransom Center since January 2011. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from Earlham College and a Master of Library and Information Science from Catholic University of America. Gushee is responsible for launching and managing the platform for the Ransom Center’s digital collections, which includes more than 43,000 items and continues to grow as newly digitized materials are added on a regular basis.

  [Read more…] about Meet the Staff: Digital Collections Librarian Liz Gushee

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts, Digital Collections, Meet the Staff Tagged With: and Capacity: A Collaborative Large-Scale Digitization Project on the Long Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina, Archives of American Art Digital Collections, Content, CONTENTdm, Context, cutoverload, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Deep Eddy, digital collections, digital collections librarian, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Julia Alvarez, Liz Gushee, Meet the Staff, O. Henry, Oscar Wilde, REVEAL, Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters, The Things They Carried, Thomas Hardy, Tim O'Brien

Julia Alvarez to receive National Medal of the Arts

July 28, 2014 - Alicia Dietrich

Julia Alvarez speaks with students during a visit to the Ransom Center in March 2014. Photo by Pete Smith.

Novelist, poet, and essayist Julia Alvarez will receive a 2013 National Medal of the Arts today “for her extraordinary storytelling.” The award will be presented by President Obama. The White House notes in the citation, “In poetry and in prose, Ms. Alvarez explores themes of identity, family, and cultural divides. She illustrates the complexity of navigating two worlds and reveals the human capacity for strength in the face of oppression.”

Alvarez’s archive resides at the Ransom Center and is currently being processed. Alvarez was born in New York City but raised in the Dominican Republic until she was 10. In 1960 her family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic when it was discovered that her father was involved in a plot to overthrow dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Much of Alvarez’s work is considered semi-autobiographical, drawing on her experiences as an immigrant and her bicultural identity. Alvarez’s unique experiences have shaped and infused her writing—from such award-winning novels as How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies to her poetry.

Alvarez’s extensive archive consists of manuscripts, correspondence, journals, and professional files. The manuscripts span her writing career and include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and unpublished works, often in multiple drafts.

Image: Julia Alvarez speaks with students during a visit to the Ransom Center in March 2014. Photo by Pete Smith.

Filed Under: Authors Tagged With: archive, Bill T. Jones, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, James Turrell, Julia Alvarez, Linda Ronstadt, Maxine Hong Kingston, National Endowment for the Arts, National Medal of the Arts, President Obama

Q&A With Julia Alvarez

March 28, 2014 - Gabrielle Inhofe

Photo of Julia Alvarez by Bill Eichner.

Acclaimed novelist, poet, and essayist Julia Alvarez speaks about her life and work with University of Texas at Austin professor Jennifer M. Wilks in a Harry Ransom Lecture this Monday, March 31 at 7 p.m. in Jessen Auditorium at Homer Rainey Hall. A book signing and reception follow at the Ransom Center. This lecture is presented by the University Co-op and co-sponsored by the 2013–2014 Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS) Symposia: Reading Race in Literature and Film. Alvarez’s archive resides at the Ransom Center.

In an interview with Cultural Compass, Alvarez shares her thoughts on women in the literary canon, cultural identity, and more.

Stories about men are considered universal, but stories about women are often considered “women’s fiction.” What do you think can be done to change this trend? How have your books centering on female protagonists been received with regard to this?

We’ve made a lot of progress. In my own lifetime as a writer, now over 40 years, I’ve seen a sea change in interest in authors of ethnic/racial/gender diversity—both as a writer in what gets published but also as a writer in the academy in the curriculum, the books departments select for their core readings.

That said, we are still living in the shadow of that old canonical/gated understanding of what constitutes classic, serious fiction. The travails and writing by men, mostly white, with some exceptions. Women’s novels are often considered lite fair. (Is there a male version of chicklit denomination?)  What was Samuel Johnson’s comment about women preachers? “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Well in many quarters, this was also the attitude toward women’s writing.

So, even though many of the most admired and serious American novelists and poets now come from other traditions, ethnicities, races, and many of them are female, that old mentality is there, like a gas we breathe and don’t even know it. Still it was daunting to read the op-ed in New York Times Book Review, two years ago, by Meg Wolitzer, “The Second Shelf: On the Rules of Literacy Fiction for Men and Women.”

Additionally, it’s not just that women’s fiction isn’t taken as seriously, [or] reviewed as often, but also the default characters and plots of serious fiction are still those of the mainstream culture. So often when I write about a Dominican American family, it’s assumed this has to be my story. Why? Because otherwise I’d write about a John Cheever family in Connecticut? (I love John Cheever’s fiction, but those aren’t the stories I have to tell.) It’s as if our characters are only allowed limited minority fiction status—often there are courses just in this area, an infusion of fairness into an otherwise distorted canon! It’s a curious and often unconscious set of assumptions and expectations about who gets to have their stories told. Of course, I know this, too, is changing, but as Wolitzer cautions us, we ain’t there yet.

If I may take it a step further into personal experience: when I wrote In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) I told the story of the dictatorship seen for the first time from a female point of view. I heard from my friend, Dominican historian and author Bernardo Vega that he introduced Mario Vargas Llosa to the novel, and MVL got very interested in the dictatorship and subsequent “democratic dictatorship” by Balaguer. His novel, La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat) (2000), is often cited as the seminal work of fiction about those years. I admire the novel, and none of this is MVL’s “fault.” Just the way critics and even readers have these unexamined assumptions. Good for you for bringing up the question and forcing us to see these assumptions are still out there.

What can be done to change trend? My response is to keep writing. Spike Lee once said the only way to be avoid being flash-proof is to keep doing your work.

Attitudes/assumptions change slowly, over time, probably not during my watch, but if I don’t do my part, change won’t happen at all.

Many people categorize you as a Latina, Dominican, or bicultural writer. How would you like to be perceived as a writer?

I like the quote, attributed to Terence, the Roman playwright, “I am a human being, nothing human is alien to me.” That could well be the motto of literature. It’s how I would ultimately want to be remembered: one of the storytellers from my specific “tribe,” but telling the stories to all of us. We are all feeding the same sea, as Jean Rhys put it, as we come down and flow into it from our different mountains and landscapes.

After all, one of the things literature teaches—and why I gave myself to this “calling”—was that I recognized that this was the one place where the table was set for all. All the wonderful stories, poems are our legacy as part of the human family—our communal treasure chest, but in order to access it, of course, you need to get the key, that is, education, learning to read, having the time and opportunity to claim your legacy.

For so many years, I felt denied entry into that world of serious American literature (as Langston Hughes noted in his wonderful little poem, “I, too, Sing America”) so that when I finally was published I claimed my LATINA voice, my traditions, my culture with a vengeance. Often it was because I sensed that I needed to make a space and place for other kinds of stories on the shelf of American fiction. But as I get older, what’s important to me is that these terms describe the sources of my stories, my history, my traditions, but that they shouldn’t be used to limit my subjects, or limit my readership to only those in the tight circle of my own culture or background. Again stories are about the big circle, the gathering of the different tribes of the human family. Getting down into ethnic/racial bunkers of literature totally negates what they are about.

Which of your works means the most to you, and why? Which one was most difficult to write? The most fun?

Oh dear, that’s like asking a mother to pick a favorite child! Each work has taught me things I needed to learn—about technique/writing, about history/characters/situations I was curious to understand. So, each one was meaningful to me at the time.

I suppose writing the Tía Lola books for young readers was the most fun, just because Tía Lola is such a sassy, fun-loving tía. I’d catch myself eager to start the writing day, wondering what trouble she’d get into, and as the author, how I’d get her out of the fix she was in, or had gotten me into.

That said, on a good writing day, any book I am laboring on is “fun,” and even those fun books are difficult to write if I want to get them right. Let’s face it, good writing is hard work. I have this one quote about revision/writing by James Dickey that I like to share with my students:

“It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations to a single line of poetry sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nuggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired.”

I guess I wouldn’t go that far—of saying I’m never inspired. But at the end of the day, the inspired piece of writing and the one that took 50 tons of dirt to get to a single nugget of golden writing—they have to be indistinguishable from each other.

Most meaningful? Always the writing I’m currently working on because that’s the cutting edge, the material or technique or character that I’m trying to understand, to serve, to get down on paper.

A little rambling, I know, but as the quote ascribed both to Twain and to Pascal (the problem with Internet searches!): “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

 

Image: Photo of Julia Alvarez by Bill Eichner.

Filed Under: Authors, Exhibitions + Events Tagged With: archives, fiction, Harry Ransom Lecture, In the Time of the Butterflies, James Dickey, Jennifer M. Wilks, John Cheever, Julia Alvarez, La Fiesta del Chivo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Meg Wolitzer, Terence, The Feast of the Goat, Tía Lola

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