Julia Alvarez Julia Alvarez was born in New York City on March 17, 1950, the second of four daughters. Three months later, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic after a self-imposed exile from General Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. When her parents became involved in an underground movement to overthrow Trujillo, the Alvarez family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic in order to escape imprisonment. They returned to the United States in August of 1960, four months before the founders of the underground, the Mirabal sisters, were brutally murdered by the government. The Alvarez family settled in Queens, N.Y. Alvarez was 10 years old when her family returned to the United States, and she had a difficult time adjusting to immigrant life and learning English. She was homesick and faced alienation and prejudice. “I consider this radical uprooting from my culture, my native language, my country, the reason I began writing,” Alvarez has said. “Language is the only homeland, Czeslow Milosz once observed, and indeed, English, not the United States, was where I landed and sunk deep roots.” When asked why she wrote ``In the
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