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Best-selling Dominican American author Julia Alvarez is the focus of a new PBS documentary that explores the 74-year-old’s childhood, experiences, and career as an acclaimed poet and author. Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined gives viewers a look into Alvarez’s life in the Dominican Republic, exploring her familial trauma from the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, and follows her footsteps in entering the world of poetry and becoming the influential writer she is today. The documentary covers her 1991 breakout semi-autobiographical novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, her bestselling 1994 novel In the Time of the Butterflies, which details the true story of the Mirabal sisters who rebelled against Trujillo, and her most recent novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories.
“Once we came to this country and once Papi felt that he could talk because everyone was afraid, he told the stories of the Mirabal sisters,” Alvarez told NBC News. “They were killed two months after we escaped. They were four sisters and three gave their lives to create a free country, depose the dictator, and we were four sisters, too. So we were the four sisters who had made it to safety, and I always felt the long shadow of those four sisters. … So there was a sense of a connection there, a connection to their story.”
Born in New York in 1950, Alvarez spent the first ten years of her life in the Dominican Republic after she and her family moved there when she was three months old to escape the dictatorship. She is now considered one of the most prominent contemporary Latina voices in literature. In the film, which is part of PBS’s “American Masters” series, Alvarez reflects on the traumas of a dictatorship, the feeling of loss following their migration to the U.S., and discusses how poetry made her feel like less of an outsider.
Produced and directed by Cuban American filmmaker Adriana Bosch, the documentary examines how Alvarez’s writing shifted the lens from male-dominated stories to female-dominated stories: “In our film, Dominican poet Elizabeth Acevedo introduces Julia by say that ‘Julia belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Women Latino writers, along with Isabel Allende and Sandra Cisneros. She was among the pioneers in creating a new literature that expanded the meaning of the ‘American Mainstream’ and reminds us of the famous line by Langston Hughes – I too sing America,” Bosch said in a press statement.
The film is available to stream through Oct. 16 on PBS and PBS.org
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