Yet as part of the white elite the Mirabals are hardly representative of the majority of Dominican women's experiences in a nation with a majority mulatto population. Furthermore, the women Alvarez writes about have been remembered and memorialized in the Dominican Republic and throughout Latin America for the violence enacted on their bodies. While their stories attest to the regime's oppression of Dominicans, they make little mention of Haitian oppression or the 1937 massacre of 20,000 Haitians by Trujillo's army. The Mirabals were part of the white elite in the Dominican Republic, yet they each also participated in the popular struggle for freedom from the totalitarian Trujillo government. These voices testify to the regime's oppression as well as disrupt the linear patriarchal construction of history. The novel functions as a fictional testimonio told through the multiple narrative voices of the Mirabal sisters (actual historical figures - three of whom were murdered by the regime). Set during the period of strident nationalism in the Dominican Republic under dictator, Rafael Trujillo (1930-60), In the Time of the Butterflies is her only novel to date that focuses solely on the Dominican Republic. The majority of Alvarez's novels, including How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, ¡Yo!, and In the Name of Salomé focus on Dominican experiences in the United States, where she herself now lives.
The novel that has received the most attention for doing this is Dominican-born Julia Alvarez's 1995 work, In the Time of the Butterflies, which was lauded by critics as a novel that broke new ground by placing women at the center of Dominican history. In this analysis, I specifically address recent fictional testimonios written in English that historicize Hispaniola. Often, these fictional testimonios represent actual historical events, but challenge existing histories through their representations. One of the conventions of these fictional testimonios is a narrator who serves as an eyewitness to acts of brutal oppression. Specifically, critics such as John Beverley and George Yúdice have promoted testimonio as a consciousness-raising genre, giving "First World" readers insight into "Third World" political and social injustices. Recently, there has been a trend in Caribbean fictions to represent subaltern voices by mimicking testimonio, a genre that arose out of Caribbean and Central American social and political movements as a way to foreground the voices of the oppressed. Novels coming out of the Caribbean typically reflect the socio-political issues that make up the region by engaging with the voices of the oppressed and, in doing so, challenge and transform conventional colonial constructions of history. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48.1 (2002) 83-112Ĭaribbean literature has been distinguished by its engagement with national and subaltern histories.
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