Alvarez, who first impressed readers in 1991 with “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” has returned to the Dominican Republic to bring the story of the famous Mirabal sisters to a wider audience. The author was just 10 when her own family fled the country, where her father had been part of a botched plot against the Trujillo dictatorship. Four months after they made their narrow escape to New York, three beautiful sisters from the same revolutionary underground were assassinated on a mountain road as they drove home from visiting their jailed husbands. Only a fourth sister, not with them that day, was spared. “I kept asking myself, What gave them that special courage,” Alvarez writes.
The novel she has based on this true-life story skillfully weaves fact and fiction, building to a gut-wrenching climax. Each of the girls develops her own voice: Patria, the religious sister; Minerva, the fiery radical; Mate, the hopeless romantic; Dede, the practical worrier. They share their most intimate moments: first kisses, family spats and infidelities. urgent prayers.
Their growing awareness of Trujillo’s brutality slowly tranforms these convent-educated daughters of the middle class into committed revolutionaries. Mate illustrates her early diaries with innocent drawings–new shoes with snap-on bows, opal rings, Later, her sketches depict grenades and jail cells. Yet the sisters remain sweet, often naive. “I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle,” Mate writes. In the end, only Dede survives. She must cope with that guilt and see to it that her sisters are remembered and their children cared for. As her husband says, “This is your martyrdom, Dede, to be alive without them.”
Chavez’s women are martyrs of a different sort. Soveida Dosamantes is the latest in an unending line of suffering women. Soveida’s mother has a womanizing, incestuous husband; one grandmother is married to a man who beats her and has a mistress. Soveida’s mother warns against Mexican men: “I don’t have anything against our own, except that they don’t make good husbands.” Unfortunately Soveida ignores the advice, and marries a Chicano philanderer.
Chavez is at her fin-est when describing the delightfully crazy happenings in the fictionalized New Mexican town of Agua Os-tufa, from Soveida’s visit to the shrine of the Holy Tortilia to the cockroach fiasco at El Farol Mexican restaurant. In a career spanning three decades, Soveida, a waitress at El Farol, has been writing a manual of service for the next generation of waitresses, a compendium of lessons that stress the dignity of work and the value of women in a macho culture; Chavez movingly uses these lessons to underscore her hovers themes. With their rich tales, she and Alvarez give voice to Latinas who have for too long been mute.
