The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Born in 1950, Alvarez is a prominent Latina writer who is widely known for her novels, poems, and essays. Alvarez spent the first decade of her life in the Dominican Republic, until her father’s involvement in broader attempts to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship forced the family to flee north. Alvarez’s writing is heavily influenced by this experience and by her bicultural upbringing. Her work often features themes of exile and identity, and many of her characters are versions of herself or are designed to represent specific parts of her life. For example, in The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Alma’s biography is somewhat similar to Alvarez’s, for Alvarez’s own mother refused to speak to her after her first novel was published. That first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, was published in 1991 to much acclaim and is now considered part of the canon of Latinx literature. It, too, deals with a young family that is forced to flee Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, and the plot outlines the four sisters’ subsequent struggles in their new country. Likewise, her novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) concerns the three Mirabal sisters: real Dominican women who were murdered for being part of a resistance movement against Trujillo.