In the time of the butterflies

Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, 2011

Reading U.S. Latina Writers, 2003

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short-story would exist in its current form […] Just remember: in dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide myself behind my characters. – Junot Diaz � In one of her most acclaimed novels, In the Time of the Butterflies, Dominican-American Julia Alvarez explores the Trujillato, the terrible chapter in the history of the Dominican Republic when dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo held absolute power over the country during both his official presidency and unofficial rule that together lasted from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Trujillo shaped his own 'era' by modeling the spirit and identity of the Dominican Republic around his vanity, fantasies of dominion, and obsessions with the notion of a homogenous Dominican nation. The Trujillato, characterized by innumerable episodes of violence, including the massacre of approximately 30,000 Haitians in 1937 to secure the border with Haiti, created an atmosphere of sheer terror. This terror, which haunts Dominicans long after the official end of the Trujillato, problematizes both lived experiences and narratives of the nation.

llha do Desterro, 2010

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2020

In the present work we analyse the exhibition Puras Evas: Sobre mariposas (Only Evas: About butterflies) by the Mexican artist Cintia Bolio. This exhibition was presented from November 14, 2018, to March 3, 2019 at the Museum of Women, which is located in Mexico City, in the context of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Woman, a date which commemorates the Mirabal sisters, known as ‘The Butterflies’, who were murdered in the Dominican Republic by the dictatorship of Leonidas Trujillo on November 25, 1960. The exhibition was presented in a context characterised by the growing number of women victims of violence in Mexico. As we are going to see, in the exhibition analysed, Cintia Bolio seeks to publicise the types of violence that exist and why the struggle of the Mirabal sisters led us to reflection on gender violence in our daily life.

Screening Motherhood in Contemporary Cinema, 2016

The Latin Americanist, 2015

This paper examines the narrative structure of Mariana Otero’s film, which focuses on her mother, Clotilde Vautier, who died in 1968. Otero was only 4 years old and has no recollection of this tragedy or of her mother. Therefore, she relies on the testimonies of relatives and friends to reconstruct the jigsaw. As an investigative journey, the film stages a literal movement back to the places of Mariana’s childhood and a metaphoric return to the past. In this sense, its narrative structure bears interesting similarities with that of the detective story, and gives a prominent place to Clotilde’s paintings, whose examination partakes of a similar search for traces. Just as the structure of investigation simultaneously looks back into the past and moves forward into the resolution of the crime, the film draws a simultaneous movement back into the past and forward into the narrative and therapeutic process of mourning.

diacritics. A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 2018

This essay sketches out a reading of Julia de Burgos's first poetry volume, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows), published in 1938. My twofold goal is to elaborate 1) de Burgos's poetic rejection of the historicity of tradition and the temporality of existing political and social norms; and 2) her retrieval of the temporality of the instant as the only temporal mode that may interrupt the oppressive unfolding of tradition. To do so, I focus on the opening and closing poems of the volume, titled "A Julia de Burgos" ("To Julia de Burgos") and "Yo misma fui mi ruta" ("I myself was my route"). Paradigmatic of de Burgos's life-long struggle to achieve an authentic form of self-expression within a patriarchal social context, these poems stage several interruptive strategies that are declined in different temporal keys. "A Julia de Burgos" ruins the very possibility of a coincidence between the poet and the person who bears the name Julia de Burgos, concluding with a utopian scene of ironic "self"-immolation in which the former burns the latter alive. Referring to the bending of the poet's desire "to be what men wanted her to be," "Yo misma fui mi ruta" figures the poet's interruption of a tribute planned in her honor. If "A Julia de Burgos" is oriented towards the future, the last poem of the volume is oriented towards the past. And yet, both poems foreground the need for the poet to take leave of a calcified social and political space that is bent on neutralizing the possibility of the new. As if she were responding affirmatively to Walter Benjamin claim that "there is a tradition that is catastrophe," de Burgos's poetic debut unleashes the interruptive force of a literary modernism that dissolves the illusion of historical continuity and temporal stability, even if the price to be paid is exile from any communitas.