Big Read author Julia Alvarez talks diversity and literacy

DeKALB – Award-winning author Julia Alvarez didn’t think twice about books until she read one with characters who looked like her.

Alvarez spoke before a crowded audience Tuesday at the DeKalb Public Library, as part of its Big Read endowment program. DeKalb’s is one of three libraries in the nation to receive the Big Read grant for nine consecutive years, programming and public relations manager Edith Craig said.

“It’s a true community read in the sense that it helps promote literacy in our community,” Craig said.

With a colorful butterfly broach pinned close to her heart, Alvarez took the stage Tuesday to talk about this year’s Big Read book, “In the Time of the Butterflies,” and the importance of diversity in literature.

Alvarez’s career as a novelist and storyteller began at a ripe age, with a book that forever changed her opinion on reading: “Arabian Nights.”

“I read it and reread it, pouring over the beautiful pictures,” Alvarez said. “Instead of a white princess with blue eyes and yellow hair – the usual fare – the cover showed a brown girl, with black hair sitting before a man in a turban, her hand in the air. In other words, unlike the fairytale princesses, for once the cover promised a story about a girl who looked Dominican.”

“In the Time of the Butterflies” is a historical fiction account of Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and Dedé Mirabal – Las Mariposas – who were in the forefront of a political opposition against Gen. Rafael Lenidas Trujillo’s dictatorship of the Dominican Republic in 1960.

Alvarez’s education truly began after returning home from school, back to her colorful, complex and diverse extended family, she said. Stories, she quickly learned, could be liberating, and were a commodity her Dominican family had in spades. Experiencing prejudice herself as a young Dominican girl in an American school, Alvarez found solace in stories.

“I found what we had come looking for in the United States of America between the covers of books – the grand democracy of the world of the united nation, where everyone was welcome,” she said.

As her career evolved, however, Alvarez found the U.S. wasn’t all that had been promised to her, as she struggled to have her book “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” published because of its “nontraditional” characters, she said.

“The message to me was that although the underlying truth of everything I was reading was ‘I am a human being; nothing human is alien to me,’ still there were big gaps on that shelf of American literature,” Alvarez said.

But today, Alvarez’s experience and those of her characters have helped to instill courage in new and seasoned readers alike.

“When she talked about the role of people, and that we don’t always have to be activists or at the forefront, and that courage can come by accident – I think that was really powerful for me,” Big Read participant Juan Molina Hernandez said.

More than 2,000 copies of “In the Time of Butterflies” and 5,000 copies of Alvarez’s young adult adaptation of the story, “Before We Were Free,” were distributed for the program, and the author’s message of diversity Tuesday was not lost upon a local Dominican mother, Elizabeth Grada.

“Kids can learn that everybody can work together independent of their skin color or language,” Grada said. “We are human beings. We are not different. We just learn different things, but we are the same.”