BOOKS:Of Passion and Politics
Martinez, Elizabeth
Of Passion and Politics In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez Algonquin Books. 325 pages. $21.95. MotherTongue by Demetria Martinez Bilingual Press. 128 pages. $17.00. $10.00...
...To write a book about such icons could mean trouble, controversy...
...asks the survivor Dede, who takes center stage in the last pages of the book, grappling with guilt and grief...
...The press reports how the bodies of the famous, beautiful sisters have been found with their jeep and driver at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff—clearly the victims of an "accident...
...Also, both books are written by Latina women and thus form part of the flowering of fiction, poetry, essays, and plays by Chicanas and other Latinas here over the past decade...
...And I am just beginning to discern the shape that was there all along, just beginning to become me...
...Martinez made poems from those years and others in a collection called "Turning," published in Three Times a Woman...
...A sort of dance begins, in which the bodies of Maria and Jose Luis make love but their realities do not quite connect...
...Television doesn't even bother to whiten...
...Yet the two begin slowly to meld and expand...
...On a winding mountain road along the north coast of the Dominican Republic, their jeep is stopped and they are shot to death...
...To cross, you need much more than a green card...
...at age ten by her family to escape Tru-jillo's repression...
...Just try to put it down...
...Sure enough, some Dominicans have berated Alvarez for daring to humanize the sisters, and for other supposed crimes...
...Her question can resound with U.S...
...Demetria Martinez became known as a reporter/ activist from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who went on trial along with a minister for helping two refugee Salvadoran women enter the U.S...
...The god she embraces is one who suffers with the poor...
...But the Dominican people know better...
...It tells us almost nothing about the issue of color and the particularities of Afro-Dominican experience...
...Her story of a young Chicana who falls in love with a Salvadoran refugee tortured as a counter-insurgent in his own country, now exiled to the U.S., is haunting and simply beautiful...
...The highly religious Patria seems least likely to join the movement but she does, after witnessing a hideous government massacre of peasants...
...Jose Luis thinks she loves the idea of him—the dissident—not the real person, flaws and all...
...As for the print media, they may publish reviews of art, theater, dance, films, and books with Latino themes—but how many Spanish surnames can you find among the reviewers...
...it's also the cultural and spiritual borders imposed by the dominant society...
...Maria longs to "take the war out of him...
...One may find flaws in her book, small things that stumble—for example, the sudden revelation that Maria was a victim of incest as a child doesn't seem to relate to much else about her...
...But they cannot overshadow the strength and complexity of this work, its challenge to that cultural border, and its word magic...
...Within a year Trujillo was overthrown, but this didn't lead to a society of the sisters' dreams...
...by Elizabeth Martinez November 25th is observed as International Day Against Violence Toward Women in many Latin American countries...
...He was not killed...
...Las mariposas—the butterflies—were born to semi-rural comfort, servants, and a convent education...
...10.00 paper...
...Maria Teresa, the youngest and least political or even spiritual, first declares that love of a man goes deeper for her than some higher ideal, but she, too, joins...
...In the same mood, Dede describes how, at an event honoring the sisters, she thinks of the younger people: "to them we are characters in a sad story about a past that is over...
...He leaves without notice...
...After her first successful book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez faced a huge challenge in telling the story of the butterflies...
...movement activists from twenty-five years ago as precious victories of that era undergo reactionary assault today...
...It surfaces in acceptance of her son's separate reality, and with it, Jose Luis's: she could not become a person through loving another...
...In the worlds of film and television, cultural gringoism is almost pathetic...
...Go on, try.M Elizabeth Martinez, an editor of Crossroads magazine and a regular columnist for ? magazine, is the author of "500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures...
...As a result, Dede lives to tell the sisters' story and how they were ambushed driving back from a visit to their husbands in prison...
...Both books center on young women maturing, and celebrate women...
...She has begun to participate in low-key political activism...
...But not quite, Dede tells an old friend: "I'm not stuck in the past, I've just brought it with me into the present...
...All, and perhaps more, and there's the wonder...
...But they do, each in accordance with her own character and within her world of parents, lovers, husbands, and children...
...How concessions that seem trivial may lead down one road and a refusal to make such compromises can lead down its opposite...
...That was the day in 1960 when three young sisters who had been fighting to overthrow a brutal dictatorship in the Dominican Republic were assassinated...
...But Maria has changed, is changing...
...And it somewhat veils the issue of class...
...During Ihc last few years alone, one Hollywood movie after another—from House of the Spirits to The Perez Family— has found it necessary to have stars of European background play Latina/o characters...
...How rebels are not always born but can be made...
...Twenty years later, Maria and her son by Jose Luis go to El Salvador to find out what happened to him...
...Or is it about a young woman who seeks to define herself through loving a man from that struggle...
...Their background did not suggest that one by one they would become involved in the underground movement against dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo...
...Mainstream recognition did not begin at all until the discovery that the Chicano world could be colorful, amusing, exotic, quaint, magical...
...Too often he sees Maria as alien, if not hateful: "Even church bells mean something different to us...
...they know...
...On her journey, Maria rejects the traditional white god...
...Only Dede, the fourth sister, following her conservative husband's wishes, does not join the others in their new life, in prison, and in death...
...The problem lies not only in institutional racism...
...their family home is a shrine, where Patria's wedding dress lies on the bed ready to wear, and the braid of young Maria Teresa's hair rests under glass...
...Maria does not become an insurgent like Jose Luis but she defies the prison of patriarchy in which so many women live...
...Jose Luis must return to El Salvador, especially after news comes from there of the two nuns murdered and mutilated by death squads...
...Here we have not one but two: along with Butterflies comes Mother-Tongue by Chicana poet Demetria Martinez, winner of the 1994 Western States Book Award for Fiction...
...I hear them and remember the endless funerals...
...And of these, how many are even vaguely progressive...
...Now thirty-five and based in Arizona, Martinez has continued her long journalistic association with The National Catholic Reporter...
...Good novels with political themes are a rare treat...
...Not that the book is perfect...
...She hears them and sets her watch...
...You suspect Minerva will be the first when, in front of a crowd, she slaps Tru-jillo for sexual harassment (and then leaves the party with her family before Trujillo has left, which is literally against the law...
...In the beginning, Maria declares herself not poUtical and makes clear that her attraction to Jose Luis—the handsome Sal-vadoran in exile—rises more out of the hope he will save her from an ordinary life than insurgent solidarity...
...Both authors have interwoven political and personal themes with powerful effect...
...But Maria seems less cause than symbol of why "there is a bomb ticking inside me...
...Is MotherTongue about the people's long struggle in El Salvador against a U.S.supported dictatorship...
...Both are treasures...
...No wonder Jose Luis's face "was boarded up like a house whose owner knows what strangers can do when they get inside...
...It's better to be cute than political, individual than collective-minded, and you should pray to be compared with Like Water for Chocolate...
...The sound of Meryl Streep repeatedly mispronouncing her husband's name, Esteban, may rasp in my ears forever...
...They and their era are the subject of Julia Alvarez's devastating, inspiring book...
...The first sentence of Demetria Martinez's novel, MotherTongue, has been widely quoted by reviewers, and with good reason...
...Julia Alvarez's book is a fictionalized biography that moves its characters forward in the shadow of impending doom, yet never victimizes, never negates human complexity...
...But nothing makes me less than joyous that Julia Alvarez wrote this book, telling a story unknown to most people in this country...
...In general, Chicano or other homegrown Latino writers have been quietly labeled a bunch of lightweights...
...Julia Alvarez, now a professor at Mid-dlebury College, was brought to the U.S...
...Or about a feminist theology in the making, as the author has put it...
...In the world of literature, Latin American writers (for example, Isabel Allende and Carlos Fuentes) have been the ones to slip over the border most easily...
...The transformation of the sisters—Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa—shows how a person can BOOKS become a traitor to her class...
...Now come the new books by Julia Alvarez and Demetria Martinez, both with radical themes that include criticism of U.S...
...They have had flattering reviews, but profound political or social questions raised in each book go ignored: most critics seem happier with the romancing...
...Her long journey from traditional Catholicism to revolution—a journey made by many priests also—is a major theme in this book, as in Latin American liberation theology...
...Known as the butterflies (originally their underground code name), the Mirabal sisters became beloved national heroines...
...Reviewers in this country have displayed similar emotions, as in the major New York Times review, which bristled with hostility and leveled totally absurd criticism like, "There is indeed much too much crying in this novel...
...Was it for this, the sacrifice of the butterflies...
...Speaking of the Salvadoran refugee as he arrives in the U.S., her character Mary/Maria writes: "His nation chewed him up and spit him out like a pinon shell, and when he emerged from an airplane one late afternoon, I knew I would one day make love with him...
...It's not such a big step from there to running guns...
...Instead it was more killings, hapless new rulers, and the rise of "the prosperous young," living in luxury where guerrillas had once fought...
...Activists and progressives can also contemplate the author's own, last message about the butterflies: "by making them myth, we lost the Mirabals once more, dismissing the challenge of their courage as impossible for us, ordinary men and women...
...Rarely was that world projected as full of anger at racism, struggles for justice, or revolutions of the body and spirit...
...The Mirabal sisters are revered in the Dominican Republic...
...Both follow a journal structure, with different voices speaking at different times...
...And the problem is not enough of us have done that...
...At that point you know you are in the hands of a poet, as well as a writer of strong political conscience...
...Opposing this creative explosion has been a Euroamerican tendency to find our history, mores, language, most artistic expression, and all but the fair-skinned just too alien...
...Their acquittal in 1989 signified a major victory for the sanctuary movement...
...it just makes us invisible...
...She discovers that the thirty-three strange marks on his body are from cigarettes stubbed out by torturers, and then begins to see that the scars inside him are even worse...
...policy and Anglo values...
...Both reveal powerful links between the spiritual and the political...
...Most of this seems to come down to petty jealousy, perhaps with a dash of wounded macho, toward someone who left the country and "made it" in the U.S...
...this is the only way to assert her spirituality...
...I have melted down sadness and joy into a single blade with which to carve out a life...
Vol. 59 • July 1995 • No. 7
