21 pages • 42 minutes read
Homecoming
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Julia Alvarez is one of the most famous Dominican American authors. She is mostly known for her fiction, but also for her work in other genres, which include memoir as well as poetry. Another famous Dominican American author is Junot Díaz, the author of The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012). Both Díaz and Alvarez write about the concepts of home from the perspective of immigrant families.
When Alvarez’s Homecoming was published in 1984, Pedro Mir was the Poet Laureate of the Dominican Republic. Like Alvarez’s family, he was critical of the dictator Trujillo and forced into exile. Mir writes in Spanish, but his book Poemas de buen amor y a veces de fantasía (Poems of good love and sometimes fantasy) (1969) has been translated into English.
Alvarez paved the way for contemporary Dominican American poets, such as Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X (2018). Both women lived in New York City, but Acevedo was born after Homecoming was published. Acevedo was named the 2022 Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2017, another female Caribbean poet was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate: Margarita Engle, author of Tula [Books are door shaped] (2013). She is close in age to Alvarez, but her family is from Cuba. The poem “Tula” is from Engle’s book in verse about the life of the 19th-century Cuban abolitionist Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda.
Cultural Context
Alvarez’s family was part of the movement to overthrow the dictator General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Trujillo was born into a wealthy family and lived as a plantation overseer in the Dominican Republic until the US occupation in 1916. Under US occupation forces, Trujillo trained in organization, unit tactics, and leadership, eventually working his way up to head of the national militia after the end of the US occupation. In 1930, after a successful coup against the sitting president, Trujillo took power in the Dominican Republic through fraudulent elections. His abuses of power include having his secret police arrest people at will, brutally disregarding civil liberties, and a massacre of thousands of sugar cane workers in 1937.
“Homecoming” reflects on how Alvarez’s family ranch employs sugar cane workers. However, her parents were involved with Las Mariposas (the Butterflies), a code name for the political movement led by the Mirabal sisters. Alvarez wrote about this historical movement in her novel In the Time of the Butterflies. In 1949 and 1959, there were unsuccessful insurrection attempts against Trujillo. The latter of these occurred on the 14th of June, with the movement taking on the name “Fourteenth of June Movement.” The movement’s plans to assassinate Trujillo in 1960 were discovered, and the Mirabal sisters were killed. However, their deaths reinvigorated the movement, which then succeeded in the 1961 assassination of Trujillo.
Unlock all 21 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,100+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Julia Alvarez
