Writing in a Minor Key

Abstract

Like Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez belongs to the generation of Latina writers who achieved remarkable critical and popular success during the 1990s. Alvarez is perhaps the most prolific of this group, publishing five novels, a book of essays, four collections of poetry, four children’s books, and two works of adolescent fiction between 1991 and 2006. While writers from this generation—especially women whose work is not obviously ghetto-centric—have been criticized for achieving their market success at the expense of the political ideals of the Sixties generation, Alvarez engages that past directly, returning throughout her writing to the legacy of anticolonialism in order to thematize and think through the role of the contemporary writer in relation to politics and the market. Far from withdrawing from the messy world of politics, Alvarez’s writing has progressively ventured further and further into that field. In this chapter, we will argue that Alvarez’s work has evolved from an early desire for an autonomous art free of external demands to a richer conception of the author as a kind of public intellectual, positioning writing as a process intimately connected with history and social struggles. Beginning from Alvarez’s hyper-personal first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), to the later In the Name of Salomé (2000) and its exploration of the writer’s ability to speak in the public sphere, we can see the novelist’s growing awareness of her own position within the literary marketplace.¹