Julia Alvarez's first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, is a fictionalized account of her own upbringing as she and her family navigated the vastly different worlds of the Dominican Republic in the 1950s and New York of the 1960s and '70s. Alvarez was born in New York and moved to the Dominican Republic as a three-month old. Her family, like the Garcia de la Torres family of the book, was forced to flee the island nation when their father was involved in a failed coup against Rafael Trujillo, the ruling dictator. Alvarez completed her education in the United States, and like one of the characters in her book, becomes a teacher "but not on purpose." She taught at several...
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