Seven titles that bear witness to Latin America’s Dirty Wars

Jahia de Rose is an antillana-deutsch artist, landworker, writer, and scholar. Her bylines appear in Electric Literature, midnight + indigo (forthcoming), PetitMort, Business Insider, and several indie publications. She is at work on a novel and her first memoir. She blogs on Substack as @autumnwildroses, and her Substack publication ‘Roadworthy’ chronicles her off-grid life on the road in Europe.

At Electric Lit the writer tagged seven "works of historical fiction about events in [Latin America and the Caribbean] which touch on the Dirty Wars." One title on the list:

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

After her father’s involvement in a failed plot to overthrow Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1960, Julia Alvarez and her family fled to New York. She memorialized the thirty-year dictatorship and Dominican resistance to tyranny through the real-life activist Mirabal sisters—Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa—who were known as Las Mariposas, The Butterflies. Cycling through the perspectives of all the sisters, the book begins and ends with Dede, who chose not to join her sisters’ guerrilla activities. Drawing on themes of class, gender, family dynamics, and survivor’s guilt, the book follows the Mirabals as they develop into revolutionaries. Ironically, though Dede did not want to be involved, she is the one who keeps the memory of their bravery in the face of tyranny and patriarchy alive. Perhaps that is Alvarez’s metaphor for how we cannot escape being a part of the revolution in the end, no matter how much we try.

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue