Julia Alvarez: progenitor of a movement: this Dominican-American writer weaves passionate sensibilities through her works with the gift of seeing through others' eyes.

• Author: Coonrod Martinez, Elizabeth
• Position: Biography

History demonstrates that literary periods are launched by daring, intrepid writers or poets who appear to have suddenly sprouted from nowhere. Later these writers are acclaimed as initiators of movements, but the many years they barely subsisted while writing tomes that languished in wait for a publisher are rarely remembered.

Think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, now recognized as one of the "fathers" of the so-called Latin American Boom of the late 1960s, when (mostly male) writers erupted onto the international stage with their novels dubbed as magical realism. Or the two Mexicans--Laura Esquivel and Angeles Mastretta--recognized for launching a "boom" of women writers in the 1980s, when women's novels finally began to be published in greater numbers. Just as Garcia Marquez and the writers of his generation were not the first to create a great Latin American novel, Esquivel and Mastretta are not the only significant women writers of the 20th century. But in each case they will forever be remembered as those who launched a literary period.

Julia Alvarez occupies a similar place in U.S. literature as one of the initiators of Latina literature, principally novels written in English by women of Latin American heritage. While members of the largest minority population in the U.S. had been producing novels and poetry throughout the 20th century, few who published before Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street or before the beginning of the now-recognized Chicano/Latino era are famously remembered.

"I feel very lucky to happen to have been a writer at the watershed time when Latino literature became a literature that was not just relegated to the province of sociology," Alvarez says. "But I still feel there is a certain kind of condescension toward ethnic literature, even though it is a literature that is feeding and enriching the mainstream American literature ... [And], definitely, still, there is a glass ceiling in terms of the female novelists. If we have a female character, she might be engaging in something monumental but she's also changing the diapers and doing the cooking, still doing things which get it called a woman's novel. You know, a man's novel is universal; a woman's novel is for women."

The content of novels written by women may be different, but Alvarez feels that all stories come from the same source: "The great lesson of storytelling is that there is this great river that we all are flowing on of being a human being and a human family. So, when the market comes up and says 'Latina writers,' and this is for this or that market, it is [simply] part of how things are broadcast out there, but really, that's not what the writing is about. It's about interconnectedness. And sure, Faulkner is from the south, or such and such poet has an Irish background and you can hear it in the lines; that is a way to get a handle on this mysterious current of narrative that is so important to us."

In Alvarez's case, she is the ubiquitous Dominican-American writer. Her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, based on the heroic Mirabal sisters who lived in the time of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, is now a staple of college literature classes. Her first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, published in 1991--along with Cisneros' The House on Mango Street in 1984 and Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban in 1992--officially launched the new movement of Latina writers. Their "hyphen" experience, straddling borders or cultures in the U.S. as people of Latin American or Caribbean descent, foments new critical ideas. The current generation of Dominican-American New York writers (Angie Cruz, Loida Maritza Perez, Nelly Rosario, and Junot Diaz) now hopes to achieve the success Alvarez has had.

A certain element of luck, and very precise publicity, played a role in the now easy recognition of Julia Alvarez and Sandra Cisneros. In 1990 they and two other writers--Denise Chavez and Ana Castillo--posed for a group photo arranged by their New York agent Susan Bergholz to promote their forthcoming novels. The one-page photo article ran in the magazine Vanity Fair...