Journal of Transnational American Studies

This essay examines two novels by Dominican American author Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies. By undertaking a transnational feminist reading practice, the author explicates the novels’ critique of the political constructions of the Latin American Third World as “deprived” and “depraved.” Alvarez’s work traces how these representations have been constitutive of a North American liberal feminist imaginary, limiting its conception of the forms of feminist agency available to women in the Americas as well as the liberal social rebellion and “development” of the woman of color in the United States. Ultimately, the two novels uncover the imperial history between the United States and the Dominican Republic that (neo)liberal linkages otherwise obscure.