This study examines Julia Alvarez's best-known works, García Girls and In the Time of the Butterflies, to explore the intertextuality within Dominican-American fiction through the vocabulary and methodology of trauma studies and witnessing. Alvarez's work indicates that traditional academic discourse about witnessing often translates trauma survivors into tourists by legally dispossessing them from the witnesses they could provide as they seek to assign blame and pass judgment on the source of their traumatic experience. This process of exclusion threatens to hinder the ability of Dominican-Americans to work through their shared, traumatic experience with the Trujillo regime. Furthermore, this study contends that as Alvarez privileges fiction and the imagination, instead of historiography, as the appropriate sites for witnessing, she invites other members of the collective to share their witnesses in an effort to populate the structure of the trujillato in order for the collective to better come to terms with their shared trauma.

Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo (ruled 1930-1961) developed the reputation as one of the most violent and oppressive leaders of the Western Hemisphere in his thirty-one years of power. Authors Julia Alvarez and Mario Vargas Llosa provide insight into the effects of Trujillo's infamy by sharing the stories of Dominican women. In Alvarez's novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, the Dominican-American author fictionalizes the lives of the Mirabal sisters, historical women who were assassinated in 1961 for their involvement in the anti-Trujillo movement. Likewise, Vargas Llosa centers much of his novel, La fiesta del Chivo, on the life of Urania Cabral, a fictional female character who is raped by Trujillo at the age of fourteen. Both the Mirabals and Urania grow up amidst dictatorship and Alvarez and Vargas Llosa frequently focus on their characters' growth as they progress from childhood and adolescence into adulthood. This formative time in the protagonists' lives is often impacted by Trujillo and his actions. In particular, Alvarez and Vargas Llosa emphasize the unique process of female identity formation as a means of highlighting the cruelty of the Trujillo dictatorship. Female development is often described as a process that focuses on connection and relationships to others. As a result, women often demonstrate a high ability to respond to the needs and feelings of the people in their lives. Alvarez's depiction of the Mirabal sisters reflects these principles as her characters mature into strong women by learning the value of selflessly caring for others. The Mirabals' concern for people contrasts to Trujillo's character, which Alvarez portrays as violent, selfish and petty. Conversely, Vargas Llosa's protagonist experiences a traumatic event at the age of fourteen that severely inhibits her growth. As a result of Trujillo's cruelty Urania loses her ability to connect with others and becomes cold and distant. Urania's developmental obstacles reflect the debilitating effects dictatorship can have on individuals, and by extension, on a whole nation. In both In the Time of the Butterflies and La fiesta del Chivo the concept of female development shapes and informs the portrayal of Rafael Trujillo and his corrupt government.

My thesis discusses the ways in which Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and In the Name of Salomé (2000) are revolutionary texts contesting traditional, male dominated history and redirecting historical and communal foci to the lives of Dominican women. I employ Walter Benjamin's theories found in his essays "The Storyteller" (1936) and "On the Concept of History" (1940) to assist my exploration of Alvarez's questions concerning the power and effect of storytelling, and the importance of reconstructing various historical voices and images, specifically, the importance of reconstructing female voices in male dominated cultures. I discuss the female-narrated component to Dominican history which Alvarez creates in her reconstruction of the lives of these women. Alvarez confronts the challenge of breaking these women out of their marginalized status by combining fiction with history in her reconstruction of their lives. Alvarez assumes the multifaceted role of mediator, story-teller, and historian as she remembers and re-presents Dominican history through the eyes of women who lived, experienced, and affected change within the Dominican Republic. Without merely act as a reporter of historical "facts," Alvarez reconstructs the lives of these women fictionally, applying her impressions and ideas about the personalities, feelings, and thoughts of these women, and historically, utilizing first and secondhand accounts and information about the women. Ultimately, the women are presented as individuals but are also connected to a collective memory and history. As individuals with human characteristics, the women are no longer inaccessible legends. As members of a collective memory and history, the women are redeemed from the isolating effect of their patriarchal society which would have women remain silent. Due to Alvarez's reconstruction, their stories finally have the potential for further dissemination in the future with the possibility to affect other oppressed peoples. Thus, Alvarez's reconstruction of the resistance of a few women in Dominican history produces the capacity for additional resistance by Alvarez's audience to the same forces that these women were combating which continue to exist today — forces such as patriarchy, dictatorial governments, fascism, and economic disparity.