Something to declare
By: Julia Alvarez.
Publisher: Plume
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 300
Subjects: Alvarez, Julia -- Authorship; Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Dominican Americans -- Intellectual life; Dominican Americans in literature; Dominican Republic -- In literature
Description: In her first book of nonfiction, Julia Alvarez offers two dozen personal essays about the two major (and interlocking) issues of her life - growing up with one foot in each of two cultures, and writing.

In 1960, when Alvarez was ten years old, her father's participation in a failed coup attempt against Rafael Trujillo, the repressive dictator of the Dominican Republic, resulted in the family's self-imposed exile to New York City, where Dr. Alvarez set up a medical practice in the Bronx while his wife and four daughters set about the serious business of assimilation. That uprooting formed the thematic basis for two of Julia Alvarez's novels.

Her father's revolutionary ties inspired the third, the story of one of Trujillo's most infamous atrocities. Something to Declare is about the influences those experiences have had on her work, and about the practical lessons she's learned on her way to becoming the internationally acclaimed writer she now is.
Notes: Orignially published: Chapel Hill, NC : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998.