"In the worlds of film and television, cultural gringoism is almost pathetic. Mainsteam recognition of Chicano and Chicana homegrown authors did not begin until the discovery that the Raza world could be colorful, amusing, exotic, magical. Rarely was that world projected as full of anger at racism, struggles for justice or revolutions of the body and spirit by women as well as men. Now come the new books of Julia Alvarez and , both with radical political themes. They have garnered flattering reviews, but profound political or social questions raised in both books have gone ignored; most critics seem happier with the romancing...Julia Alvarez, now a professor at Middlebury College, was brought to the United States at age ten by her family to escape Trujillo's repression. After her first successful and lighter book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez took up the challenging task of telling the story of the butterflies. Some Dominicans have berated the author for supposed errors. The book isn't perfect reading; it tells almost nothing about issues of class and color or the Afro-Dominican experience, for example. But the book remains a treasure, for Alvarez has told a story unknown to most people in this country and told it unforgettably. In her last message about the butterflies, the author says: "by making them myth, we lost the Mirabals once more, dismissing the challenge of their courage as impossible for us, ordinary men and women." This she seeks to correct by making them real people, whose courage is thus made real, too."