New Characters

Minou: Minerva’s daughter, raised by Dedé after the murders

Virgilio Morales (Lío): a revolutionary who befriends Dedé and loves Minerva

Manuel de Moya: Trujillo’s Secretary of State, who helps the dictator meet women

Margarita: an illegitimate daughter fathered by Papá

Don Chiche: a relative of Mamá whose connection to Trujillo protects the family

Raul and Berto: brothers who fight over María Teresa’s attention

Manolo: political “enemy of state” whom Minerva marries

Leandro Guzmán (Palomino): a member of the underground whom María Teresa marries

Summary

In chapter five, the story moves back to Dedé’s experience as she looks back at 1948 to 1959. She reflects on the spectacle her sisters’ death has now become. For instance, the family servant Fela runs a shrine to the sisters’ deceased spirits and “channels” them. She notes how Minou, Minerva’s daughter, chastises her for dismissing Fela and often visits with Fela.

The interviewer asks Dedé to continue discussing her family’s history, starting with when their political trouble began. Her past, secret attraction to Virgilio distracts Dedé. She tells the interviewer the Mirabals’ trouble under Trujillo was underway before the 1949 Discovery Day dance, where Minerva confronted Trujillo. In fact, it really started when she and Minerva befriended Virgilio. After meeting Virgilio, Minerva focused on politics.

Dedé says they met him in 1948 at the family store. Dedé was daydreaming about her cousin Jaimito, whom she was considering marrying. Two visitors appeared at the store. The first was Mario, a distributor, and the second was a man they learned was named Virgilío Morales, a university professor educated in Venezuela. Dedé was attracted to Virgilío, but he and Minerva talked easily and she recalls feeling left out. They all decided that since it was a hot day they should go play volleyball and swim. Mario took everyone to the home of their uncle, Tío Pepe, where they saw Jaimito, among others. She envied Minerva, who connected with Virgilio. Dedé was not dressed for volleyball, because she usually watched rather than played, which embarrasses her in retrospect.

Weeks passed, and the group played volleyball and socialized more than once. Dedé found out more about Morales, notably that he was a political revolutionary. She recalls how Jaimito and the others were divided on whether to admire Virgilio for his bravery or fear the ramifications of associating with him. Dedé agreed to play volleyball one day and hit a ball into the bushes, disturbing an intimate exchange between Virgilio and Minerva. They emerged from the bushes and Lío and Jaimito got into a fight, calling each other names and discussing politics. Lío flattered Jaimito to broker a peace, saying his movement could use men like Jaimito.

The Mirabal sisters’ mother liked Virgilio, and they hid his politics from her. This was easy, since she was illiterate and couldn’t read of him in the papers. However, María Teresa one day forgot to censor what she read to her mother from the paper, and so her mother found out who he really was. That night the Mirabals argued about their daughters fraternizing with Lío, and Dedé realized that she had always pictured “politicals” like Lío to be self-serving or evil. Since he was neither, she realized that Minerva was right about the country’s status as a police state. She began reading the paper more, but concluded that as a woman she can only do “small” things. She wondered if Minerva was involved with him, but Minerva said they were “comrades,” which Dedé doubted.

Dedé asked Lío where he got his courage one night, but he told her it was not courage at all, but common sense. She grew angrier about the regime, and her family was questioned by police about their knowledge of Lío. Dedé broached her thoughts on the Trujillo government with Jaimito. He told her to compromise. In retrospect, Dedé realizes that that is where her trouble in marriage to him began.

Ironically, the night she agreed to marry the conventional Jaimito was the night that Lío went into hiding and fled the government. Jaimito proposed to her in the family car, where Lío was hiding. Lío told them he must hide there overnight in order to catch a ride. Before leaving, he gave Dedé a note for Minerva, which Dedé read. Dedé discovered that he wanted Minerva to join him in asylum. Despite her new engagement, the jealous Dedé burned the note and did not tell Minerva about it.

The story moves to 1949 and into Minerva’s voice in chapter six. Three years after school graduation, Minerva remains at home and wonders what she wants from life. She believes others think she doesn’t like men, and she feels like her father is too attached to her presence in the home and discourages her from dating. Letters from friends at college, like Sinita, make her jealous about starting her own life. She drives around in the family Jeep to think.

While driving one day she spots her father’s Ford parked outside a small yellow house and sees a child who has her father’s eyes, and she realizes that her father may have another family. She acknowledges she is falling in love with Lío, but also with the revolution. She wants both and isn’t sure how to have both. She is hurt that Lío left without saying goodbye. After returning from the drive where she sees her father has another family, her mother sees her worried look and sends her to nap in her father’s room. Inside his wardrobe she finds four letters from Lío that her father had hidden from her. Each letter updates her on his locale and discusses their possible future together.

“It seemed suddenly that I’d missed a great opportunity,” she says. Enraged at her father for keeping her “cooped up,” she drives back to the yellow house and crashes the Jeep into her father’s Ford. Her father comes home and slaps her, telling her she owes him respect, but she tells her father he has lost her respect and she owes him nothing. Minerva realizes both she and her mother are stronger than he is and that he will pay the consequences for his “shabby choices.”

Minerva meets her father’s second family and comes to a fuller understanding about him and her family. Meanwhile, her father has been invited to a Trujillo dance, to celebrate Discovery Day. He has been instructed to bring Minerva. Mamá doesn’t want her to go because Trujillo has a reputation for seducing or raping young women, and so Patria and Pedrito agree to go. They are late to the dance, which is held at a faraway mansion in San Cristobal, but not as late as Trujillo, who is still not there when they arrive. Manuel de Moya, Trujillo’s secretary of state, is concerned about the leader’s absence but takes the family to their seats. Minerva is to sit at Trujillo’s table.

Trujillo joins Minerva’s table, but focuses on a senator’s wife instead of Minerva. She observes him fondling the senator’s wife under the table. Eventually, dances begin. Minerva turns down Manuel de Moya a few times before agreeing to dance with him. A bolero starts and de Moya leaves her with Trujillo, a bad dancer. They chat and Minerva tells him she wants to attend law school at the university, but she is careful to flatter him as she discusses her goals.

He tells her the university is not a place for women, and he may close it because anti-government people are found there. He notes that the government has caught some agitators, and without thinking she asks if that means Virgilio Morales. Trujillo asks Minerva if she knows Morales. She says she doesn’t know him “personally,” just that she knows his family is from her area and he is at the university. She feels her lie is how most people bow to the regime, by doing increasingly humiliating things to please Trujillo. He’s happy Minerva doesn’t know Virgilio Morales , but he is holding her too tight and she tells him his medals are hurting her chest. Trujillo pulls off his coat, asking her lewdly if he should remove his other clothes. At that, she slaps him.

Manuel de Moya comes to them, and rain begins to pour. Minerva expects Trujillo to send her away to a prison—a thrill since she might see Lío—but he doesn’t. In fact, he remarks on her spunk. He tells everyone to come indoors. Patria and Jaimito want the family to leave in order to protect Minerva from Trujillo’s “designs” on her, but Papá notes that it is against the law to leave before Trujillo. They leave nonetheless. En route home Minerva realizes she’s left behind her purse containing Lío’s letters.

The next day they must send letters of apology to Trujillo, and both Minerva and her father must go to a governor’s office to apologize personally for what happened at the Discovery Day dance. The governor, Don Antonio, tells Minerva there is “a way” she can help her father—hinting that it would involve sex with Trujillo. Minerva and her mother check into one of three hotels the government will let them stay in, and they’re told to book an extended stay. They go to various offices filing requests for release.

Minerva is taken to National Police Headquarters for questioning, and her letters from Virgilio are discussed. She says she is not in communication with him and that she didn’t admit to knowing him for fear it would upset Trujillo. The government officials say that it is good that Minerva is thinking of Trujillo’s pleasure and that if she agreed to a “private” meeting with Trujillo her father could be pardoned. Again, Minerva refuses. Manuel says Minerva is a complicated woman; a general says she is as complicated as Trujillo.

Three weeks pass and their father’s health in jail isn’t good. He may have suffered a stroke or heart attack and not gotten adequate care. Eventually, the family is allowed to talk to Trujillo about the release of their father. He pulls out their letter and refers to Don Chiche, their gambling relative who is a friend of Trujillo’s. Their mother says he is a relative, and Trujillo talks about their gambling together. He and Minerva challenge each other to a game of dice. They both roll doubles. “Something has started that none of us can stop,” Minerva says.

Chapter seven is told through a series of María Teresa’s diary entries. The story shifts to the years from 1953 to 1958. The first entry discloses that Papá has died and was incoherent and senile after prison. Fela reads María Teresa’s fortunes and tells her she will have many admirers. Mama writes to Trujillo about her husband’s death, and Minerva is mysteriously granted Trujillo’s permission to attend law school.

In January of 1954, Mate writes that Minerva has returned from a trip away and has met a special man. Mate is happy for her but suspicious about the man, Manolo, who is already engaged. Minerva goes back to college in the capital, and Mate also goes to the capital to college. In February, Mate comes home and cooks a dinner for Manolo and Minerva, who will come to present Manolo to their mother. Mate decides she approves.

Mate is eighteen and wonders when she will fall in love. She reviews what she likes about different men. She also has a recurring dream in which she peers into an open coffin full of pieces of clothing, beneath which lies her father—or other men. She has this dream about Manolo and fears it means he has poor character. She eliminates suitors, such as Raul and Berto, based on their mother. She writes of how a family servant is being paid by Trujillo’s regime to write down what he hears at the Mirabal residence.

Mate finally begins school and shares a place with Minerva. She goes on a double date with Minerva and Manolo and has the coffin dream, this time with her date’s face replacing her father’s. In 1955, Minerva marries at the age of 29. In 1956, Mate is elected the university’s pageant queen and must compose a careful letter to Trujillo. The political climate is stressful since a political opponent of Trujillo’s named Galíndez has escaped the country to write about the regime but was murdered abroad by Trujillo’s henchmen.

In July 1957, Minerva graduates from law school, but her diploma doesn’t grant her license to practice. Minerva takes it well, saying she’ll focus on her child, Minou, but Manolo is angry. Mate goes to live with Minerva and Manolo for part of a summer and realizes that the couple is having trouble. Manolo is seeing other women. Over time, though, Mate is told her presence helps them as a couple.

One night in September, Mate has her recurring dream, but this time all the faces she usually sees fade away, as if she has completed going through them. She is woken from the dream by a knock at the door and answers it. She accepts a package from a man who asks her if she is the little sister of “Mariposa” (Minerva’s code name in the regime) and if she is “one of us.” She doesn’t know what he means by that but wants to be a part of the group. After the man leaves, she pries the box open and sees a stack of guns.

Mate learns about the underground from Manolo and Minerva and that the delivery man, to whom she is attracted, goes by the regime name of Palomino. She stays in school but mostly as a front for her underground involvement. She shares a place with Sonia, also an underground member, and they take deliveries of supplies and make small bombs in the apartment. The landlady thinks they are hookers and that Palomino is their pimp. Mate and he finally kiss. She learns his real name is Leandro, and they eventually marry on Valentine’s Day of 1958.

Chapter eight shifts to Patria’s perspective and voice in the year 1959. Patria is in her eighteenth year of marriage and sees that, while she has a full life, her sisters’ lives have a different vitality. One night Minerva, Manolo, Leandro, and Nelson, her son, swerve into the driveway, drunk and excited, because Batista, the Cuban dictator, has fled and Castro has been installed as the country’s new leader. The liberation is good news for the Dominican Republic. Pedrito and Patria have sex that night and she gets pregnant.

Patria is frightened for Mate and Minerva but puts it out of her mind. “I hid the sun with a finger and chose not to see the light all around me,” she says. She also overlooks Nelson’s growing interest in politics. She sends him to a religious school to keep him out of trouble since Trujillo’s police, known as SIM, are rounding up young men. Patria gets involved in small ways. For instance, she keeps Minerva and Manolo’s baby while they travel and lets underground members meet at a secret clearing on their property. She also eventually takes care of Mate’s baby, Jacqueline, when Mate is on the road.

Despite her pregnancy, Patria travels to a religious retreat in Costanza in June. Her group is caught in the crossfire of a June 14 rebel fight in the mountains. Patria sees a young boy shot and is terrified for her own children. She decides to get involved in the movement. In August, she goes to a meeting of the Christian Cultural Group and hears her minister preaching the church’s support for overthrowing the Trujillo government. She joins church-related organizations planning to overthrow Trujillo, but tension develops. Pedrito is upset, fearing his land could be confiscated if he’s caught hiding enemies of state on his property. Patria confronts him and tells him that Nelson doesn’t want to farm. Pedrito decides to cooperate with the movement.

Patria and Pedrito’s home becomes the home of the Fourteenth of June Movement, which works to overthrow the Trujillo regime from within rather than rely on outside aid. Patria sends Noris away to her grandmother’s. As 1959 begins, she begins to wonder if she has done the right thing and prays.

Analysis

The novel’s middle chapters allow Dedé to begin telling her secrets about her role in the Mirabals’ political position. She confides in her American interviewer about her interest in and connection to Virgilio Morales, which was overshadowed by Minerva’s better-known relationship to him, and about her inability to make some of the brave choices her sister made. She realizes that she nonetheless made choices, for she chose to take on a traditional feminine social role, to defer to men and to decide they are the ones to handle career, money, and politics rather than women. (Ironically, in later life Dedé becomes a successful single business woman.) These choices hurt her personally as much as her sisters’ political choices hurt them physically, she begins to understand.

The sisters move further from their adolescence, begin serious relationships, marry and become mothers. Minerva, whose interest in the movement to overthrow Trujillo is established in the book’s first section, moves from casual interest to a more active role. But first, she must complete her own adolescence. For her sisters, the transition from girlhood to adulthood was marked both by school graduation and marriage, but for Minerva the transition has not been complete. She returns home after graduating from school and stays there for three years, working the family business and waiting for her life to begin, dreaming of law school and wondering about Virgilio. She also senses her relationship to her father, which was once a source of joy, as she was his favorite, becoming stifling, as if he wants to keep her around rather than let her grow up.

Minerva’s separation from her adolescence and the onset of her adulthood come about when she discovers not only that her father’s affair has produced a second family, but also that he has hidden letters Virgilio had written her over the years. Enraged, she sees her father for what he is and realizes both she and her mother are stronger than him. Her anger spurs her to sever her identification with her family and begin working toward establishing her own adulthood and values, which differ from her more conservative sisters’ values.

As this section progresses, we learn that the sisters’ distance from Trujillo shortens. The nature of their relationship to the government moves from suspicious but cordial to a more contentious orientation. Dedé and Minerva’s association with Virgilio Morales puts their family and friends at risk, and, after Morales flees under asylum, that association creates a snowball effect. When Trujillo seeks out Minerva, she lets slip her connection to Virgilio and can’t disguise her disgust with the Dominican dictator, going so far as to slap him. Her family, especially her father, is punished as a result, and the letters from Virgilio are found, placing her under suspicion. Trujillo’s attraction to Minerva, which is both sexual and political, as she does not fear him, is established as a new and potent conflict within the novel. Even Trujillo’s aides and politicians remark on how she and El Jefe seem like evenly-matched competitors. This foreshadows Minerva’s eventual rise to the status of “La Mariposa,” the mastermind of the revolution. But Trujillo’s character is also further deepened in this section, for Alvarez reveals the ways in which he cheats to win. Trujillo grants Minerva permission to study law, but after she completes the five-year degree, she gets a diploma without the license to practice.

Whereas the novel’s first chapters expose each sister to the regime’s evils, its second section shows each sister making choices about what to do with that knowledge. These chapters put each Mirabal sister in a specific position relative to the movement to oust him. Dedé’s choice of spouse, Jaimito, is consistent with her character as it was established in the first section of the novel. She makes a conservative, predictable choice and settles down with a man who forbids her to get “involved” in politics. In retrospect, she realizes that she ended up paying the price for making too many compromises in her early years. Dedé had secretly desired Virgilio, who was in love with Minerva. When she burns a letter he gives her to convey to Minerva, Dedé also further seals Minerva’s fate as a revolutionary: had she accepted Virgilio’s invitation to join him in asylum, Minerva might have worked at a safer distance or in a different relationship to the government rather than remaining in the country and getting into deeper trouble with Trujillo.

Aside from Minerva, Mate, and Patria also make decisions to join the movement. Mate is energized by life as a student but is also preoccupied with finding a man to marry. She dates many men but continues to have recurring nightmares about men’s fidelity, signified by her father or other men she meets peering at her from a coffin. Finally, she has a dream that foretells her healing from her mistrust of men. Immediately, she meets Palomino (Leandro), a good-looking gun runner. Her desire to join the movement is bound up with her desire for romance and love, and she finds both in Leandro. Patria, too, decides to join the movement, motivated by a massacre she sees in the mountains while on a religious retreat and, later, the church’s support for ousting Trujillo. She also thinks of her son, Nelson, who is a revolutionary, and wishes to create a safer future for him and her daughter, Noris. This section, then, firmly places the sisters in the revolution. They are no longer flirting with it but actively fostering it, each for their own reasons.

“Something has started which none of us can stop,” Alvarez writes in Minerva’s voice. The statement refers to the tragic momentum that is building in the Mirabal sisters’ lives: each of their seemingly small and instantaneous choices propels them toward their future and determines the nature of their future. She is speaking of the movement’s power within the country, of Trujillo’s unbending regime and his leadership style (leadership through terror), and the sisters’ participation in a social revolution whose twists and turns are beyond the family’s control. She speaks of submitting to an uncertain future, in which her and her sisters’ stance against the Trujillo regime pits them in a definitive position against it. She also foretells her family’s political troubles and eventual deaths—which Papa’s imprisonment and treatment also foreshadow.