inside this group, the sisters where known as "Las Mariposas (The Butterflies)."  The sisters were repeatedly jailed for their protests and were often tortured during their incarceration.  Trujillo decided to end their resistance by having them executed.  A group of hired men intercepted three of the sisters after they visited their imprisoned husbands.  They were lead into a field and killed.  Dede survived the execution.

Although the Mirabal sisters are real historical figures, Alvarez uses elements of fiction to develop their characters and retreat into their thoughts in the novel.

In the Time of the Butterflies is the fictional portrayal of the lives of the Mirabal sisters, who lived in the Dominican Republic during the era of Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship. Trujillo actively sought out dissenters during this period and was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths as he exerted complete control over the Dominican people. Eventually, three of the Mirabal sisters would be counted among those who perished during his rule.

Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa Mirabal were actively involved in an underground resistance movement during the 1950s; a fourth sister, Dedé, was not an active participant in the resistance at the time of her sisters' revolutionary involvement. The sisters, who were the daughters of farmers, grew up in a rather ordinary and middle-class home in the town of Ojo de Agua.

Minerva, who went to college to study law, became increasingly aware of the injustices of Trujillo's dictatorship. She met Manolo Tavárez Justo while in college, and they married in 1955. Together, the two emerged as leaders in the resistance movement. Soon, sisters Patria and María Teresa, along with their husbands, joined Minerva's resistance efforts.

Tragically, Minerva, Patria, and María Teresa were murdered while travelling together to visit their imprisoned husbands in 1960. They were taken from the car they were riding in, beaten, and strangled. Their bodies were then placed back inside the car and pushed over a cliff; Trujillo's regime intended for their deaths to appear accidental.

Because their involvement in the resistance was widely known, the truth of their deaths was almost immediately recognized. The sisters became martyrs, which bolstered new support against Trujillo's regime as an increasing number of Dominicans became aware of the horrors of his influence in their country. The surviving sister, Dedé, raised all of her sisters' children and managed their legacy until her own death at age 88.

Through the story of the Mirabal sisters (also known as "Las Mariaposas"), Alvarez is able to show how brutal the regime of Trujillo had been, not just for the poor of the Dominican Republic, but also for the middle and upper classes of society.

Like many megalomaniacal dictators, Trujillo has tried to make his citizens feel that he is god-like. Pictures of the man hang, by law, everywhere, often aside images of Jesus himself. The people, especially younger ones, have grown up with the idea that their leader can do no wrong. Those who are older know better, and also know the consequences of objecting to worshipping Trujillo: imprisonment or death.

It is not until, Sinita, Minerva's school chum, is taken as a concubine for the dictator that Minerva begins to feel in her heart "a china crack of doubt" about the motives of Trujillo. The metaphor is an important one, for once china is cracked, it can never be the same again.

The crack broadens and fractures as Minerva and her sisters witness the repression, economic consequences for the people, the senseless beatings, trumped up imprisonments, and other atrocities of unchecked power.

All of the people suffer, in one way or another. As the Mirabals fight for their family and their country, the necessity of the struggle becomes ever more important and the cause larger than three lives.

It is clear that if we examine each sister in turn, each one walks her own journey to becoming an aggressor against the Trujillo regime. With Minerva, for example, it is clear that her associations with other rebels and the way that the Trujillo regime discriminates against women is a key factor. With Maria Teresa, it is love that draws her in to the conflict. With Patria, however, it is seeing the effects of Trujillo on her country first hand that forces her to take a moral stand against what she sees as being wrong.

Note how this occurs. In Chapter Eight, Patria is in her church during a retreat listening to her Padre, when explosions descend around them. She sees four or five men running towards them from government forces. She sees one boy in particular running towards her, and looks at his face as he dies, so that she sees the "wonder on his young face as the life drained out of him." Watching his death, she identifies this boy as being one of hers. Note how this experience profoundly changes her:

Coming down that mountain, I was a changed woman. i may have worn the same sweet face, but not I was carrying not just my child but the dead boy as well.

Patria decides that she is unable to sit back and let "her babies" die, which helps her to resolve to become involved in the rebel movement. So, as we can see, with Patria, it is witnessing the brutality of Trujillo's regime first hand that makes Patria join her sisters in opposing Trujillo.

This novel falls into the subgenre of historical fiction. What that means is that it is a fictional story that deals with real historical events and includes real people among the characters.

The real event that "In the Time of the Butterflies" deals with is the Trujillo dictatorship of the Dominican Republic. Rather than write a nonfiction account of those years, Alvarez chose to use the novel genre to dramatize the story of the real-life Miranda sisters to describe what it was like during those years and why so many people left that nation.

The "ongoing value" of this work and others like it is that it serves to document that era and expose the abuses and evils of such a government. As the old saying goes, "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."