Monday December 16, 2024: Fourth S.U.R.E. Diversity Book Club meeting
Book: In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Note 1: We are honoring International Human Rights Day (Dec.10) and acknowledging International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (Nov.25, which marks the start of sixteen days of activism against gender-based violence.)
Note 2: Apologies that this December blog got pretty involved (and late–despite the meeting date above, I am writing this note in late January!) You will find that I did not entirely stick to the book and our discussion of it, but elaborated on the theme of human rights. I admit the blog feels dated by this point.
I’ll do my best to get the next one done in a timely fashion.
Note 3: This time I’ve given credit to my sources with in-text (parenthetical) citations. The sources are listed on a “Works Cited” page at the end of the piece.
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Winter days are short, and the world out the window was bleak and dark when the S.U.R.E. Diversity Book Club entered in on discussion of In The Time of the Butterflies.
One of us commented that the choice of book seemed significant for this moment in time.
The story takes place in the Dominican Republic, and it is about the four Mirabal sisters, who resist the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. (According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, he was in power from 1930-1961.) Three of the sisters get involved in resistance activities that lead to their murders (in 1960), and the fourth survives the dictatorship thanks to her lack of political involvement. In surviving, she ends up supporting the motherless children of her sisters.
Who are the brave? Those who die or those who live?
Adela (or Dedé) is the sister who survives. We talked a little about what it means to be the sole survivor of four sisters. Dedé was not as brave as her sisters, but in the end, doesn’t it
take bravery to keep on living? For those of us fortunate enough to not be able to relate to the extreme hardships endured by people living under a dictatorship, we can only imagine the strength Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa must have had to do their work, including their ill-fated, final act of resistance: leaving their small children behind in order to visit their imprisoned husbands. The ominous drive along treacherous mountain roads culminated in murder disguised as an accident: the bodies of the women, along with the body of their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, were placed back in their vehicle, which was then pushed off the cliff along which they had been driving, but it was later established that the women had actually died after being beaten and strangled. The date was November 25, 1960.
Dedé went on living, and because she lived, there was nothing for it but to hang in there day after day. I’m sure it would have been next to impossible for Dedé to take care of her own three children and the six children of her sisters, but she was not all alone. Her mother, Mercedes Mirabal, lived another twenty years and helped to take care of the children.
One of us brought up the question of using violence to stop violence. Is it justified? Does it even work?
As far as I remember, no one offered an opinion in answer to this question, although I think someone suggested that violence begets violence. We knew that Trujillo was eventually assassinated, and it would be hard for anyone to feel that the murder was not justified, but then again–murder is murder, and who would want to take such an action upon themselves?
Well, while doing research in support of this blog post, I happened to come across a BBC article that described the meeting that the reporter Tim Mansel had with one of the men who killed Trujillo. The interview took place in 2011 when Antonio Imbert was ninety years old. Mansel described the way Imbert was brought into the room by his wife Giralda, who helped him into a rocking chair and lit a cigarette for him. Mansel asked Imbert if he was happy to have shot the dictator.
“ "Sure," he replies. "Nobody told me to go and kill Trujillo. The only way to get rid of him
was to kill him."” (“I Shot…”)
The article also reported on the similar reaction of a US CIA chief:
In a letter to his State Department superior in October 1960, Henry Dearborn, de facto CIA station chief in the Dominican Republic, wrote: "If I were a Dominican, which thank heaven I am not," I would favour destroying Trujillo as being the first necessary step in the salvation of my country and I would regard this, in fact, as my Christian duty." (“I Shot…”)
While the BBC article informs us that the CIA provided Imbert and the other shooters of Trujillo with some ammunition, at the same time it shows that Richard Nixon was seen sharing a cordial embrace with Trujillo in 1955.
Were there others involved in the assassination?
Imbert attacked Trujillo and his chauffeur with six co-conspirators. So what happened to the others? According to the BBC, “Two of these were killed in gun battles while resisting arrest, and the others were imprisoned and later killed.” Imbert was the only one to survive, and he had the help of an Italian consul who let Imbert hide out for six months in the consul’s home. (“I Shot…”)
In case Imbert’s quote was not enough to show the pride he apparently took in doing away with the dictator, the article mentions that during the reporter’s visit, Imbert’s wife brought out some “old scuffed brogues” Imbert wore the day he shot Trujillo. Every May 30th, he wore the shoes for a few days in commemoration of the shooting.
I realize I have gone on at length about the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, but I thought those who attended the book club might be interested to know, considering the question that was posed.
We connected the reading to current and past events concerning human rights
We spoke about what the reading made us think of: the impending presidency of Donald Trump, who plans to appoint Tom Homan as “border tsar.” Homan now offers that families “can be deported together” as opposed to being separated, a policy he was infamous for during Trump’s first term. It should be mentioned that Homan was also appointed by Barack Obama, and he began arguing for family separation at that time, in 2014. Below is a link from the online magazine Wired, with information about Homan:
The next link offers an excellent collection of articles published by the Atlantic. It includes seven chapters the magazine published to inform us about how the American government came to separate parents from their children. Find the link below:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/trump-administration-family-separatio n-policy-immigration/670604/
Our talk often diverged from Alvarez’s book to a more general discussion of those who abuse their power. I mentioned to the book club that I had recently read the graphic novel Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio by Derf Backderf. Having been born after the time the National Guard shot and killed unarmed student protestors in 1970, I hadn’t known much more about the incident than that folk-rock group Crosby, Stills, and Nash had written a song about it, and that the students were protesting the Vietnam War. In my imagination, the shootings met with righteous indignation and support for the students. The book (and subsequent research) showed me this was not really the case. There was so much more to
the story, including the complicity of the adults either directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of the students. Even many of the grown ups in the community showed little compassion for the students, who were presented by the media and politicians as dangerous delinquents. In fact, many of the students were just going about their business, or watching the protest out of curiosity. For their part, the guardsmen stationed on campus were overworked, tired, and “on duty” constantly. They knew if they lost their guard spot they could be drafted into the regular army and sent to Vietnam (Backderf 119). This is not to excuse what they did, but to show the complexity of the situation, as Backderf does in his book.
I watched some videos on YouTube that were especially enlightening as far as their portrayal of the people in power, be they parents, the university president, or even the president of the nation, Richard Nixon, who wanted the world to believe outside agitators had been involved in the protests. Unfortunately for him, the F.B.I. was unable to prove this. None of the allegations against the students could be proven true, but the bad press against them had its effect, as the History channel shows: “A Gallup poll in the wake of the shootings found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students for the deaths at Kent State, while only 11 percent blamed the National Guard” (Klein). To me it was unspeakably tragic that the older generation could be so cold-hearted. That day at Kent State, May 4, 1970, 67 rounds were shot, and besides the four students killed, nine were wounded; one of these was left paralyzed for life. Two of the students who were killed were only 19 years old; the other two were twenty.
Below I include a link to a video of a student who was injured. He was interviewed shortly after the incident:
In our talk we spent as much time on In the Time of the Butterflies as on human rights issues in general. As I am writing this, (12/24) just this week, Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country after over two decades in power, but thousands of innocent civilians were tortured and murdered while he was in office. We’ve seen in the news the horror of the Sednaya Prison, the release of skeletal survivors. Meanwhile, according to an August report of the United Nations, 130 people in Gaza have been killed every day, on average, for the last ten months; even hospitals have been bombed repeatedly (“The Question…”). According to a (more recent) December 2024 press release by the United Nations, “Since 7 October 2023, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to Gaza’s health ministry, and over 1,700 Israeli and foreign nationals have been killed in attacks in or originated from Gaza, according to Israeli sources.” (“Noting More”) For a better, more detailed picture of the suffering, read the United Nations’ press release, which is the second-to-last source under my “Works Cited.” Meanwhile, in the US, the great numbers of refugees seeking asylum at our southern border get no relief. In fact, the Border Patrol often take their possessions away, including life-saving medications, (Schramm) and the humanitarian crisis will only get worse as Trump has appointed not only Tom Homan but Stephen Miller, who, according to NPR, was a “lead author” in Trump’s infamous and “...highly controversial zero tolerance policies that led to children being separated from their parents” (Ordoñez). At the same time, according to the Sentencing Project on mass incarceration, “Following a massive, four-decade-long buildup of incarceration disproportionately impacting people of color, a growing reform movement has made important inroads.” Yet, “... imprisonment levels remain too high nationwide, particularly for Black Americans.” (“Growth in…”) Finally, too many states still have state-sanctioned murder, otherwise known as the death penalty, even though one out of eight people who were executed since 1972 have been exonerated, and even though it is known that the death penalty not only does not work to deter crime, but states that have it have higher levels of murder (“Innocence”). In a world such as this, I wonder, what are we to do? How do we achieve justice when our governments have not passed laws that would make a difference, or when they pass laws that are responsible for lasting harm to ordinary people? At this point, I want to confess that I have rewritten the last part of this paragraph a number of times. I have even done some research and found some surprises that showed me that in fact, when people speak up, when people protest, it appears to make a difference. (Go to the Sentencing Project website and read about the improvements that have been made in decarceration, although still a lot of work needs to be done. For a great list of books on the topics of abolition, decarceration, and the experience of incarceration, check the following link: https://guides.lib.uw.edu/OORR/PandemicsofViolence)
We can look to the example of minority groups including Black and Indigenous peoples
Black people in the US have had to resist injustice and deal with a lack of protection by the government for literally hundreds of years. I’ve recently been reading a book called Driving the Green Book, by Alvin Hall. In this work, I learned that Victor Green, a letter carrier for the US Postal Service, created and published The Negro Motorist Green Book for the first time in 1936. The book was a travel guide for Black people attempting to make road trips without fear of harassment or worse, and it was a response to Jim Crow laws and racism generally. The book was “...a definitive guide where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep” (Hall), and it was published until 1967. Right here in Swampscott, Massachusetts, we have an address that was featured in the Green Book.
Even though the book was last published in the 60s, there is no room for complacency. In a buzzfeed.news article of 2021, “Sundown Towns Are Still A Problem For Black Drivers”, by Ade Onibada, there is mention of a modern version of the Green Book, called ABC Travel Greenbook. This book was written by Martinique Lewis, president of the Black Travel Alliance. Not only that, but another book by Boston author and photographer Amani Willett A Parallel Road, “. . . borrows pages from the Greenbook”, and Willett notes that racism is not just contained in sundown towns (cities where Black people were threatened to leave town before dark), but that racism can be found all over the country (Onibada). In fact, while many people who know of them assume they were mostly in the South, there were actually more sundown towns in the North of the country (Hall 64).
To speak of one more example of recent injustice against Black people, just this past June of 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit of the last two survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, both over 100 years of age.The Tulsa Race Massacre was, according to PBS, “... one of the worst single acts of violence against Black people in U.S. history” (Murphy), and even though Tulsa’s legislature formed a commission back in 1997 that came up with a plan that included making direct payments to survivors and descendants of the massacre, no payments were ever made. It is amazing that the plaintiffs found the strength and courage to continue to fight for their due, and it is outrageous that these long-suffering people should continue to be denied compensation.
Indigenous peoples also have a long history of resistance. Although parents were coerced by the US government to give up all rights to their children when they were put into Indian boarding schools established to destroy native nations’ cultures, some parents were imprisoned when they refused to give up their children. For example, according to a 2023 article by the New York Times, in 1894, US soldiers arrested 19 Hopi men after Hopi parents refused to send their children to the Keams Canyon Boarding School. “The captives were imprisoned on California’s Alcatraz Island for nearly a year, and the removal of Hopi children proceeded as planned” (Levitt). I bring up this example because these boarding schools functioned for over 150 years and had a profoundly destructive effect that carries into the present day. Just this October of 2024, President Biden became the first sitting president to apologize for the “ongoing harms caused by federal boarding schools”, where at least 900 indigenous children died (Urell).
Although I offer it last, the next examples were actually the first that sprang to mind as an answer to my question of what we can to do to combat injustice. How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America, which I recommended last month, contains stories of people who inherited the trauma of their ancestors: people whose homes, land, children, and cultures were taken from them. One of them is Althea Guiboche’s story. The hardships she lived through included being destitute and homeless; she recounts that at one time the Red Cross turned her away even though she had three babies and nowhere to go. At a certain point, she began to help others by sharing the homemade bread (or “bannock”) she learned how to make out of great need (Sinclair 219). Likewise, James Favel, who suffered in his early years from poverty, drugs, and arrests, turned his life around out of a desire to help the young victim of a mugging, whom he happened to see lying on a porch. In the hour that the girl lay there, no one before Favel had approached her to ask if she needed help. Favel did his best for the girl, but he didn’t stop with that action; he ended up forming the “Bear Clan Patrol” and looking after his neighborhood just because no one else stepped up to do the job (Sinclair 164).
I am not saying that we shouldn’t continue to demand that our government do the right thing for people; the more I read, the more I see that we must. But I find it inspiring to think of people like Guiboche and Favel. In fact, since I learned of them, I can’t stop thinking about them: they are ordinary people that nobody knows. Not only that, they were people who throughout much of their lives badly needed help, but even so they managed to reach out and help others.
Continuing that thought, I’d like to leave you with the words of advice of another person who experienced terrible losses: Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor of Nazi Germany and the only person in his family (including his pregnant wife, parents, and brothers) to survive the concentration camps; he was a psychiatrist who then devoted the remainder of his life to helping people, without regard for their background. In his famous book Man’s Search for
Meaning, he challenges us to do the right thing by others. The words were written many decades ago, but they are relevant now as ever: “For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.” (Frankl 154).
Works Cited
Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies. 1994. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Algonquin Books Of Chapel Hill, 2019.
Derf Backderf. KENT STATE : Four Dead in Ohio. S.L., Harry N Abrams, 2020.
Dickerson, Caitlin. “An American Catastrophe.” The Atlantic, 7 Aug. 2022, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/trump-administration-family- separati on-policy-immigration/670604/.
Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston, Beacon Press, 1946. Gilbert, David.
“Donald Trump’s New “Border Czar” Defended Child Separation at Festival Held by Gun- Worshipping Sect.” WIRED, 13 Nov. 2024, www.wired.com/story/tom-homan-trump- border- czar-child-separation-policies/.
Hall, Alvin. Driving the Green Book. HarperCollins, 31 Jan. 2023.
Human Rights Watch. “US: Failed Justice 100 Years after Tulsa Race Massacre.” Human Rights Watch, 21 May 2021,www.hrw.org/news/2021/05/21/us-failed-justice-100- years-after-tulsa-race-massacre.
“Innocence | Death Penalty Information Center.” Death Penalty Information Center, 12 Oct. 2017, deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/policy/innocence.
Klein, Christopher. “How Nixon’s Presidency Became Increasingly Erratic after Kent State.” HISTORY, 4 May 2020, www.history.com/news/richard-nixon-kent-state-shootings- response.
Levitt, Zach, et al. “War against the Children.” The New York Times, 30 Aug. 2023, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/30/us/native-american-boarding-schools.html.
“Library Guides: Odegaard Online Reading Recommendations: “Pandemics of Violence”: On Prison Abolition & Decarceration.” Uw.edu, 2016, guides.lib.uw.edu/OORR/PandemicsofViolence. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.
M.I. “40,000 Palestinian Lives Lost in Gaza: UN Human Rights Chief Pleads for End to Fighting Stating That 130 People Have Been Killed Every Day in Gaza over the Past 10 Months - Question of Palestine.” Question of Palestine, 15 Aug. 2024, www.un.org/unispal/document/gaza-40000deaths-turk-ohchr-15aug24/.
Murphy, Sean. “Oklahoma’s Supreme Court Dismisses Lawsuit from Last 2 Survivors of Tulsa Race Massacre Seeking Reparations.” PBS News, 12 June 2024, www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/oklahomas-supreme-court-dismisses-lawsuit-from-last -2-survivors-of-tulsa-race-massacre-seeking-reparations.
NEWS, BBC. ““I Shot the Cruellest Dictator in the Americas.”” BBC News, 27 May 2011, www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-13560512 .
News 5 Cleveland. “Kent State Shooting Anniversary.” YouTube, 30 Apr. 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVCoNEJCokE. Accessed 20 Dec. 2024.
Onibada, Ade. “How the Legacy of Sundown Towns Affects Black Travelers.” BuzzFeed News, 22 July 2021, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adeonibada/sundown-towns- racism-black-drivers-tikt ok.
Ordoñez, Franco. “Stephen Miller Will Be Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor in New White House Role.” NPR, 11 Nov. 2024, www.npr.org/2024/11/11/g-s1-33741/trump-stephen-
miller-deputy-chief-of-staff-immig ration-policy-deportations.
Schramm, Noah. “Border Patrol’s Abusive Practice of Taking Migrants’ Property Needs to End | ACLU.” American Civil Liberties Union, 13 Feb. 2024, www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/border-patrols-abusive-practice-of-taking-migra nts-property-needs-to-end.
Sinclair, Sara. How We Go Home : Voices from Indigenous North America. Halifax ; Winnipeg, Fernwood Publishing, 2020.
The Sentencing Project. “Growth in Mass Incarceration.” The Sentencing Project, 2022, www.sentencingproject.org/research/.
United Nations. “Noting More than 45,000 Palestinians Have Been Killed in Gaza, Assistant Secretary-General Tells Security Council “Ceasefire Is Long Overdue” | Meetings Coverage and Press Releases.” Un.org, 18 Dec. 2024,
Urell, Aaryn. “President Biden Apologizes to Native Americans for Federal Indian Boarding Schools.” Equal Justice Initiative, 25 Oct. 2024, eji.org/news/president-biden- apologizes-to-native-americans-for-federal-indian-boardi ng-schools/.
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