1. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 3.
2. For a more complete study of the wide variety of African-based religious customs in the Caribbean, see Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, ed. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
3. Alvarez’s second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, celebrates the bravery of the martyred Mirabal sisters, who lost their lives under Trujillo (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1994).
4. Julia Alvarez, Something to Declare (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1998), 174.
5. Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (New York: Penguin, 1992).