In the Time of the Butterflies.

November 25th is observed as International Day Against Violence Toward Women in many Latin American countries. That was the day in 1960 when three young sisters who had been fighting to overthrow a brutal dictatorship in the Dominican Republic were assassinated. Known as the butterflies (originally their underground code name), the Mirabal sisters became beloved national heroines. They and their era are the subject of Julia Alvarez's devastating, inspiring book.

Good novels with political themes are a rare treat. Here we have not one but two: along with Butterflies comes MotherTongue by Chicana poet Demetria Martinez, winner of the 1994 Western States Book Award for Fiction. Her story of a young Chicana who falls in love with a Salvadoran refugee tortured as a counter-insurgent in his own country, now exiled to the U.S., is haunting and simply beautiful.

Both authors have interwoven political and personal themes with powerful effect. Both books center on young women maturing, and celebrate women. Both reveal powerful links between the spiritual and the political. Both follow a journal structure, with different voices speaking at different times. Both are treasures.

Also, both books are written by Latina women and thus form part of the flowering of fiction, poetry, essays, and plays by Chicanas and other Latinas here over the past decade. Opposing this creative explosion has been a Euroamerican tendency to find our history, mores, language, most artistic expression, and all but the fair-skinned just too alien. The problem lies not only in institutional racism; it's also the cultural and spiritual borders imposed by the dominant society. To cross, you need much more than a green card.

In the worlds of film and television, cultural gringoism is almost pathetic. During the last few years alone, one Hollywood movie after another - from House of the Spirits to The Perez Family - has found it necessary to have stars of European background play Latina/o characters. The sound of Meryl Streep repeatedly mispronouncing her husband's name, Esteban, may rasp in my ears forever. Television doesn't even bother to whiten; it just makes us invisible. As for the print media, they may publish reviews of art, theater, dance, films, and books with Latino themes - but how many Spanish surnames can you find among the reviewers? And of these, how many are even vaguely progressive?

In the world of literature, Latin American writers (for example, Isabel Allende and Carlos Fuentes) have been the ones to slip over the border most easily. In general, Chicano or other homegrown Latino writers have been quietly labeled a bunch of lightweights.

Mainstream recognition did not begin at all until the discovery that the Chicano world could be colorful, amusing, exotic, quaint, magical. Rarely was that world projected as full of anger at racism, struggles for justice, or revolutions of the body and spirit. It's better to be cute than political, individual than collective-minded, and you should pray to be compared with Like Water for Chocolate.

Now come the new books by Julia Alvarez and Demetria Martinez, both with radical themes that include criticism of U.S. policy and Anglo values. They have had flattering reviews, but profound political or social questions raised in each book go ignored: most critics seem happier with the romancing.

Julia Alvarez's book is a fictionalized biography that moves its characters forward in the shadow of impending doom, yet never victimizes, never negates human complexity. Las mariposas - the butterflies - were born to semi-rural comfort, servants, and a convent education. Their background did not suggest that one by one they would become involved in the underground movement against dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. But they do, each in accordance with her own character and within her world of parents, lovers, husbands, and children. The transformation of the sisters - Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa - shows how a person can become a traitor to her class. How concessions that seem trivial may lead down one road and a refusal to make such compromises can lead down its opposite. How rebels are not always born but can be made.

You suspect Minerva will be the first when, in front of a crowd, she slaps Trujillo for sexual harassment (and then leaves the party with her family before Trujillo has left, which is literally against the law). It's not such a big step from there to running guns.

The highly religious Patria seems least likely to join the movement but she does, after witnessing a hideous government massacre of peasants. Her long journey from traditional Catholicism to revolution - a journey made by many priests also - is a major theme in this book, as in Latin American liberation theology.

Maria Teresa, the youngest and least political or even spiritual, first declares that love of a man goes deeper for her than some higher ideal, but she, too, joins. Only Dede, the fourth sister, following her conservative husband's wishes, does not join the others in their new life, in prison, and in death.

As a result, Dede lives to tell the sisters' story and how they were ambushed driving back from a visit to their husbands in prison. On a winding mountain road along the north coast of the Dominican Republic, their jeep is stopped and they are shot to death. The press reports how the bodies of the famous, beautiful sisters have been found with their jeep and driver at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff - clearly the victims of an "accident." But the Dominican people know better; they know.

Within a year Trujillo was overthrown, but this didn't lead to a society of the sisters' dreams. Instead it was more killings, hapless new rulers, and the rise of "the prosperous young," living in luxury where guerrillas had once fought. "Was it for this, the sacrifice of the butterflies?" asks the survivor Dede, who takes center stage in the last pages of the book, grappling with guilt and grief. Her question can resound with U.S. movement activists from twenty-five years ago as precious victories of that era undergo reactionary assault today.

In the same mood, Dede describes how, at an event honoring the sisters, she thinks of the younger people: "to them we are characters in a sad story about a past that is over." But not quite, Dede tells an old friend: "I'm not stuck in the past, I've just brought it with me into the present. And the problem is not enough of us have done that. "

Julia Alvarez, now a professor at Middlebury College, was brought to the U.S. at age ten by her family to escape Trujillo's repression. After her first successful book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez faced a huge challenge in telling the story of the butterflies. The Mirabal sisters are revered in the Dominican Republic; their family home is a shrine, where Patria's wedding dress lies on the bed ready to wear, and the braid of young Maria Teresa's hair rests under glass. To write a book about such icons could mean trouble, controversy.

Sure enough, some Dominicans have berated Alvarez for daring to humanize the sisters, and for other supposed crimes. Most of this seems to come down to petty jealousy, perhaps with a dash of wounded macho, toward someone who left the country and "made it" in the U.S. Reviewers in this country have displayed similar emotions, as in the major New York Times review, which bristled with hostility and leveled totally absurd criticism like, "There is indeed much too much crying in this novel."

Not that the book is perfect. It tells us almost nothing about the issue of color and the particularities of Afro-Dominican experience. And it somewhat veils the issue of class. But nothing makes me less than joyous that Julia Alvarez wrote this book, telling a story unknown to most people in this country.

Activists and progressives can also contemplate the author's own, last message about the butterflies: "by making them myth, we lost the Mirabals once more, dismissing the challenge of their courage as impossible for us, ordinary men and women."

The first sentence of Demetria Martinez's novel, MotherTongue, has been widely quoted by reviewers, and with good reason. Speaking of the Salvadoran refugee as he arrives in the U.S., her character Mary/Maria writes: "His nation chewed him up and spit him out like a pinon shell, and when he emerged from an airplane one late afternoon, I knew I would one day make love with him."

At that point you know you are in the hands of a poet, as well as a writer of strong political conscience. Demetria Martinez became known as a reporter/activist from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who went on trial along with a minister for helping two refugee Salvadoran women enter the U.S. Their acquittal in 1989 signified a major victory for the sanctuary movement. Martinez made poems from those years and others in a collection called Turning," published in Three Times a Woman. Now thirty-five and based in Arizona, Martinez has continued her long journalistic association with The National Catholic Reporter.

Is MotherTongue about the people's long struggle in El Salvador against a U.S.-supported dictatorship? Or is it about a young woman who seeks to define herself through loving a man from that struggle? Or about a feminist theology in the making, as the author has put it? All, and perhaps more, and there's the wonder.

In the beginning, Maria declares herself not political and makes clear that her attraction to Jose Luis - the handsome Salvadoran in exile - rises more out of the hope he will save her from an ordinary life than insurgent solidarity. Yet the two begin slowly to meld and expand. She discovers that the thirty-three strange marks on his body are from cigarettes stubbed out by torturers, and then begins to see that the scars inside him are even worse. No wonder Jose Luis's face "was boarded up like a house whose owner knows what strangers can do when they get inside."

A sort of dance begins, in which the bodies of Maria and Jose Luis make love but their realities do not quite connect. Maria longs to "take the war out of him"; Jose Luis thinks she loves the idea of him - the dissident - not the real person, flaws and all. Jose Luis must return to El Salvador, especially after news comes from there of the two nuns murdered and mutilated by death squads. Too often he sees Maria as alien, if not hateful: "Even church bells mean something different to us. She hears them and sets her watch. I hear them and remember the endless funerals." But Maria seems less cause than symbol of why "there is a bomb ticking inside me." He leaves without notice.

Twenty years later, Maria and her son by Jose Luis go to El Salvador to find out what happened to him. He was not killed. But Maria has changed, is changing. She has begun to participate in low-key political activism. It surfaces in acceptance of her son's separate reality, and with it, Jose Luis's: she could not become a person through loving another. Maria does not become an insurgent like Jose Luis but she defies the prison of patriarchy in which so many women live. "I have melted down sadness and joy into a single blade with which to carve out a life. And I am just beginning to discern the shape that was there all along, just beginning to become me."

On her journey, Maria rejects the traditional white god; this is the only way to assert her spirituality. The god she embraces is one who suffers with the poor.

One may find flaws in her book, small things that stumble-for example, the sudden revelation that Maria was a victim of incest as a child doesn't seem to relate to much else about her. But they cannot overshadow the strength and complexity of this work, its challenge to that cultural border, and its word magic. Just try to put it down. Go on, try.

Elizabeth Martinez, an editor of Crossroads magazine and a regular columnist for Z magazine, is the author of "500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures."