Homecoming

“Homecoming” (1984) by Julia Alvarez is part of her collection with the same title. The first edition of Homecoming was one of her earliest published books. In addition to Homecoming, Alvarez published two other collections of poetry: The Other Side (1995) and The Woman I Kept To Myself (2004). She is most known for her novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and In The Time of Butterflies (1994).

“Homecoming” is written in free verse, which lacks a predetermined meter or a rhyme scheme. It focuses on the speaker attending her cousin’s wedding in the Caribbean after living in Vermont. Alvarez draws upon her own experiences living in both the United States and the Dominican Republic and explores Intersections Between Caribbean and US Cultures. She also examines Tensions Between the Working Class and the Upper Class on her family’s sugar ranch and her uncle’s Gendered Entitlement to Places and Bodies. This guide refers to the 1996 Plume/Penguin edition of Homecoming.

Poet Biography

Julia Alvarez was born in 1950 In New York City. Shortly after her birth, her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic. They participated in a movement to overthrow the dictator Rafael Trujillo, which resulted in their having to return to the United States when Alvarez was 10 years old. Alvarez’s family included three sisters and their parents, who lived in Queens. Alvarez attended boarding school in Massachusetts.

Alvarez earned an undergraduate degree at Middlebury College and a master’s degree at Syracuse University. She graduated from Syracuse in 1975 and began teaching as part of the Poet-in-the-Schools program in Kentucky public schools. In 1978, she taught in several states. She worked with senior citizens in North Carolina and co-edited the collection Old Age Ain’t for Sissies (1979), which collected their experiences. In the 1980s, she taught at various universities, such as the University of Vermont, George Washington University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During this time, she turned 33 and published Homecoming. In the late 1980s, she became a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.

Alvarez’s first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, was incredibly successful. It won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and was published when Alvarez was 41. Alvarez’s second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, is her most famous. It was a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read and partially supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, awarded in 1987. Alvarez also won the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002, the Vermont Arts Council’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2011, and the National Medal of Arts in 2014. She has authored a number of books for children, such as her Tia Lola series.

Poem text

Alvarez, Julia. “Homecoming.” Homecoming, Penguin Random House, 1996.

Summary

“Homecoming” has 64 lines in one stanza. The first four lines set the scene. The speaker is attending their cousin’s wedding on their family’s ranch in the Caribbean. When guests enter the ranch for Carmen’s wedding, guards take their jewelry and store it in an armored truck.

In lines 4 through 7, the speaker describes how the guests bathe in a river. The river was only cleaned for this special occasion, and the women have lighter skin than their rich husbands.

In lines 7 through 11, the speaker’s uncle, Tio, tries to impress Carmen’s husband’s family. They are from Minnesota. Tio’s seating chart placed the speaker with Carmen’s husband’s family because they can speak English with them. Lines 11 through 14 describe the speaker dancing with Tio. He fondles their shoulder blades and calls them thin, pretty, and intelligent. The speaker is only 17 at this time.

Tio tells the speaker to leave Vermont and come back to the family ranch. He says it belongs to them, and they see the workmen hauling ice for the champagne (Lines 15-18). Then, the speaker describes the wedding cake (Lines 19-24). It is made to look like the family ranch. There are details like marzipan shutters. An unmarried aunt looks after the cake in the heat, using egg whites in a syringe to fix roses and dealing with the groom’s miniature chocolate shoes melting.

The poem returns to Tio dancing with the speaker again (Lines 25-29). Tio is drunk on rum, and the floor has talcum dusted over it, which smells like babies. Tio twirls the speaker, enjoying it when they exclaim that they are dizzy. He jokes that their merengue dancing has lost its Caribbean style.

The speaker observes that the Chinese lanterns come on and that one breaks, flying up into the sky. One of the grandmothers declares that the children grow up too fast (Lines 30-33).

In lines 34 through 40, the speaker describes the groom’s family. They dance the Charleston, which endears them to the locals. The groom’s younger sister has blond hair and freckles. When some maids ask to touch these, she backs away. However, she stops retreating when she learns that they didn’t mean any harm.

The focus returns to the dance floor and the employees (Lines 40-45). Tio repeatedly tells the speaker that the ranch is theirs and dances close to their body. They see workmen dancing, and maids carrying trays of wedding bells and matchbooks. The latter have Carmen’s and Dick’s names printed on them, revealing the groom’s name.

In lines 45 through 51, the speaker reflects on their education since they were 17. Their family’s sugar fields paid for their education. They learned how working-class people, like the maids with deviled eggs at the wedding, are ignored. The speaker thinks it was too early, or too late, to have this knowledge.

The sun starts to rise (Lines 52-54). The roosters crow and the band plays a song for the morning called Las Mananitas. Lines 54 through 56 are the speaker’s drunken vision. They see the fields around them on fire and blame the champagne.

In lines 56 through 59, the sleepy couple cuts their wedding cake. The guests are full of alcohol, eggs, and meat, as well as beans and rice.

The speaker describes the staff eating the wedding cake (Lines 60-64). They consume the miniature version of the ranch. Its windows, doors, walls, and other features are made from the sugar that the workers cut in the fields.