The Journal of Historical Fictions
published by the Historical Fictions Research Network
Volume 7, Issue 1: “Women Constructing the Nation in In The Name of Salomė by Julia Álvarez” by Keisha Allan (City University of New York), pp. 4-29, 2026
Abstract: Julia Álvarez’s In the Name of Salomé reimagines women’s participation in nationalist discourses through the lives of Salomé Ureña and her daughter, Camila Henríquez Ureña. This article argues that the novel presents an intergenerational, transnational genealogy of feminist resistance that challenges masculinist definitions of the nation by foregrounding the maternal body as a site of national fervor. Through maternal imagery and language, the novel enacts a feminist reformulation of the nation, envisioning matria in which women’s political imagination disrupts masculinist notions of nationhood and opens avenues of resistance against colonial and patriarchal oppression. By reimagining the nation through a feminist framework, the novel invites readers to consider alternative societal configurations grounded in women’s visionary leadership and revolutionary imagination.
Women Constructing the Nation in In the Name of Salomé by Julia Álvarez
Abstract
Julia Álvarez’s In the Name of Salomé reimagines women’s participation in nationalist discourses through the lives of Salomé Ureña and her daughter, Camila Henríquez Ureña. This article argues that the novel presents an intergenerational, transnational genealogy of feminist resistance that challenges masculinist definitions of the nation by foregrounding the maternal body as a site of national fervor. Through maternal imagery and language, the novel enacts a feminist reformulation of the nation, envisioning a matria in which women’s political imagination disrupts masculinist notions of nationhood and opens avenues of resistance against colonial and patriarchal oppression. By reimagining the nation through a feminist framework, the novel invites readers to consider alternative societal configurations grounded in women’s visionary leadership and revolutionary imagination.
ARTICLE
Introduction
Julia Álvarez’s In the Name of Salomé explores and fictionalizes the lives of actual historical figures who, within their societies, challenged patriarchal mandates that exclude women from nationalist discourses. The novel is based on the life of Salomé Ureña, “la poetisa nacional” of the Dominican Republic and her daughter, Salomé Camila Henriquez. Álvarez presents a fictionalized account of the lives of Salomé and Camila, from the 1850s to the 1970s, alternating between Salomé’s patriotic poetry that inspired revolutionary movements in the Dominican Republic and Salomé’s daughter, Camila, who emulates her mother’s revolutionary ideals. The novel moves between different spatio-temporal realms, from Salomé’s life in the Dominican Republic to Camila’s in the U.S. and Cuba, highlighting the transgenerational transmission of feminist revolutionary ideals. Álvarez imaginatively documents the life of Salomé Ureña, whose poetry inspired independence movements in the nineteenth century. Born in 1850, Salomé became an iconic figure in independence movements and Dominican women’s struggle for emancipation during the late 1800s. In the novel, Salomé Ureña deploys the medium of poetry to protest against oppressive regimes. In Álvarez’s reimagining, Ureña dons the mask of Herminia to envision an independent Dominican Republic free from the threat of Spanish colonization. She proposes a matria—a female-centered political community—using the language of motherhood to reimagine the nation. Ureña crystallizes the ways the maternal body becomes the ultimate site of national fervor. She illustrates the intimate connection between the maternal womb and the “national womb” as the recurring motifs of womb images suggests that the female body serves as a catalyst for social and political transformation.
The Female Body as the Medium for Reimagining the Nation
In In the Name of Salomé, Julia Álvarez reconceptualizes women’s roles in the nation to critique monolithic definitions of nationhood that exclude women from nationalist discourse. Commenting on gendered binaries that underpinnationalism, Catherine Hall argues that “the gendering of nations and nationalisms provides many clues as to why, for example, women’s active involvement in nationalist struggles does not result in their holding effective political power after independence” (100). As Hall points out, “Women can often be conceptualized as ‘mothers of the nation’, an image which places their reproductive capacities as at the centre of their service to the nation” (100). More broadly, Hall explains that the feminization of the nation and the masculinization of citizenship help explain why women’s participation in nationalist struggles rarely translates into political authority after independence. In the Dominican Republic, this gendered exclusion is evident in institutional practices, such as the delayed recognition of women’s literary and political contributions, exemplified by the Premio Nacional de Literatura being awarded to Hilma Contreras in 2002.
Susheila Nasta critiques masculinist nationalism by illustrating that it is a male figure who is portrayed as the author and subject of the nation while the woman is relegated to a metaphoric or symbolic role. She posits that “in the rhetoric of nations, it is a male figure who is cast as the author and subject of the nation. The female puts in an appearance chiefly in a metaphoric or symbolic role. She is the strength and virtue of the nation incarnate, but it is a role which excludes her from the sphere of national public life” (8). As Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias have also pointed out, “Very often (women) constitute the actual symbolic figuration” (of the nation); they are “signifiers of ethnic/national differences” (7). Davis and Anthias contend that women are allotted the “metaphoric” or “symbolic” role in the national script as they are viewed as the symbolic bearers of the nation.
In In the Name of Salomé, Álvarez attempts to dismantle the notion of the post-colonial nation as a masculinist space. During the 1950s to the 1970s nationalist narratives authored by Caribbean male writers, “overlooked issues of gender and insisted on seeing freedom in terms of patriarchal rhetoric that equated colonialism with emasculation and liberty with free expression of patriarchal desires” (Boyce-Davies 12) As Elleke Boehmer notes,
Nationalism which has been so fundamental to the decolonization process, bears a clear mark for gender, and this gender marking, rather than being referred to as a monolithic or transhistorical concept of patriarchy, can be explained as a specific historical development of power defined by sexual difference. (28)
Through her female characters writing and reformulating the nation, Álvarez offers alternative models of nationhood beyond patriarchal constraints.
Against this backdrop of historical exclusion, Álvarez intervenes by inserting women’s roles in the national script. In In the Name of Salomé, she uses the term “Quisqueyana” to refer to women who participated in nationalist discourses. The first epigraph of the novel, “Quisqueyanas valientes” (brave Dominican women, my translation) is a direct reference to the national anthem of the Dominican Republic. The original title “Quisqueyanos Valientes” (brave Dominican men, my translation) pays homage to revolutionary men who played a pivotal role in the national script. By dedicating the book to Quisqueyanas, Álvarez underscores that the nation stands on the shoulders of matriarchs by illustrating the formative role played by Quisqueyanas in national self-emergence.
Julia Álvarez deploys the conventions of the bildungsroman to illustrate the intimate connection between the female body and the nation. Álvarez charts a parallel course of development between Salomé’s development from childhood to adulthood and her nation’s transition from colonization to self-governance. Salomé’s narrative begins with these words: “The story of my life starts with the story of my country as I was born six years after independence, a sickly child, not expected to live” (13) which immediately establishes a nexus between the development of the protagonist and the Dominican Republic. She writes: “By the time I was six I was in better health than my country for the patria had suffered eleven changes in government” (13). Born six years after the Dominican Republic declared its independence from Haiti in 1844, Salomé comes of age with her country. From the outset of the novel, Salomé’s body is plagued with illness. Her weakened state is analogous to the deteriorating state of her newly independent country with its incessant political turmoil. Salomé witnesses the political maelstrom in her homeland marked by dictatorships and the threat of Haitian invasion. At the age of six, young Salomé states that her country had been beleaguered with multiple changes in government. She witnesses the struggle in her country in the name of the patria. Salomé makes reference to a childhood Dominican song reflecting her country’s transition from Spanish to French colonial ownership, and then to Haitian rule:
I was born Spanish,
by the afternoon I was French at night I was African.
What will become of me? (16).
Here, Salomé articulates her ambiguous racial and cultural identity, but also an awareness of the political instability in her country. The young, unwed Salomé reflects that they await “an invasion from Haiti that never comes” (33) and her father “talks of the Haitian threat and the protection we will get from being a part of Spain again,” stating, “I’d rather be a colony than a cemetery … I’d rather be Spanish than Haitian. We are not ready to be a patria yet” (30). Salomé’s father’s words haunt her psyche as she laments her country’s inability to liberate itself from the threat of dictatorships and imperialist powers. These details alert us that the story is set in the island of Hispaniola during the 19th century, when Haiti and the Dominican Republic are dealing with the immediate legacies of colonial control, and trying to figure out who and what they are as emergent nations.
Moreover, Salomé’s adolescence reflects her country’s years of subjugation under Spanish rule. The heroine ponders on the period of oppression under Spanish rule and writes that “her country had gone back to being a baby having to obey the colonial mother country” (50). The supervision of the Dominican Republic by the mother country mirrors Salomé’s own surveillance within her family. Reflective of the colonizer and colonized relationship, Salomé’s father’s numerous prohibitions and attempts to control his daughter’s behavior are comparable to the power that the Spanish colonizers exercise over the Dominican Republic. As part of the island of Hispaniola—a Caribbean space marked by maroon resistance, slave revolts, and the revolutionary upheavals emanating from Saint-Domingue—the Dominican Republic was subject to heightened surveillance, driven by imperial anxieties over political instability and anticolonial revolt. The surveillance of Salomé’s body mirrors the monitoring of the nation by the colonial mother country, linking the familial to the broader sociopolitical climate. During her adolescence, she is constantly supervised under her family’s perpetual gaze. She laments that her father devoted all his attention to safeguarding her honor—a concept deeply embedded in Spanish patriarchal culture, where female virtue functions as a symbol of familial and national respectability. Here, Salomé illustrates how the family unit was a microcosm of the nation. She explains,
It was my Papa who was all eyes. It seemed that he had transferred all his worry and attention from la patria to Ramona and me. We began to see how crucial it was for him to have a nation with which to occupy himself or we would not have a moment’s peace. (51)
Álvarez makes a direct connection between Salomé’s repressed body in her adolescent years and her country’s oppression under Spanish colonization, as both are imprisoned under the weight of the “all-seeing” and “all-powerful” panoptic gaze.
Salomé’s transition from adolescence to adulthood also mirrors her country’s transition from colonization to independence. While Salomé’s adolescence is plagued by repression, her adulthood marks her period of sexual awakening as she explores her repressed sexual desires. She begins to write poems that explore the themes of love and female desire. She writes: “I had released the woman inside me and let her free on paper” (143). The freedom of Salomé’s repressed body in her adulthood correlates with her country’s freedom from oppression under Spanish rule. She describes her country’s independence as a hopeful beginning as a “fresh new energy was at work in the patria” (300) which reflects her own feminist awakening in her adulthood.
Reimagining Women’s Roles in the National Script
In In the Name of Salomé, Julia Álvarez confronts the exclusion of women from the national script by destabilizing the patriarchal genealogy embedded in the term patria and reclaiming it through the perspectives and experiences of her female characters. Álvarez reimagines the patria by redefining women’s roles in the national script. The term patria is defined as “one’s homeland or birth country” (Harrison and Hipchen 191). As Rebecca Harrison points out,
The origins of patria are themselves patriarchal as nation and patria share the same Greek root “patriot,” a term whose definition excludes the feminine in using only the masculine pronoun ‘his’: a patriot is understood as one whose ruling passion is the love of ‘his’ country. (191)
Álvarez disrupts masculinist connotations of the nation by envisioning a matria, a feminist reimagining of nationhood derived from mater (“mother”). As Sandra M. Gilbert explains, matria is an imagined maternal space—located “in the nowhere of a newly made vocabulary” (207)—that subverts the authority of the patria. Rather than accepting the patriarchal nation, women “long for a mother country or ‘sisterland to Paradise’ in which women and men can live together free of the rigid interventions and interdictions of the father” (205). Matria emphasizes maternal labor, female-centered leadership, and women’s political agency, rendering visible the contributions and perspectives of women historically excluded from nationalist discourses.
Álvarez, through her female protagonist, Salomé, redefines the patria not as a fixed, masculinist territory, but as a dynamic, inclusive space that acknowledges women’s active participation in nation-building. The novel begins with the heroine inquiring what constitutes a nation as her country has been plagued by political turmoil. Salomé is further dejected by the news of the Spanish repossession of the Dominican Republic on March 18, 1861. She ponders on the meaningless battles for freedom which ended with the patria in “chains” under Spanish rule.
During the nineteenth century, in the real world of the Dominican Republic, where Julia Álvarez logically situates this reimagining of the nation, through the eyes of an important national figure, political instability reigned. Rebels fought for independence from Haiti in 1844 under the leadership of the Trinitaria- the three leaders Duarte, Mella and Sanchez. The triumph was short lived as the Haitians attempted another invasion but were defeated by the caudillos. An independent Dominican Republic was plagued by political turmoil which led General Santana to request repossession by Spain. On March 18, 1861, General Santana, after having been accorded dictatorial powers by the senate, announced the reincorporation of the country into Spanish dominion stating that the repossession by Spain “brings peace to this soil where so many combats have taken place, and with peace she brings the benefits of peace” (Rodman 74). Salomé recalls the Spanish re-acquisition of the Dominican Republic as she writes: “That day March 18, 1861-on the main plaza we had been given back to Spain and became a colony again” (50). She proceeds to ask her father what constitutes a “patria that will make so many people die for its freedom only to have a whole other set of its people put it back in a ball and chain again?” (25). Salomé reflects on the political climate in her homeland in which men are engaged in an incessant struggle for power in the name of the patria:
One side was red and the other side was blue-color being the only way we could tell one side from the other, though both sides said that whatever they were doing they were doing for the patria. We had fought off an invasion from Haiti and soon we would fight a war against Spain, now we were fighting among ourselves. (13)
Salomé makes it clear that in her estimation, men are responsible for the political maelstrom in her homeland and on the island, whether the male leaders were colonizers or the newly independent Haiti-colonial or post-colonial. She laments that the patria has transformed into a dystopia, plagued by incessant violence and political turmoil.
The meaning of the patria haunts Salomé’s psyche as she has witnessed the perpetual struggles within the Dominican Republic in the name of the patria. As Silvio Sirias points out,
When the characters in In the Name of Salomé use the word “patria” they are trying to define it. This is because throughout Latin America’s history the group that controls the definition of patria is the one that governs the country. In light of the endless struggle of the Dominican Republic- and of other Latin American nations-to establish a just and equitable society, the leitmotif of la patria acquires a sense of urgency. Hence the significance of Salome’s poetic inquiry. (100)
Salomé’s question remains unanswered, but she recognizes that she must redefine and recreate the patria on her own terms. She reimagines a matria that foregrounds women’s visionary leadership, activism, and revolutionary imagination, depicting women as critical agents of social and political transformation.
Salomé, wearing the mask of Herminia, envisions an alternative sociopolitical reality, free from the threat of imperialist powers. Although the heroine’s male suitors yearn for social and political transformation, it is Salomé who reveals activist revolutionary fervor. Donning the mask of Herminia allows Salomé to write what she thinks of the nation and write like a man, to imagine alternatives to oppressive regimes. She relies on her alter ego, Herminia, to perform her nationalist fervor. While her public persona is shy and reserved, her alter-ego, Herminia, is an outspoken critic of social and patriarchal oppression. Salomé, through her alter-ego, adopts an authoritative, commanding voice, calling on Dominicans to “throw off the shroud” of apathy and fight back against the oppressive forces in their homeland.
Salomé seeks to reimagine the patria, free from political violence and the threat of imperialist powers. Yet, she is a woman, which shapes her perception of herself as a poet. When Salomé sees how difficult it is to effect this reconfiguration as she has been trained to fit the particular role envisaged for women within her society, she uses her alter ego, Herminia, who is a much more confident individual. She relies on Herminia for strength to construct the nation she dreams of. She stores her poetry under her mattress to ensure that the poetic ambitions of the Salomé that they know are hidden from her parents. In public, Salomé plays the role of a dutiful daughter who obeys her parents but privately, as the brave Herminia, works to free her country from the grips of Spanish colonization. Herminia, Salomé writes, “is going to bring down the regime with pen and paper” (55). Salomé, through Herminia, adopts the posture of a warrior who uses her pen as her weapon to strike back against her oppressors. When her father discovers her poems, he warns her of the dangers of writing patriotic poems, but Salomé continues to write secretly, defying her father’s wishes. She writes:
Sometimes my hand would shake as I wrote. Herminia, Herminia, I would whisper to myself she was the brave one, she was the one not in thrall to her fears. She did not quail at a harsh word. Secretly, in the dark of the night, Herminia worked at setting the patria free. (62)
She uses her “paper as her shield” and her poetic verses as “her sword,” illustrating the dual function of writing as both defense and offense. The paper-shield becomes a protective armor, safeguarding her identity and her political aspirations from the surveillance imposed by her father and colonial authority. The sword, meanwhile, conveys the importance of writing as a powerful weapon in the struggle against colonial rule. Through poetry, Salomé wages a battle against Spanish colonization and gendered repression, creating avenues of freedom from oppression.
The heroine creates an alternative world through her fictional narrative space where she dialogues with an imagined reader as she protests against the political turmoil within her homeland. She writes: “At night I would lay in bed, and instead of sleeping I would think of what I would whisper into the ears of the Spanish governor if I had the chance. If I got scared, I’d chant my brave name over and over to myself,! Herminia! !Herminia! Herminia!” (60). Salomé imagines herself whispering into the ears of the Spanish governor as she yearns to be seen and heard by masculine authority. Through her alter-ego, Herminia, she hopes to usurp political power that is usually accorded to the male. Salomé conjures up an imaginative world where she is actively involved in the political realm. Salomé’s poetry inspires her to enact change in her social surroundings. As Herminia, she has the confidence to strike back against the abject powers in her external environment. Salomé imagines conversations with the Spanish governor, deploying her fictional narrative space as a revolutionary counter-site against the oppressive forces in her homeland.
Salomé uses her poetic verses to communicate with her fellow citizens, encouraging them to fight for liberty from Spanish colonization. She writes poems, “that would keep the love of liberty alive in the hearts of her countrymen and women during these hard times” (133). With their patria in bondage, they must imagine and create an alternative socio-political space, independent of foreign powers. She writes: “with the patria in chains the spirit can still soar” (67). Salomé envisions a pathway for freedom from Spanish colonization: “I dreamed of setting us free. I would free the patria with my quill and bottle of ink” (47). Salomé views her poetry as a vital tool to communicate her message of liberty with her fellow citizens, deploying her poetic verses to inspire collective resistance to both Spanish colonization and constructions of womanhood.
Yet, Herminia’s poetic abilities are questioned by her compatriots who attributed her literary prowess to supernatural forces: “Everyone was curious as to how I wrote and where my ideas came from. There were rumors that I heard voices or that the angel Gabriel came to me in dreams” (91). At a reading of her poetry, after her true identity is discovered, someone applauds Salomé and praises her by saying, “What a man that woman is!” which Salomé remarks, “was meant to be a compliment, I suppose” (141). Before her true identity is revealed, her aunt claims that “this Herminia is a warrior” (63), insisting that “Herminia is really a man, hiding behind a woman’s skirt” (63), reflecting patriarchal attitudes towards women. Herminia’s call for collective revolt was uncharacteristic of women of that time, and revealed a particularly transgressive woman
Salomé abandons her pseudonym when she discovers that what she thinks of as a frivolous poem written about winter was published under Herminia’s name. Salomé, unable to respond to her critics and explain that she had not written the piece, becomes ill. She writes: “It made me feel sick not to be able to defend myself” (69). To avoid being denigrated by her critics, Salomé signs her name under her poems. At this juncture, she feels empowered to abandon her fictional persona and claim her own identity to keep her message of freedom alive in the hearts of her compatriots. Salomé’s choice to sign her name reinforces the idea that literature is not just a reflection of national identity but a force that actively shapes it. Her poems are not abstract or ornamental; they are direct interventions in the political life of her country. By attaching her real name to her verses, she asserts her right to participate in the making of patria, offering a vision of the nation that includes women’s voices, experiences, and imaginations.
The Maternal Body as a Site of National Fervor
Salomé Ureña draws inspiration from the maternal body, using the language of motherhood to reconstruct the nation. Through her poetic verses, Salomé rewrites her space on her own terms, using the maternal body as the medium to reconceptualize the patria—not as an abstract ideal to be defended with arms or bellicose language, but as a site of limitless possibility and hope nurtured through the ideals of freedom, justice and equality.
Salomé’s poetic verses are intimately connected to the maternal body. In this context, it is interesting to consider that poetic language has been described as the language of the maternal body (Kristeva 44). For Julia Kristeva, the poetic text insistently draws us back to our beginnings in the maternal body through its stress on sound and rhythm. Kristeva posits that “it reconnects us to the phonetic, that is to the articulating body: initiating the articulating apparatus and then through the drives through the body as a whole” (14). The poet’s practice disrupts the disembodied, prescriptive speech that is the domain of what Kristeva has called the “Symbolic Order,” the “Father,” or the “Law.” For Kristeva, the symbolic aspect of language is associated with authority, order, repression and control. By contrast, the semiotic aspect of discourse defies logic and order as it is characterized by displacement, slippage and condensation. Kristeva describes the semiotic as the language of poetry which opens language up to the pre-symbolized, pre-socialized, profoundly subversive world of the maternal body’s “pulsions” or “drives” (37). Kristeva illustrates how the poetic text with its emphasis on sound and rhythm is analogous to the pulsations within the maternal womb.
Salomé uses the language of motherhood to imagine alternative societal configurations grounded in feminine innovation and maternal care. She illustrates her perception that the power that the Spanish colonizers exercise over Dominicans is comparable to the mother-child relationship. Here, Salomé depicts the nation as infantilized with its political development stunted under colonial rule. To free themselves from the colonial condition, Salomé insists that they must break the cycle of dependence on the mother country for political and economic sustenance. In her meditations on her country’s independence from Spain, the Dominican Republic is no longer figured as a child under maternal control but as a prospective mother struggling to bring life into the world. Salomé writes, “For fifty years we had to struggle to bring it to life, only to deliver still births, one after another” (300). At this juncture, the Dominican Republic is grappling with the legacies of colonial control, struggling to determine who and what it might become as an emergent nation but remains incapable of creating a viable future. She draws a parallel between the woman’s physical womb and the “national womb,” illustrating how the infertility of the nation is inextricably tied to the colonial condition. She calls on Dominicans to envision the patria anew—as a hopeful new mother figure that would give birth to “a new generation of young people who would think in new ways and stop the cycle of violence on the island” (171), thus deploying the maternal body as a site of national fervor.
Salomé uses her poetic verses to create the nation of which she dreams. When the Dominican Republic became a colony of Spain from 1861 and 1865, she declares, “It was a time for poetry, even if it was not a time for liberty” (55). The heroine views poetry as an effective medium for protesting against Spanish colonization. Through these poetic verses, she envisions a pathway for freedom from Spanish colonization. She views her poetry as a vital tool to communicate her message of liberty with her fellow citizens, using her poetic verses to inspire collective resistance to Spanish colonization. Her commitment to using poetry as a political tool reflects a deep understanding of literature’s capacity to shape political consciousness. She believes that her poetic verses can plant the seeds of resistance, kindle the desire for change, and embolden her compatriots to reclaim their autonomy. In this way, her poetic imagination becomes an integral part of the nation-building process, asserting that freedom must be envisioned before it can be realized.
Salomé’s patriotic poems inspire independence movements in the nineteenth century. Her poetry appears in newspapers in Santo Domingo and was occasionally reprinted by foreign newspapers. The poems become a medium of hope and her message of freedom resonates with her fellow citizens as they recognize that the country they envision is within their grasp. The woman who felt unable because of societal attitudes to openly express her opinions is quoted in the political sphere. Clearly conceptualizing a role for gender in her political imaginings of the nation, Salomé muses that “there was another revolution to be fought if our patria was truly free” (147). The patria, she thinks, must transform into a matriarchal space where women are liberated from patriarchal control. By the time she is more openly articulating such views, Salomé has abandoned her alter-ego, Herminia, signing her own name under her poetic verses. Through the fictional narrative space that Álvarez inscribes, she interrogates the oppression of women in her society and the culture of silence that stifles the female voice. Salomé draws inspiration from the imaginative vision of the nation as a maternal body to reimagine the patria as a space where women are liberated from the constraints placed on their bodies. Construing a link with the real-life experiences of women, she writes a poem to denounce the vitriolic attacks against a pregnant, unmarried young woman, condemning the societal censure of women for satisfying their sexual desires:
It seemed unjust that this young woman’s life should be ruined whereas the rogue man went on with his engagement to a girl from a fine family with no seeming consequences to be paid. Why was it right for a man to satisfy his passion, but for a woman to do so was as good as signing her death warrant? (145).
In an act of defiance against the status quo, she begins to write erotic poetic verses that explore female desire. For the heroine, writing these passionate poems becomes an act of self-revelation and a feminist awakening: “I had released the woman inside me and let her free on paper” (143). She refuses to suppress her sexual desires and writes the poem “Quejas”:
Listen to my desiring!
Answer the wild longing in my heart
Put out my ardent fire with your kisses! (143).
Salomé’s poems spark outrage in her homeland as her countrymen were shocked to discover that “she had a real body” (145). Her iconic status as the muse of the nation trapped her permanently into that role and she was condemned for writing erotic poetry. While her patriotic poems engender the adoration of the public, she is vehemently criticized by her family members and the public for these poems. When she tries to write a love poem to her fiancé, her father rejects it, saying: “You Salomé Ureña can do better than that” (96). Even her sister, Ramona expresses outrage at the personal nature of Salomé’s poetic verses as she insists that “no one wants to hear love poems” (143). Ramona exclaims that people want patriotic poems about la patria: “You are la musa de la patria, for heaven’s sakes” (143). When her fiancé Pancho reads the erotic poems, he echoes her father’s and sister’s disapproving comments as he retorts that “We want the songs of the patria, we want anthems to lead us out of the morass of our past, and into the glorious destiny as the Athens of the Americas” (177). Salomé, however, asserts that perhaps by writing poems, “I had discovered that I had a body” (146) and defiantly retorts that, “I am a woman as well as a poet” (177). She doesn’t allow her role as the national poet to hinder her from writing poetry of a personal nature. Salomé brings together the personal and the political by illustrating the connection between the struggle for liberty in her homeland and the oppression of women in the Dominican Republic. She writes about carnal pleasure to protest against the incessant policing of female sexuality.
Through her poetic verses, Salomé is inspired to transform the patria into a matriarchal space, where women are liberated from the constraints of male desire-national and individual. As Madeline Camara Bentacourt suggests, “only a subversive women’s discourse can rewrite the matria. Its liberating effect creates a different ordering from that of the law of the father that applies in the male imaginary of Patria” (9). Salomé becomes an advocate for women’s education as she believes that pedagogy can serve as a vital tool in fighting against patriarchal oppression. She recognizes that education equips women with the necessary skills to reclaim their agency and re-write their role in the familial and public sphere. The heroine declares: “I felt up to the hard work of rebuilding my patria, girl by girl” (271). Through education, women acquire the tools not only to understand the mechanisms of their own oppression but also to challenge and change them. For Salomé, pedagogy becomes a revolutionary act — a means of cultivating critical consciousness among girls and young women, empowering them to claim their rightful place in both the familial and national spheres. As Sirias suggests, “Educating women becomes a powerful form of resistance within la patria as women’s education has the potential for radically changing the patriarchal patria into an egalitarian matria” (121). Salomé’s dedication to women’s education leads her to establish the first high school for girls in the Dominican Republic where she trains and mentors future teachers.
Transnational Feminist Activism in In the Name of Salomé
In In the Name of Salomé, Salomé’s poetic voice functions as a bridge across generations and national borders, transmitting strategies of feminist resistance and empowerment. Her verses cultivate a sense of resilience and hope that transcends geopolitical boundaries, engendering a transnational feminist resistance to social and patriarchal oppression. Through Camila Henríquez, Salomé’s revolutionary poems and ideals are passed down to a new generation of women, highlighting the transgenerational scope of female-centered activism. In the twentieth century, Camila carries forward this legacy as she moves between the Caribbean and the United States—from the cold north of Poughkeepsie, Middlebury, Cambridge, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C., to the sun-soaked islands of Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and Santo Domingo (Hoffman 121). This intergenerational transmission resonates with Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s vision of “feminism without borders,” which she describes as attentive to structural constraints while cultivating solidarities across lines of difference. In Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Mohanty contends that “our most expansive and inclusive visions of feminism need to be attentive to borders while learning to transcend them” (2). Mohanty further asserts that “there is no one sense of a border, that the lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities, religions, and disabilities, are real — and that a feminism without borders must envision change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and division” (2). Reflecting Chandra Mohanty’s conception of feminist praxis, Salomé and Camila enact transgenerational and transnational feminist activism, attentive to historical and structural inequalities while cultivating solidarities that transcend geopolitical boundaries.
In the Name of Salomé explores the effect of a life of explicitly political writing on the daughter who inherits the matrilineal legacy of a revolutionary writer-mother. Throughout the narrative, Camila struggles to find purpose for her existence. Salomé’s poems inspire her to claim her own identity, independent of social and patriarchal control. At the end of the text, the heroine’s poetic anthology ignites revolutionary action in her daughter, Camila, who joins Fidel Castro’s literacy brigade in post-revolutionary Cuba in 1960. Camila spends her years in Cuba, reading her mother’s poetic verses, inspiring women to imagine alternatives to oppressive regimes. By depicting a community of women reading and inscribing revolution, Álvarez illustrates how the literary text can incite the reader to imagine and feel motivated to create alternatives to oppressive regimes.
Camila’s search for answers within her mother’s poetic verses is reinforced in the structure of the text as the novel is divided into two parts with eight chapters with separate plots that converge at the end. Camila’s story is narrated in reverse chronological order as she prepares to return to Cuba. At the age of sixty, she has just retired from teaching and is a mature woman searching for her place in the world. From here, Camila’s story moves backward until in the last chapter where her story is narrated from her childhood as she reflects on her mother’s final days before succumbing to her ailment of tuberculosis. In the Epilogue, the reader learns that Camila has been the narrator of both stories and made the stories run parallel to each other to give meaning to her own life: “I learned her story. I put it side by side with my own. I wove our two lives together as a rope and with it I pulled myself out of the pit of depression and self-doubt” (235).
Camila is initially drawn to her mother’s poems to find the antidote to her existential dilemma. She immerses herself in her mother’s poetic anthology as she feels lost in the world after her mother’s death. Her existential angst drives her to lead a nomadic existence with each chapter of her life narrated from a different location. She journeys from her homeland to Cuba and then the United States. Her perpetual journeys reflect her constant struggle to find her place in the world. As Leslie Erickson notes, “unsettled and unfulfilled, Camila feels “the terrible moral disinheritance of exile” (90), as her nomadism heightens her feelings of despair.
In Álvarez’s fictionalized account of the life of Camila, the heroine struggles to find her place in the world as she has spent a lifetime being controlled and overshadowed by her renowned family. Born Salomé Camila Henríquez Ureña, she avoids using her mother’s first name. As an adult, she insists that “I’m just plain Camila”- Camila Henry – a nondescript brown woman like any other” (37) as she feels unworthy of her mother’s name. Her mother, Salomé (1850-1897), is considered the National Poetess of the Dominican Republic and was recognized even during her lifetime as a nationalist heroine because of her patriotic verses. As a Professor at Vassar college, Camila struggles to find her place within her family. Camila’s father had been president, her brother Max has a job in the government, and, most important, her brother Pedro is “the one who received mother’s legacy” (22). Camila feels that she does not really belong to their “necklace of the generations” (2) that she is “the nobody among them” (38). Camila feels burdened by her family’s prestigious image: “she had to think first of her words’ effect on the important roles her father and brother and uncles and cousins were playing in the world” (85).
Salomé’s poetic verses function as deeply personal sources of inspiration and empowerment for Camila, who inherits both the legacy and the burden of her mother’s nationalist ideals. While initially overwhelmed by the weight of living in the shadow of an iconic heroine, Camila gradually discovers her own voice through an intimate and reflective engagement with her mother’s poetry. Salomé’s poetry motivates Camila to envision the patria anew, free from the political turmoil of previous regimes. She writes:
She too, wants to be part of national self-creation. Her mother’s poems inspired a generation. Her own she knows, are not clarion calls, but subdued oboes, background piano music, a groundswell of cellos bearing the burden of a melody. Every revolution surely needs a chorus. (121)
Although Camila is inspired by her mother’s revolutionary ideals, her third-person self-reference illustrates her continued struggle to view herself as a subject rather than object of national narratives.
Camila’s political activism leads her to Cuba where she participates in a revolt against the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. After her imprisonment for leading a group of dissidents in protest against the regime, she flees from Cuba to the United States. The young activist continues her political activism at the celebration of her mother’s legacy at Middlebury where she denounces Rafael Trujillo’s reign, stating that she cannot celebrate her mother’s work with her country beleaguered by political turmoil, vehemently condemning the violence unleashed by Trujillo’s brutal regime. Camila emulates her mother’s revolutionary ideals by speaking out against the cruelties perpetrated in the Dominican Republic by the Trujillo regime, as she strives to “keep her dreams from dying” (86). For Camila, the only way not to lose her mother completely is to become the new Salomé, or “to take up the burden of her songs” (347).
Camila’s activism and political engagement culminate in post-revolutionary Cuba, where she transmits her mother’s revolutionary ideals to a new generation of women. She spends her years in Cuba, reading her mother’s poetic verses, inspiring women to imagine and inscribe revolution. As a member of a government sponsored literacy brigade, Camila reads Salomé’s unpublished poems to a group of women working at a Cuban cafetal. The women are so moved by the poetic verses that they stop working and ask Camila: “Was that written by a mother?” (348). Camila responds that “It was written by my mother, in fact. And then I told them her story and when I was done, one by one the women began to clack with their wooden scoopers on the side of their tables, until the din in the room drowned out the campanero, shouting for order, in the name of Fidel, in the name of the revolution” (348). Here, the resounding cries of women laborers in the cafetal underscore the transnational reach of Salomé’s patriotic poems, highlighting women’s roles in shaping revolutionary consciousness across the Spanish Caribbean. Salomé’s patriotic poems underscore how women’s political activism—long excluded from official historiographies—functions as a pedagogy that incites revolutionary fervor. Camila recognizes that her mother’s poetry inspires women to release their stifled voices as the rousing cries in the cafetal create a hopeful melody for women outside of the parameters of male sociocultural constraints.
In Camila’s eyes, reading is crucial to rebuilding a matria as it nurtures and develops the minds of a new generation of women to think in new ways and move beyond the symbolic roles historically allotted to women in the national script by actively participating in nation-building. She views reading as “liberature”: cultural knowledge transmitted to all women, irrespective of race, class, or age, aimed at achieving personal, social, and political transformation. She writes that she found her mother in Cuba as the collective voices of the women in the cafetal resuscitated her mother’s revolutionary spirit, illustrating how feminist activism and matrilineal transmission of knowledge work in tandem to cultivate women’s empowerment, solidarity, and leadership across generations.
In the final scene of the novel, Camila goes to a cemetery in the Dominican Republic where she plans to have her family bury her. At the cemetery, she encounters an illiterate boy and begins to teach him how to read. She laments that “in Cuba, he would know how to read. He would not be picking weeds on a school day” (352). Here with this reflection, Camila highlights Cuba’s role as a pioneer of social reform in Latin America, particularly in the post-revolutionary period as education and healthcare were crucial to the utopian vision of building a better world. Although Camila is now visually impaired, she does not let her disability hinder her from her role as an educator as she uses her hands to teach the boy how to read: “The boy has guided my hand, and now I put my hand over his. “Your turn,” I say to him. Together we trace the grooves in the stone, he repeating the name of each letter after me. “Very good,” I tell him when we have done this several times. “Now, you do it by yourself” (353). Together, Camila and the boy read ‘Camila Salomé’ on the grave. By guiding the boy’s hands through the act of reading, Camila exemplifies how women serve as leaders and educators, actively constructing the nation by cultivating literacy and transmitting knowledge across generations.
At the end of the narrative, Camila transforms from an insecure young woman to a self-assured political activist who finds the purpose for her existence. She addresses the reader directly by employing the first-person perspective. Camila has previously indulged in the habit of effacing her subjectivity by speaking about herself in the third person as the daughter of the iconic heroine. At the end of the narrative, Camila speaks in the first-person voice that she has avoided as she transforms from the object to the subject of her own discourse. As Sirias notes,
When the reader initially meets Camila, she is insecure, indecisive. The reader needs to travel backwards to understand the cause of her depression and self-doubt. The Epilogue, however, presents a transformed Camila. She is now a strong, self-assured character that is in control of her own destiny. (121)
Camila is committed to fighting for the revolution by building the nation one person at a time through the literary imagination. She steps out of her mother’s shadow by defining her own notions of revolution, marking a powerful moment of subject formation and political awakening. Her journey throughout the novel is structured by a dual movement: a retrospective excavation of her mother’s legacy and a forward-looking redefinition of her own role within the revolutionary tradition. The narrative charts Camila’s evolution from an insecure, fragmented individual—haunted by the mythologized figure of her mother and her own marginalization within political history—into a self-assured political subject who articulates her own revolutionary ethos.
In In the Name of Salomé, Julia Álvarez depicts a community of women reading and imagining solidarities and resistance across generations and national boundaries. Through Camila’s journeys across the Spanish Caribbean and the United States, the novel highlights the interconnectedness of the islands through their political histories, the contributions of (often unacknowledged) female political figures, and shared colonial and postcolonial experiences. While in exile in Cuba, Camila explicitly expresses a pan-American perspective when she asks, “Why speak of Cuba and Santo Domingo, when even the underwater cordillera that runs from island to island knows that they belong together?” (164). The heroine’s trans-American scope illustrates the intimate connection among various countries of the Americas through shared experiences of social and political repression. While Camila initially sees the Cuban revolution as a model for social and political transformation across the Americas, by the end of the narrative she realizes that the true revolution of “Our America” resides in awakening the imagination of its people and nurturing solidarities and coalitions across borders.
In the postscript of In the Name of Salomé, Álvarez stresses the importance of emulating Salomé and Camila’s revolutionary ideals, inciting the reader to go beyond the text to imagine alternatives to oppressive regimes:
The Salomé and Camila you will find in these pages are fictional characters based on historical figures, but they are re-created in the light of questions that we can only answer, as they did, with our own lives: Who are we as a people? What is patria? How do we serve? Is love stronger than anything else in the world? Given the continuing struggles in Our America to understand and create ourselves as countries and as individuals, this book is an effort to understand the great silence from which these two women have emerged and from which they have disappeared, leaving us to dream up their stories and take up the burden of their songs. (357)
Álvarez underscores in the postscript that the readers’ “immersion” in “an epoch of life of the Dominican Republic” comes with concomitant responsibilities: to emulate the revolutionary ideals of these women by continuing to “dream up their stories” and “take up the burden of their songs” (357). Here, the postscript extends the novel’s transnational feminist vision, inviting readers to imagine a matria grounded in female-centered leadership, feminist activism and collective resistance against oppression.
In conclusion, Julia Álvarez’s In the Name of Salomé, depicts women actively shaping the nation. Through the act of writing, the protagonist, Salomé reimagines the patria on her own terms, free from political violence and the threat of imperialist powers. Rather than replicating the bellicose logic of the patria, Salomé articulates a matria grounded in maternal care and female-centered visionary leadership. Through the language of motherhood, she reconceptualizes nationhood itself, positioning the maternal body as a site of national meaning and revolutionary desire. Salomé’s poetic voice offers an alternative vision of independence in which women’s revolutionary imagination reshapes the contours of the emergent nation. The heroine’s patriotic verses resonate beyond geopolitical boundaries, cultivating a transnational feminist resistance to social and patriarchal oppression. By centering the female voice as the locus of nationalist fervor, In the Name of Salomé offers alternatives to male-centered national narratives, inviting readers to consider how nationhood might be interrogated, disrupted, and renarrativized through a feminist framework.
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