ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, “Neighborly Networks: Personal and Professional Systems of Support,” goes beyond literary analysis to instead explore the two authors as activists and as friends or “sisters.” This final chapter begins by referencing the authors’ social justice platforms as confirmed in their autobiographical short-story collections and then moves to dissecting the written correspondence between the two women (in The Julia Alvarez Papers at the Harry Ransom Center), beginning as early as 1994 when Alvarez received a galley of Danticat’s debut novel Breath, Eyes, Memory for review. The chapter considers the sisterly, familial, and neighborly relationships that each writer develops within their respective works and deciphers the relationship—as sisters, neighbors, and as mentor/mentee—between the two writers themselves. It also uplifts the networks that exist between other intergenerational women writers who are either considered Danticat’s or Alvarez’s “literary ancestors” or who represent the next generation of women writers.
