At the age of ten, Alvarez returned to the United States. The United States was where she developed her passion for writing. When growing up in a new cultural environment, she had a difficult time adjusting to immigrant life and learning english. Alvarez was brutally faced with alienation and prejudice. Throughout her lifetime, she was able to keep close eyes on what was happening in the world around her. These immigrant experiences and her bicultural identity were main subjects to her writing. In her well known novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, she used first-person altering events to guide her writing. Alvarez wrote this novel to mark the importance of women fighting against their own wills. 

The attention of Alvarez was caught by these horrific events. In this novel, she fictionalized historical figures from real life events to prove the concept of feminism. She used this book to dramatize the heroic events of the Dominican population to try to overthrow the government of Trujillo. These events allowed Alvarez to look into the struggle of women to fight for their rights in the world today and allows people to better understand the historical legacy of the extraordinary women. 

The poem explains that a woman will be “ready to charge into the war by his side”. This connects easily to the novel In the Time of the Butterflies because las mariposas were able to gain strength from their own female experiences and escape their mental illnesses. When they gained strength, they were able to create an underground government to fight against the abusive leader of the Dominican Republic, General Trujillo. 

Similar to Julia Alvarez, Latoya uses her own experiences to shape her art. The pain both of them have been through allows them to strive through writing and artwork. In the novel In the Time of the Butterflies written by Julia Alvarez, Las Mariposas travel through dark times when General Trujillo is in reign. Las Mariposas are females who are courageous and stand up against the abusive Trujillo. Although they did want to fight for their independence, they were full of fear which soon led to anxiety, a mental illness. Trujillo was an oppressive and abusive ruler to all individuals, but mainly women as he brutally murdered women who were just trying to stand up for their independence. Similarly, in this art piece, women in black communities were not treated with respect. To hide from their mental health, they were hidden behind a mask. But when guided by self-imposed experiments, a woman is able to feel more empowered and wants to advocate the meaning of mental health and how individuals can grow from it. 

Stigma is a mark of disgrace set on somebody that sets them apart. Stigma limits and prohibits you from your free will and it is something that an individual will never fully be able to recover from. Besides stigma caused, personal experiences are events that can cause mental illness to arise for females in society. Nwana lost her mother in 2017. This caused her emotional pain and affected her work and creativity. To overcome this, she started publicly speaking to more formally accept it. Similar to how her personal struggles of her mom guided her actions in life, the personal struggles of las mariposas are what guide them together under one umbrella. Alvarez shows how the resistance against women in politics can even be propagated by the women themselves. To overcome the mental illness caused by the reign of Trujillo, Alvarez speaks upon the ideas of how the women used menstruating, falling in love, obsessing over clothing, and getting married and having children to cope with the abusive ruling of Trujillo.