LAWRENCE — It’s dusk at Union and Canal streets in Warehouse Park just outside the Ateneo Dominicano de Nueva Inglaterra, a Dominican arts and culture center.
Starting in June and continuing through summer, crowds will celebrate Dominican life here on the plaza with music, dance and fruit-laden punch on Thursday nights.
But this Wednesday, at 6 p.m., Minou Tavarez Mirabal will visit the center to talk about her martyred mom, Minerva, and two aunts, Patria and Maria Teresa.
Her presentation is on the book “Alive in Their Garden” by the surviving aunt who raised Minou, Dede Mirabal.
Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal were code-named The Butterflies — Las Mariposas — and part of the 14th of June Movement opposed to the rule of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.
On Nov. 25, 1960, Trujillo had the three sisters executed and their murders staged as an accident.
The public mourned The Butterflies and, Trujillo, who would lose the support of the military, was assassinated seven months after the sisters’ deaths.
The Mirabal sisters remain remembered in their country as The Butterflies, never far from Dominican consciousness, an enduring source of pride, standing for resistance and representing both loss and resilience.
Today’s grandparents and parents of Dominican heritage in the United States strive to preserve the Mirabals’ memory in the minds of youth.
Meanwhile, on this May weeknight, butterflies adorn the park.
They’re painted on a monument that points to the sky, and they spread their wings in Caribbean-colored displays whose arms hold planters.
Nearby, a sparrow hops on patio stones and leaps to a flower bed.
At the intersection, commuter traffic stirs. A Union Street motorcyclist gooses the throttle and pops a wheelie, the bike emitting a bass roar.
Runners’ shoes slap the pavement as they pass. A father and daughter on a tandem bike pull into the plaza for cell phone pics.
The daughter poses on the park’s small stage holding a blue slushy drink.
They then get on their bike and pedal away. The father makes a sound effect, vroom-vroom, and the daughter laughs.
To the park arrives Ingrid Castillo, who has organized Minou Mirabal’s visit to the cultural center.
Castillo wants her two sons to know their history.
“Even though my children were born and raised here, I want them to know that they come from a lineage of powerful, principled people,” she said.
Also with her is Jenny Garcia, the Ateneo’s director, and helpers Lorenza Ramirez, Cenzina Tralci and Ernesto Bautista.
Castillo’s son, Jesus, a 2022 graduate of Lawrence High, arrives, too.
The gathering reflects on Minou’s presentation.
Jesus says his mom has told him about the Mirabal sisters, but he doesn’t know their story’s details.
He wants to know more, and to pass it on to his children when he has a family.
Las Mariposas are revered worldwide for their courage and sacrifice.
In 1999, the United Nations designated the date of their murders (Nov. 25) as International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
Bautista says it is important for young people, all young people, to know their origins.
He is 65 and was a baby living in the Dominican capital, Santa Domingo, when the Mirabals were murdered.
As a boy, growing up, he knew their story. Everyone in the Dominican Republic knew the sisters’ story, and people knew first-hand the hardship experienced under the Trujillo regime which stretched back to the 1930s.
Tralci, who is originally from Venezuela, says people in her former country have also lived under dictatorship.
Jenny Garcia feels honored to have Minou visit the center.
Minou was only 4 years old when her mother and aunts were ambushed by the Trujillo hit squad.
The three sisters were returning with their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, from a visit to a prison where Minerva’s and Maria Teresa’s husbands were being held for their opposition to Trujillo.
On the road their car was stopped by Trujillo secret police who clubbed and strangled them and the driver, placed them in the vehicle and ran it off a cliff to make the murdered women and man look like accident victims.
A fourth Mirabal sister, Dede, who had not been politically active, raised the six children of her slain sisters and her three children.
Dede, who died in 2014, wrote “Alive in Their Garden,” in 2009 and started a museum in the sisters’ hometown, Conuco, to tell their story.
Minou says Dede was a second mother to her.
Ingrid Castillo knows Minou through family connections, and, here in the park, calls her and places her on speaker phone for an interview.
Minou lives in the Dominican Republic, where she has been a member of Congress and an international activist on behalf of women’s rights.
She was last in Lawrence about six years ago.
She said Dede told her sisters’ story as an unrelenting cry from her heart.
When she learned of their deaths she cried out that Trujillo had them murdered.
“Everybody tried to stop her and they couldn’t,” Minou said. “And she never stopped until the last day of her life. She told the story to everybody. Kids, grown up people, Dominicans, foreigners.”
Minou has continued telling the sisters’ story.
Earlier this day she was at the museum dedicated to Las Mariposas.
The museum receives 90,000 visitors each year.
Minou has also written about The Butterflies and spoken about them at college and other venues in the Dominican Republic and the United States.
She and others want new generations from all backgrounds and cultures who are unfamiliar with Las Mariposas to learn from their ideals, struggle and deaths; and to defend democracy and reject dictatorships.