Bones -- experiences a lot of negative interactions with people due to their racism and xenophobia. For example, a girl at the beginning of the story yells at Elena for not jumping rope fast enough, saying "Didn't you eat your rice and beans and pork chops for breakfast today?" The other girls start making up a chant with the word pork chop and Elena feels embarrassed and upset.

She thinks about how difficult it is to live in a city in winter. Elena hates the weather and how the black girls in her class seem to always be warm and fast, while she's cold and slow. She envies them. She fantasizes about life in Puerto Rico, where she's only been once. She says that the stories her parents tell about it are like fairy tales. 

Elena is blocked from advanced classes -- despite her excellent grades -- only because English is not her first language.

Her relationship with Eugene isn't marked by the racism and xenophobia that mar many of her other encounters. However, when she visits his house, his mother immediately dismisses her and sends her away. She tells Elena that Eugene cannot study with her based only on Elena's looks and where she lives.

Elena's reaction to the death of President Kennedy shows her isolation from other people. They're all very affected and her mother asks Elena to go to church with her. She also expresses surprise that Elena is going to see Eugene now that President Kennedy is dead. Elena, on the other hand, goes home from her encounter with Eugene's mother shocked and tries to feel sad for President Kennedy. She is only able to find tears for herself in the end. 

The theme of a story is found in the main subject being discussed. For Elena in Cofer's "American History," dealing with the prejudice she faces at such a young age seems to dominate the story. Elena is a Puerto Rican girl who attends a predominantly African American public school. She ironically faces prejudice from girls in her P.E. class who call her "Skinny Bones" and ask her if she eats rice and pork chops for breakfast. Putting up with their constant harassment makes her feel lonely and isolated.

Then, as if dealing with the girls at school isn't enough, Elena must face prejudice from a white neighbor from Georgia who won't allow her to study with Eugene, the only friend she has at school. Elena is shocked beyond belief when she is turned away at the doorstep because she lives in El Building and is Puerto Rican. "You live there?" asks Eugene's mother and points up at Elena's home. "She looked intently at me for a couple of heartbeats, then said as if to herself, 'I don't know how you people do it.'"

Elena is surrounded by prejudiced people who she allows to hurt her because she is just recognizing their prejudice for what it is. In this coming-of-age story, Elena must look prejudice in the face and decide how she will deal with it. Unfortunately, the reader only gets the part of the story that shows the growing pains dealing with prejudice, not the part that tells how Elena deals with it. Therefore, the theme of the story revolves around Elena learning about prejudice in the world, that there are different types of prejudiced people, and people have many different reasons for being prejudiced that might shock her at different times in her life.

Additionally, the main conflict can also be placed in the character-versus-society category.

As the story progresses, we come to the realization that Elena feels alienated from her parents, her school peers, and mainstream society. First, she is Puerto Rican, and her command of English isn't good enough for her to be admitted into honors classes at school. Elena also finds herself rejected and ridiculed by the African-American girls she tries to best in rope-jumping. Because she is thin and small-framed, Elena finds it difficult to keep up with her more robust peers. Her schoolmates cruelly refer to her as Skinny Bones. As a small-chested Puerto Rican teenager, Elena feels self-conscious and humiliated that she lacks the kind of physique the more popular girls have.

Elena spends much of her time at home reading on the fire escape in her apartment building and spying on an older Jewish couple in the house next door. Eventually, the husband dies, and his elderly wife moves out. A new family moves in, and there is a teenage son in the mix. Elena finds herself falling in love as she watches Eugene. However, her mother is unsympathetic when she discovers Elena is interested in the boy next door. She unceremoniously tells Elena that she is just love-sick or "stupidly infatuated." There is not much positive interaction between the mother and daughter; instead, Elena has to endure her mother's incessant warnings about the need to protect her "virtue" and "morality."

Elena is drawn to the novel Gone With The Wind because it tells the story of a beautiful heroine (who has devoted parents to support her and slaves to serve her). When Eugene invites her over, she is over the moon. However, Elena receives a rude awakening when she knocks on the door at Eugene's home. Instead of Eugene, she is greeted by his mother.

Eugene's mother unequivocally rejects the idea of her and Eugene studying together. She curtly tells Elena that Eugene is a smart boy and that he doesn't need Elena to study with him. Basically, Eugene's mother doesn't want her son associating with a Puerto Rican girl. Shocked at the woman's rudeness, Elena makes her way home. However, she receives no comfort or solace there. President Kennedy's death has shocked her parents, and they are in mourning. So, Elena must comfort herself as best she can in her bedroom.

From the above, we can see that the overriding conflict in the story rests in the difficulties Elena must face in navigating the society she lives in.

I would argue that this excellent coming-of-age short story is actually centred around an internal conflict within Elena herself, and the gap between her dreams and hopes and the brute reality that she has to face because of her ethnicity. This of course also is manifested in the external conflict in the way in which Eugene's mother treats Elena when she goes to his house, and is foreshadowed by the way in which Elena's mother warns her daughter about what she is heading towards:

You are forgetting who you are, Nina. I have seen you staring down at that boy's house. You are heading for humiliation and pain.

Thus it is that Elena's conflict is between the hopes that she has for herself and her friendship with Eugene and her ethnicity and the way that it makes her different from others. The death of her hopes is of course paralleled with the death of JFK, who himself tried to campaign for equality.

I would argue that the main reason that Cofer uses this title is that the story illustrates one of the abiding themes of American history: racial prejudice. Despite being a land of immigrants, the United States has never really come to terms with the widespread racial prejudice that exists to this day. In American History it is Elena who is on the receiving end of such prejudice in the shape of Eugene's mother, who won't let her into her home simply because she's Puerto Rican.

It's notable that Elena lives in an apartment block—El Building—that houses exclusively Puerto Rican families. This indicates that, despite the melting-pot ideal, America was and remains a country deeply divided on lines of race. If anything, the social segregation epitomized by El Building and by the bigotry of Eugene's mother is much more persistent, much harder to eradicate, than the formal legal apparatus of segregation that still existed at the time when the story is set.

Judith Ortiz Cofer's title for her short story "American History" has a double meaning. First, the story is set on November 22, 1963, which is the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. This date is remembered by many people around the world as one of America's tragic days in history. The second meaning behind Cofer's title is symbolic and ironic at the same time. The sad truth is that prejudice, discrimination, and racism are also a part of America's history; and Elena, the protagonist, experiences these vices on the day Kennedy was shot.

In the story, while the whole nation mourns the loss of a great leader by listening to or watching the news, Elena goes next door for a study date with her friend Eugene. Unfortunately, Eugene's mother denies Elena access to her home and her son because Elena is a poor Puerto Rican immigrant--not a white girl.

The title is symbolic because two historical events happen in the story; one is famous, and one represents daily life in America in the 1960s. The title is ironic because when the nation mourned the loss of Kennedy, they felt united; however, the unity was not necessarily real or long-lasting because prejudice, discrimination, and racism were still practiced, thereby separating minority groups from the majority.  

The best quotations tend to be those that give one a better understanding of the relevant text. In the case of American History by Judith Ortiz Cofer, there are a number of such quotations, all of which are particularly good at conveying the narrator's emotions as well as giving us an insight into the environment in which she lives. A particularly good example of the latter can be seen in the following extract:

But the day President Kennedy was shot there was a profound silence in El Building; even the abusive tongues of viragoes, the cursing of the unemployed, and the screeching of small children had been somehow muted.