she gets off the plane, Rita's first reaction is to the heat, which she finds stifling and oppressive. In her typically hyperbolic words, "When I stepped off that airplane in San Juan, it was like I had opened an oven door. I was immediately drenched in sweat, and felt like I was breathing water." The ladies at the airport fan their shiny faces and argue over who carries her luggage, and Rita is mortified. The hot, humid climate operates as a metaphor for Puerto Rico in general: people are too hot, too dramatic, and too loud for Rita's taste. She alludes repeatedly to the fact that everyone in Puerto Rico drinks hotcafe con leche, a combination she finds too warm and rich for the heat of the island, and an apt metaphor for her reaction to all things Puerto Rican. The closeness of the weather is akin to the closeness of people on the island, an intimacy that Rita hates when she first arrives. Puerto Ricans are much more comfortable with intimate contact than Rita is; she mentions several times that Mamá Ana sits "real close to me." According to Rita, her parents would never dream of barging into her room the way her grandmother does to wake her in the morning, and she is compelled to discuss her need for privacy with her grandfather when she wakes to find he has opened her window during her nap. She describes her past attempt to call a friend on the mainland, when her conversation was scrutinized and translated by the people around her. Her mother's explanation is that "people on the Island did not see as much need for privacy as people who lived on the mainland."

Rita's grandmother and her neighbors watch telenovelas with unbarred enthusiasm, and participate in the drama as if they were their own communities. After watching one such soap opera with Mamá Ana, Rita speculates about her grandparents' relationship to reality. She reports authoritatively, "Neither one of the old guys could tell the difference between fantasy and reality—Papá with his dream-reading and Mamá with her telenovelas." When she learns of her grandfather's gifts as a spiritualist, she mockingly calls her grandparents a Ghostbuster duo. At one point, when the three of them visit Angela and her mother, her grandfather goes into a trance to meditate on the situation, and Mamá Ana behaves as if nothing is out of the ordinary. Rita takes this as evidence of their craziness, but neglects to consider the way cultural assumptions color her own behavior. For example, she likens her grandparents' spiritist work to television shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, and to rumors she has heard about Haitian voodoo priests in her neighborhood. These cultural references reflect the mass of information she considers normal or native to the U.S. mainland, and comprise her own set of cultural assumptions. Rita is so absorbed in her own, very American view of the world that she cannot help but judge her grandparents' assumption that the spiritual or mystical is a part of everyday life. When she hyperbolically suggests that she would probably go home as one of the walking dead, Rita shows herself to be as dramatic as the grandparents she mocks.

The day Rita spends at the beach outside Angela's house marks the beginning of her transformation in attitude toward her grandparents, as well as the beginning of transformation in Angela's life. Mamá Ana presses Rita to invite Angela to picnic on the beach with them and ends up inviting her to Rita's fifteenth birthday party. In facilitating the connection between the girls, Rita's grandparents succeed in both drawing Angela out of her chilled home and forming a connection for Rita. This connection serves as a bridge for Rita into the world of Puerto Rico. Like Rita and many other Puerto Ricans of their generation, Angela is a person who navigates both island and mainland cultures, since her father lives in New York. In each other's company the girls can speak English and discuss the issues in their lives too private to share with adults. This forum for self-evaluation helps Rita grow out of her infatuation with Johnny Ruiz and see the humor in the situation, as she and Angela speculate that Johnny may be under the spell of a mala influencia himself. This kind of peer contact offers Rita the opportunity to honor the part of herself that belongs to the U.S. mainland, while she is immersed in the Puerto Rican.

By the end of the story, Rita characterizes her experience by reporting "I'd had one of the best summers of my life with Angela, and I was even really getting to know my grandparents—the Ghostbusting magnificent duo." Her time on the island has provided her with a new friend and helped her build a bridge between herself and her grandparents, marked by her use of the word magnificent. At her birthday party she notices the way her grandfather makes his way around, "looking at each guest with his kind brown eyes," as if he really does see into their hearts. Over the course of the summer she learns from him how to do the same, to observe how people really feel, and eventually she considers herself a medium in her own right. Rita's assessment of her grandmother is transformed as well; about the woman she previously characterizes as overly gregarious, dramatic, and smothering she says, "She had this talent for turning every day into a sort of party." The time they spend together, shopping for Rita's party dress or cooking crab at the beach, helps bridge the gap in their relationship and their cultures. In a sense they heal the chilliness that Rita brought with her to the island, and this maternal healing extends to Rita's mother as well. When Rita and her grandparents pick up the family from the airport at the end of summer, Rita at first holds back from her mother, deliberately making her suffer for the summer punishment, but then holds her hand in the car, their differences behind them. Thus the healing between Angela and her mother is mirrored in Rita and her mother, thanks to the warm attention of Rita's grandparents.

"Bad Influence" closes with Rita speculating on how she and her friend can get together and meet boys in the fall. Although her summer has helped her bridge the gap between the Puerto Rican and the American in herself, she has by no means lost the part of herself that identifies with Paterson, New Jersey. Rita is every bit the teenager she was when she arrived: caustic, authoritative, and opinionated. Having acclimated to life on the island and come to know her grandparents, Rita is a better integrated version of herself; more at ease in both worlds, she has forged her own identity.

Source: Jennifer Lynch, in an essay for Literature of Developing Nations for Students, Gale, 2000. Lynch is a freelance writer in northern New Mexico.

In Ortiz Cofer's short story "Bad Influence" the narrator and main character, Rita, is sent from her home in New Jersey to spend the summer with her relatives in Puerto Rico. Rita, who is almost fifteen, and her best friend had been caught attempting to sleep overnight with their boyfriends. Although nothing "happened" between the two girls and their boyfriends that night, their parents still believe the boys to be a "bad influence" on them. In order to keep her away from her boyfriend, Rita's parents give her the choice of spending her summer in a convent or in Puerto Rico. Choosing what she feels to be the lesser of two evils, Rita opts for "arroz y habichuelas with the old people in the countryside of my parents' Island." Once in Puerto Rico, Rita experiences various forms of culture shock—meaning that she has trouble adjusting to the habits, customs, and living conditions of a culture which is mostly foreign to her. Although she had spent many summer vacations there in the past with her parents, she had always been surrounded by cousins and preoccupied with playing on the beach. Now, for the first time, she is left to confront this foreign culture by herself. As narrator of the story, Rita uses humor as a means of dealing with her culture shock. In addition, she tries to make sense of things which are foreign to her by relating them back to more familiar elements of popular American culture.

One of the immediate elements of Puerto Rico which Rita must adjust to is the heat. Rita uses exaggeration, figurative language, and humor in order to describe the heat of the Island and its effect on her. As soon as she steps off the airplane in San Juan, the heat strikes her "like I had opened an oven door." Riding in the car from the airport in what she emphasizes is an "un-air-conditioned" car, Rita somewhat humorously attempts to deal with the heat by "practicing Zen." She explains that, "I had been reading about it in a magazine on the airplane, about how to lower your blood pressure by concentrating on your breathing, so I decided to give it a try." This, however, leads to a humorous misunderstanding between Rita and her relatives which she allows them to maintain throughout her visit. Hearing her attempt at Zen-like breathing, her relatives assume that she must have asthma. At her grandparents house, Rita refers to the extreme heat once again; she mentions with a degree of irony that, "Of course, there was no AC"—air conditioning. Again resorting to exaggeration and humor as a means of dealing with her discomfort in the heat, Rita goes to her room, puts a pillow over her head, and "decided to commit suicide by sweating to death."

Rita is additionally disconcerted by the lack of technological devices generally taken for granted in the United States. Because her grandparents do not own a telephone, Rita states ironically that "AT[and]T had not yet sold my grandparents on the concept of high-tech communications."

Another element of life on the island which Rita finds difficult to adjust to is the lack of "privacy." She adopts an ironic tone in describing the crowd of relatives who have come to pick her up at the airport as "my welcoming committee"—a phrase which usually refers to the greeting of an important person on some official occasion. When she decides to call her mother, Rita must use the phone at a neighbor's house, with "a nice fat woman who watched you while you talked." It is in fact impossible for Rita to have a private telephone conversation while on the Island; she explains that, when she had tried to make a phone call the previous summer at the same neighbor's house, "There had been a conversation going on in the same room where I was using the phone, a running commentary on what I was saying in English as understood by her granddaughter. They had both thought that eavesdropping on me was a good way to practice their English." Rita's mother had explained this to her as a cultural difference, as "people on the Island did not see as much need for privacy as people who lived on the mainland." Not only do they not seem to need privacy, but, as Rita's mother had explained, "Keeping secrets among friends is considered offensive." One morning Rita's grandparents come into her room without warning, and Rita observes, "It had been years since my own parents had dared to barge into my bedroom."

Along with the lack of privacy, the level of noise which surrounds Rita among her relatives in Puerto Rico is also difficult for her to adjust to. When her grandmother turns on the TV to watch her telenovela, or soap opera, Rita describes the theme music for the show as "violins wailing like cats mating." Her family members in Puerto Rico seem to have a tendency to play the TV and the radio at higher levels than what Rita is used to in the States. She sarcastically mentions that "I had always suspected that all my Puerto Rican relatives were a little bit deaf." After Rita is told that she and her grandparents must wake up early one morning, she explains, "'Getting up with the chickens' meant that both my grandparents were up and talking at the top of their lungs by about four in the morning." Rita again uses exaggeration in noting that the muffler of her grandparents' car "must have woken up half the island." Rita's use of sarcasm in dealing with the unaccustomed noise of her family life in Puerto Rico is summed up by her rhetorical question, "Why doesn't anyone ever mention noise pollution around here?"

As is the experience of most people in a foreign culture, Rita finds some of the food and methods of food preparation among her relatives on the island to be unpleasant and even disturbing to her. Rita expresses her dislike of the "cafe con leche'' which is imposed upon her during her visit in a tone of exasperated irony. Rita describes the drink, which she hates, as "like ultra-sweet milk with a little coffee added for color or something." She goes on to note, "Nobody here asks you if you want cream or sugar in your coffee: the coffee is 99 percent cream and sugar. Take it or leave it."

Strangest of all for Rita are her grandparents' ideas about spirituality, which she interprets as an inability to distinguish between "reality" and "fantasy." Rita tries to make sense of some of the customs of Puerto Rico which seem most bizarre to her by referring to elements of popular American culture, such as movies and TV shows. For example, her grandfather explains to her that his pet rooster, Ramon, likes to sing "when the spirit moves him," and Rita thinks, "I could not believe what I was hearing. It was like I was in a Star Trek rerun where reality is being controlled by an alien, and you don't know why weird things are happening all around you until the end of the show." When her grandmother discusses the characters on her telenovelas as if they were real people, Rita thinks, "It was really going to be The Twilight Zone around here. Neither one of the old guys could tell the difference between fantasy and reality—Papá with his dream-reading and Mamá with her telenovelas." Their perceptions and beliefs seem so strange to her that she describes herself as "spending three months with two batty old people and one demented rooster."

Rita's grandparents begin to seem even more bizarre to her when they explain that Papá Juan, her grandfather, is "a medium, a spiritualist," who has been called to "exorcise demons" from someone's home. This concept is so foreign, unbelievable, and downright disturbing to Rita that she can only make sense of it in terms of the little she has heard in the States about "voodoo priests."

"Does he sacrifice chickens and goats?" I had heard about these voodoo priests who went into trances and poured blood and feathers all over everybody in secret ceremonies. There was a black man from Haiti in our neighborhood who people said could even call back the dead and make them his zombie slaves ... What had my own mother sent me into? I would probably be sent back to Paterson as one of the walking dead.

Her grandparents' spiritual beliefs seem so foreign and incomprehensible to Rita that she thinks, "I really should have been given an instruction manual before being sent here on my own." Rita's sense of humor about her grandparents' beliefs, however, comes through when she describes their preparations for the spiritual healing in terms which refer to an extremely frivolous element of popular American culture—she refers to her grandfather's holy water and other religious paraphernalia as "Ghostbuster equipment," evoking the Hollywood Ghostbusters movie series. As they wait on the beach for her grandfather's visit to the woman and her daughter who have called him in as a spiritual healer, Rita continues to think of these beliefs in terms which are disdainful. She thinks of her grandfather as "the local medicine man," and his spiritual practice as "mumbo-jumbo." Rita again mentions an element of popular American culture—a movie from the 1970s—in describing how she imagines the sick girl in the house where Papá Juan has gone to clean out the evil spirits; Rita thinks of her as "the girl from The Exorcist."

Once Rita has actually met the sick girl, Angela, they immediately befriend one another, and Rita's visit to the Island takes a turn for the better. Rita is able to bond with Angela when she learns that Angela does not take Papá Juan's spiritual cleansing practices any more seriously than Rita did. By the end of the story, however, Rita becomes more open to her grandfather's spiritual beliefs. She describes herself as "taking medium lessons" from her grandparents, whom she now refers to in more positive, although still sarcastic, terms as "the Ghostbusting magnificent duo." Through her grandfather's role as a medium or spiritualist, Rita has learned to be more sensitive to the feelings and needs of other people.

Rita's experience of culture shock in visiting her grandparents becomes an unexpected opportunity for changing her perspective on her own life. Rita ends her narration on an upbeat note, which both acknowledges the "good influence" of her grandparents and maintains her characteristic sense of irony, when she claims that she has become "a mind reader myself."

Source: Liz Brent, in an essay for Literature of Developing Nations for Students, Gale, 2000.

In her short story "Bad Influence," Judith Ortiz Cofer uses spirituality to help define the family relationship. The young granddaughter is initially unprepared for life in Puerto Rico. She sees herself as a modern, American teenager and her Puerto Rican relatives as antiquated relics of another time and place. Ultimately, it is the grandfather's spirituality that gives direction to Rita's life, first by introducing her to the spirituality of the island, and second by reinforcing a set of morals and expectations by which the people live. Both of these ideas are incorporated into the island heritage that the grandparents pass on to their granddaughter. By the end of her summer, Rita has a new appreciation for her family and her heritage, and she has grown into a more responsible and responsive teenager who accepts and understands the importance of the island's legacy.

In using spirituality, Ortiz Cofer is employing an element of Latin American literature which is often defined by its reliance on magical realism or, in this case, symbolic spirituality. Much of the time, this means that the writer blends together naturalism and supernaturalism seamlessly. Often the literature of Latin America incorporates folktales and legends into the text, making the legends appear a natural part of the author's work. This is the case with Ortiz Cofer's work, which incorporates the grandfather's spirituality and the island's traditional reliance upon such people into Rita's coming-of-age story. Magical realism erases the borders between the characters' reality, the explicable and the inexplicable, and the natural world and the magical world.

Traditional Western literature relies upon literary realism, as it has for more than one hundred years. This traditional realism is what Rita is accustomed to prior to her visit to Puerto Rico. In her American world, healing is given over to conventional medicine and doctors. As is the case with traditional literary realism, which attempts to create a story and characters that are plausible, Rita's New Jersey life is explained as representative of an American teenager's life. In New Jersey, she is a rebellious teenager, easily identifiable to Ortiz Cofer's readers. In contrast, Latin American literature attempts to portray the unusual, the spiritual, and the mystical as ordinary facets of the character's lives, as with the grandfather's journey to heal the evil that permeates Angela's life. For the reader, magical realism requires an acceptance of the coexistence of the real and the imaginary. The author posits these magical events as authentic, with the supernatural events being interwoven seamlessly into the narration. For Ortiz Cofer, this means that the grandfather's spirituality and healing are interwoven into the story as essentially ordinary parts of the island's life. There is nothing exceptional about what he does for his neighbors; the reader accepts this because the author accepts it.

For the people of Puerto Rico, magical realism is an ordinary, accepted, and unquestioned part of their lives. In a 1994 interview with Rafael Ocasio, Ortiz Cofer remarked, "When I write about espiritismo [the spiritual healing that Rita's grandfather practices], I am writing about an ordinary, everyday thing that most Puerto Ricans live with." Ortiz Cofer revealed that her own grandfather, who was an espiritismo, saw nothing extraordinary or magical about what he did. In this interview, Ortiz Cofer pointed out that when she uses this spiritual tradition in her writing, "there is nothing there that cannot be explained through natural law." For instance, Rita's grandfather seeks to modify his subject's behavior through common sense, rather than cast any spells that change their lives. He employs special teas and prayers, but he also convinces the mother that she must banish her evil boyfriend. As a result, the grandfather's reputation as an espiritismo, and the weight afforded his reputation, actually create the healing. In her text, Ortiz Cofer blends the spiritual with morality. Angela is cured, not only because Rita's grandfather appears to work his magic, but also because the cause of her misery is banished. The spiritual teas may also have a role—it is never clear that they do not—and yet, Angela is also healed because her mother banishes her abusive boyfriend. The two influences—the grandfather's spirituality and the mother's actions—work together to resolve the problem. In a sense, spirituality and the appearance of magic give people control. Angela gets her health and life back again because her mother assumes control over her actions. But she is only able to act when the grandfather offers an impetus to do so. The healer's teas and prayers provide that impetus. Consequently, Rita learns to appreciate what her grandfather does when he sets out to heal someone.

Ortiz Cofer does see a difference in how she uses magical realism that makes her use of this rhetorical tradition different from that of other Latin American writers. She told Ocasio that the espiritismo are magical "only in that they provide this necessary service and they are connected to the realm of the supernatural." She added that she does not ask her readers to suspend belief in the same way that many Latin American magical realists do. But her distinction is very slight, since the defining element of magical realism is that the reader simply accepts these events as an ordinary part of the character's lives. However, the spirituality found in "Bad Influence" can easily be explained by other means, such as religious or social influences that shape the character's behavior, and so the presence of the espiritismo has less importance than it would in a work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a leading practitioner of magical realism.

The use of the espiritismo is Ortiz Cofer's attempt to live her heritage and to keep it alive for her readers. She told Ocasio that although she lives in Georgia, she has not "stopped relating to the Puerto Rican experience." This is her heritage and it is the heritage that the author also provides for her protagonist, Rita. In the United States, family and friends might intervene to deal with the abusive boyfriend who causes Angela's anorexia. But in Puerto Rico, Angela tells Rita that "it took someone with special powers to drive out the bad influence in my house." The healing of Angela's illness could not have occurred without the espiritismo, who orchestrated the evil boyfriend's removal. Was it magic? Probably not, but it was magical in its efficiency. In her summer in Puerto Rico, much of Rita's growth derives from her understanding and acceptance of her grandparents' traditions. In accepting these traditions, and most importantly the tradition of the espiritismo, Rita grows into her family's heritage. She leaves behind the New Jersey teenager and recognizes that she is a product of both American and Puerto Rican influences.

Oftentimes, in Latin American literature, magical realism exists in a woman's sphere, as it does in Isabel Allende's novels, but in "Bad Influence," Ortiz Cofer uses magical realism to provide an intergenerational link, rather than a connection between mothers and daughters. Where Allende uses storytelling and magic as interwoven representations of women's lives, Ortiz Cofer uses these two traditions to connect Rita to her Puerto Rican birthright. In "Bad Influence," storytelling and magic are not the exclusive property of women, since Rita's grandfather also possesses this gift. At the story's conclusion, Rita reveals she that has been getting to know her grandparents, and she says, "I had been taking medium lessons from them lately, and had learned a few tricks, like how to look really closely at people and see whether something was bothering them." There is no magic in listening to and paying attention to those with whom Rita comes in contact. But what is new is that she is reaching beyond her own self-absorbed teenage life to appreciate that she needs to show consideration for others, that empathy and compassion are important elements of everyone's life. These are values that her grandparents, and especially her grandfather's espiritismo, have taught her. In this way, the traditions of her parents and grandparents are passed down from one generation to the next. This is what Ortiz Cofer suggests is her intention—to keep Puerto Rico alive in her life and to teach its traditions to her readers.

In an earlier interview with Rafael Ocasio, Ortiz Cofer emphasized how important the traditions of Puerto Rico were in her life, and how profoundly those traditions have influenced her writing. In both 1990 and 1992, Ortiz Cofer said that she could not separate her background from her writing and that "the oral traditions of my grandmother's house, the folktales, family stories, gossip or myths often repeated to teach a lesson or make a point educated me and became intrinsic in my writing." It is clear that the stories that Rita's grandparents tell her, the gossip and the myths that permeate their lives, and the folktales that define the role of the espiritismo have an important influence on Rita's life—just as they did on Ortiz Cofer's life. Rita learns important lessons about truthfulness, assuming responsibility, and an understanding of the significance of family. By the end of this short story, the young protagonist emerges on the cusp on adulthood. It is her heritage that gives her the means to accomplish this growth.

Source: Sheri E. Metzger, in an essay for Literature of Developing Nations for Students, Gale, 2000. Metzger is a Ph.D. specializing in literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the English department and an adjunct professor in the University Honors Program.