Judith Ortiz Cofer

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Judith Ortiz Cofer American Literature Analysis

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Judith Ortiz Cofer’s writing is precisely right for its time. Latino American consciousness in the United States, already raised by such writers as Jesús Colón, Nicholasa Mohr, Rolando Hinojosa, Pedro Pietri, Piri Thomas, Tomás Rivera, and others, has been elevated to a new plane in Ortiz Cofer’s work.

Her own life provided Ortiz Cofer with the built-in conflict between two cultures that her writing successfully depicts. She has managed to place the two major elements of this conflict into the kind of symmetrical juxtaposition that permits her work to bristle with dramatic tension.

Her novel The Line of the Sun is equally divided between the stories of her family in southwestern Puerto Rico and in Paterson, New Jersey; the first half of the book is set in Puerto Rico, the second half on the U.S. mainland. In Silent Dancing, Ortiz Cofer achieves an even greater contrast by intermixing stories of her island home with stories of her mainland home. Each story in this book has elements of both worlds in it.

The contrasts Ortiz Cofer builds are sharp and apparent. Puerto Rico is warm, both thermally and in terms of its people, whereas Paterson, New Jersey, is cold in the same terms. The autobiographical character in Silent Dancing is ever aware of Paterson’s grayness, of its long, drab winters; the father is aware of Paterson’s coldness to foreigners. To shield his family from this coldness and to avoid open hostility, he demands that his family members keep to themselves, realizing the near hysteria that the influx of Puerto Ricans into a formerly middle-class Jewish neighborhood has generated among the Anglos who remain.

The father, able to pass for an Anglo, contrasts strikingly to his wife and children, who are clearly Latino and cannot pass. The father has been assimilated; the mother never will be. Each has different aspirations for the children. The father hopes they will gracefully, inconspicuously become typical Americans; the mother that they will preserve and reflect their Puerto Rican heritage.

The basic tensions in Ortiz Cofer’s work are heightened both by the obvious contrasts between two cultures and by the contrasts between the perceptions of children and adults. Ortiz Cofer handles these perceptions with disciplined consistency, revealing what she needs to reveal, never allowing a child to have adult perceptions or an adult to have those of a child. She draws her lines clearly as she shapes her characters; she resolutely keeps them from intruding upon one another’s turf.

Ortiz Cofer acknowledges her great admiration of Virginia Woolf, who dealt with problems of personal isolation and alienation similar to those found in much of Ortiz Cofer’s work. Ortiz Cofer, fortunately, had Puerto Rico to fall back on when her isolation and alienation threatened her equanimity; Woolf was less fortunate.

Ortiz Cofer possesses the same sort of eye for physical detail that characterizes Woolf’s writing. She presents her stories with an unencumbered sharpness of focus reminiscent of Woolf’s best descriptive passages, yet with the sort of delicacy and decorum that Woolf attained in her most successful novels.

Ortiz Cofer’s poetry deals with the same dualities found in her short stories and in her play Latin Women Pray. The conflict that most engages her attention cannot be viewed only as Puerto Rican culture versus mainstream American culture. In a sense, this surface conflict provides the pretext Ortiz Cofer requires to frame her deeply felt, sweeping questions about humankind.

Much of Ortiz Cofer’s poetry is written in irregular lines of varied metrical schemes and lengths. Despite, or perhaps because of, this irregularity, Ortiz Cofer’s verse achieves a relaxed...

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rhythm that suggests easy, free-flowing conversation.

Her poetic lines are wholly appropriate to the atmosphere she seeks to build. Ortiz Cofer’s ear for language is as good as her eye for detail, and the two combine happily in most of her poetry. Typical of the easy meter she achieves is a bitter yet matter-of-fact poem, “The Woman Who Was Left at the Altar.” The spurned, now fleshy woman makes her unused wedding gown into curtains for her room and makes doilies from her wedding veil. She roves the streets, chickens dangling from her waist; in her mind, their yellow eyes mirror the face of the man who shunned her. She takes satisfaction in killing the chickens she sells, because in that act, she is killing him, annihilating troubled memories that haunt her.

This narrative poem, gaining much power from what is left unsaid, achieves its major metrical impact by moving at its exact center from two anapestic feet to trochaic and iambic feet, all in one line; the next line is iambic dimeter:

Since her old mother died, buried in black,she lives alone.

Ortiz Cofer continues in the next lines with two dactylic feet, followed in the same line by two trochaic feet, and continuing to two lines equally varied metrically:

Out of the lace she made curtains for her room,doilies out of the veil. They are nowyellow as malaria.

These metrical irregularities are a fundamental part of Ortiz Cofer’s narrative poetic style. Her poems never seem strained or unnatural, despite their somewhat bewildering metrical scheme.

In her prose writing, as in her poetry, moreover, Ortiz Cofer is ever aware that words, whether written or spoken, have sound. She has an inherent sense of the cadences of human speech, capturing those cadences with extraordinary verisimilitude.

The Line of the Sun

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novel

Marisol Vivente struggles between loyalty to her native Puerto Rico and loyalty to the United States.

Marisol San Luz Vivente, the protagonist in The Line of the Sun, Ortiz Cofer’s first novel, is an autobiographical character. Like Ortiz Cofer, Marisol was born in southwestern Puerto Rico but, from an early age, spent much of her life in Paterson, New Jersey. The novel encompasses three decades, beginning in the late 1930’s and ending in the 1960’s, and traces the impact these decades have on three generations of a family.

Marisol’s father, Rafael, works near New York City and lives with his wife and children. Marisol, through stories she hears from her mother, has enough direct and immediate contact with her heritage that she feels strongly impelled to cling to it—as her mother, who wants her to retain the values and culture of her forbears, thinks she should.

Her Puerto Rican father, having struggled successfully to become assimilated, wants Marisol and her brother to adopt the manners and customs of the United States so that they can blend in inconspicuously, thereby improving their economic opportunities. Marisol, at a highly impressionable age, has to deal with an inner conflict between her two cultures and, in doing so, has to consider the impact that the resolution of her dilemma will have on her relationship with her parents and on her future.

Into this situation, Ortiz Cofer, writing vividly and poetically about the family, introduces Uncle Guzman, a relative about whom the parents have talked quite darkly. During the Korean War, Guzman’s brother, Carmelo, was killed in combat. At about the same time, Guzman, fifteen and the wilder of the two brothers, was involved in a scandal in his native Salud, where he lived with a prostitute known as La Cabra. He fled his island for New York, going there as a migrant farmworker. Years later, he appears on the Viventes’ doorstep in Paterson one Christmas Eve and stays with his relatives for several months. During part of this time, he is confined to bed after he is attacked by a neighborhood thug.

The introduction of Guzman, her father’s best friend during adolescence, is necessary to the resolution of Marisol’s conflict. She had known this uncle largely through reputation; the family talked about him in hushed tones. Guzman, quite unwittingly, enables Marisol to see in sharp focus the two major forces in her life and to balance them. He also finds peace by returning to Puerto Rico, where he marries La Cabra’s daughter, Sarita, a saintly woman who takes satisfaction in redeeming Guzman.

Marisol’s conclusion is that although she always carries her island heritage on her back like a snail, she belongs in the world of telephones, offices, concrete buildings, and the English language. This is essentially the decision Ortiz Cofer reached for herself during her own adolescence.

Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood

First published: 1990

Type of work: Autobiography

This personal narrative of growing up includes autobiographical tales set in Puerto Rico and New Jersey, with relevant poetry following each tale.

Early in Silent Dancing, which in 1991 won the PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonfiction and was included in New York Public Library’s 1991 Best Books for Teens, Ortiz Cofer warns her readers that she is not interested in “canning” memories. Rather, like Woolf in Moments of Being(1976), she writes autobiographically to connect with “the threads of lives that have touched mine and at some point converged into the tapestry that is my memory of childhood.”

Silent Dancing is not an autobiography as such; it does not progress linearly from the moment of birth to the day before the final revision is done. It is instead a collection of thirteen stories and a preface, with eighteen poems scattered amid the stories. The book’s elements are interconnected but are also discrete. The sequence in which they are read need not be Ortiz Cofer’s sequence, although she obviously spent considerable thought on arranging the book’s disparate components as she moved toward publication.

“Casa,” the lead story, explains elements of the book’s genesis. The family has gathered, as it does every day between three and four in the afternoon, for café con leche with Mama, the term everyone uses in referring to Ortiz Cofer’s grandmother. In the comfortable parlor that Mama’s husband built to her exact specifications, drinking coffee together provides the adults with the pretext for spinning yarns, ostensibly for one another but covertly for the edification of the children present.

Young Judith was an attentive listener; Ortiz Cofer suggests that her desire to write stems from these sessions in her grandmother’s inviting house in Puerto Rico. This story, like much of Ortiz Cofer’s writing, is exact in detail, warm and tactile in depicting human relationships. Mama is voluble, but as she talks, her hands work steadily on braiding her granddaughter’s hair.

In sharp contrast to “Casa” and stories such as “Primary Lessons” or “Marina,” set in rural Puerto Rico, are the stories about the author’s life in a dark, crowded apartment in Paterson. There, rather than being outdoors in a gentle climate, the children spend their winters huddled in a cramped living room around a television set. Despite its grayness, the New Jersey part of Ortiz Cofer’s existence has its compensations in both comforts and educational opportunities.

The conflict between two cultures often at odds provides the basic conflict for Silent Dancing. Ortiz Cofer personalizes the conflict, yet she lends it a universality that exceeds the two specific cultures about which she writes.

The Latin Deli

First published: 1993

Type of work: Prose and poetry

Throughout this volume that intermixes poetry and prose, Ortiz Cofer deals with personal problems faced by Latino women.

Readers of Silent Dancing and The Line of the Sun will encounter in The Latin Deli many of the personalities and situations familiar from Ortiz Cofer’s two earlier books. The delicatessen of the title is a bodega in Paterson where residents of El Building shop for such Puerto Rican comestibles as plantains and Bustelo coffee.

Most of the stories and poems in The Latin Deli are told from the perspective of a young girl torn between two worlds. The father, English-speaking and light-complected, is a working-class man who constrains a daughter in whom sexual desire is awakening. The mother is temporarily resident in El Building, ever longing for Puerto Rico and refusing to learn English.

El Building is a vertical barrio, an attempt to preserve in Paterson some sense of the community its inhabitants have traded for the economic opportunities the mainland offers. The girl in most of Ortiz Cofer’s stories speaks English well, yet she endures discrimination directed against Puerto Ricans.

In “American History,” the narrator, bright and more fluent in English than Spanish, is barred from classes for the gifted because English is not her native language. She develops a crush on Eugene, a boy from Georgia who is taking classes for the gifted. On the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, she accepts Eugene’s invitation to go to his house to study with him; Eugene’s mother, however, asks her whether she comes from El Building, which is next door. When the narrator admits that she does, the mother bars her entry.

In “The Paterson Public Library,” Ortiz Cofer deals sensitively with a complex social problem: the tensions between black people and Puerto Ricans. She explains that when Puerto Ricans fill jobs or move into vacant apartments, black people often feel that those are jobs they might have gotten or apartments they might have occupied.

The narrator is terrorized by a black girl, Lorraine, whom she is forced to tutor at school. Even though Lorraine beats her up, the narrator understands the frustrations that motivate Lorraine’s violence. The narrator, who resents being treated like a mental deficient because her accent is different, understands how Lorraine’s brand of English also causes her to be misjudged by racist teachers.

In “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria,” Ortiz Cofer focuses on what intelligent, well-educated women who are judged by ethnic stereotypes must endure. This piece, more sorrowful than bitter, speaks to members of any minority group.

The forty poems and fifteen stories in The Latin Deli are sensitive and searching. They demonstrate the depth of an author who has spent her adult life exploring the impact of her early years poised between two cultures.

Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer

First published: 2000

Type of work: Essays and poetry

In a combination of essays and poems, Ortiz Cofer offers her views of how one becomes a writer.

In this potpourri of essays and poetry, Ortiz Cofer reveals what it means to be a writer. It is obvious from her exquisite use of language that she is intoxicated with the wonder of words and with their emotive potential. She is also intrigued by the role memory plays in writing. Writers drift mentally through the full accumulation of experience and pluck from it the elements from which they construct stories.

For Ortiz Cofer, this revisiting of memory involved two distinct cultures, three or more generations, and the equilibrium that she was forced to reach as she moved from her childhood in Puerto Rico to her childhood in Paterson, New Jersey. Hers was not a single adjustment. She and her family left Paterson and returned to Puerto Rico whenever her father was at sea for an extended period, then returned when he returned.

Ortiz Cofer also delves into her later life when, married to an Anglo and raising a daughter, she went to school in quest of two degrees and held various jobs—all of this while she continued to write. For Ortiz Cofer, the excuse “I cannot find time to write” does not hold up. Writers always find time to write because they have something that desperately needs saying; not to say it is the greatest hardship any writer can endure.

Born into a family that loved telling cuentos (stories), Ortiz Cofer began at an early age to construct her own realities through the magic of words. Her story “The Woman Who Slept with One Eye Open,” which resulted in her collaboration with Marilyn Kallet titled Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (1999), reveals the measures that a would-be writer must take to avoid being sidetracked by other responsibilities. In essence, what she talks about in many of the essays in this book is time management, a concept drawn more from the vocabularies of efficiency experts than from the vocabularies of writing instructors.

Both by her advice and by her example, Ortiz Cofer emphasizes the importance of listening, of absorbing not only what people say but also how they say it, and of paying close attention to the small details that create believable worlds for readers. Her own cadences are those of natural speech. She adjusts them from character to character so that much of her characterization evolves from how people say what they say. She also builds atmospheres alive with details that shape them into credible realities.

In this book, as in several of her other publications, the author intermixes genres, using in this case both essays and poems. By doing this, she creates a microcosm that communicates the basic nature of what writing means to her. She does not chalk off some areas as prose, some as poetry. She combines them because she sees genres both as separate entities and as parts of a larger, all-important entity.

The Meaning of Consuelo

First published: 2003

Type of work: Novel

This young adult novel focuses on the growing up of its protagonist and of the social changes that mark her native Puerto Rico in the last half of the twentieth century.

Ortiz Cofer ventured into writing books for young people in the early twenty-first century, notably Riding Low on the Streets of Gold in 2003 and Call Me Maria in 2004. The Meaning of Consuelo is directed toward a similar audience. This is the story of a young Puerto Rican woman whose name means “consolation.” The story is not only an account of the gradual growth and maturing of Consuelo but also of the growth and changes that take place in the world around her.

Consuelo is the more stable of two sisters. The other, Mili, short for Milagros, which means “miracle,” is called “Mill” in the story. She is often frivolous and light-hearted but is intermittently disrupted by her emotional problems that stem from schizophrenia. Unlike Mill, Consuelo tends to have a brooding personality, one in keeping with her feeling that she must be responsible and dependable.

The father of the family, who is fascinated by modern mechanical devices and loves anything American, is a maintenance engineer in a San Juan hotel. His humor substantially lightens the more serious elements in the story. He encourages his daughters to be modern, more like Americans, while his wife takes an opposite stand, urging her daughters to value their culture and observe the mores of the strictly structured older society gradually disappearing from modern Puerto Rico.

Ortiz Cofer raises many controversial questions in this novel, but she does so with taste and decorum. She feels the necessity to air for young people such matters as premarital sex and homosexuality, both of which she treats well in The Meaning of Consuelo. Although this emphasis might result in the book’s being banned from libraries in some conservative venues, it deals forthrightly with questions that are much on the minds of her target audience.

Consuelo finds her own consolation in an understanding cousin, Patricio, who eventually leaves Puerto Rico for the freer atmosphere of New York City. Patricio, ever understanding and supportive of Consuelo, is a homosexual. He represents the new generation, but Consuelo thinks back to the 1950’s when a transvestite lived in her neighborhood. He is tolerated, but barely so. He must come to their house through the back door to give Consuelo’s mother a manicure, but the sisters are cautioned to treat him like a fulano (stranger) when they encounter him in public.

Consuelo is quietly rebellious. She thinks her own thoughts but seldom shares them. She has sex with a boy who then brags to his friends of his conquest. Consuelo, rather than dissolving in tears or withdrawing from society, has the self-confidence to declare that she is not like her mother, who had to seek permission from her relatives before she made any important decisions. Patricio has helped Consuelo reach this point, as has her classmate Lucila, a product of San Juan’s slums who wholly rejects the strict social order by which Consuelo’s mother and much of her family have always lived.

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Judith Ortiz Cofer Poetry: American Poets Analysis

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