60 * Judith Ortiz Cofer

BIOGRAPHY

Ortiz Cofer is one of a number of Latina

writers who rose to prominence during the
1980s and 1990s. Her stories about
coming-of-age experiences in Puerto Rican
communities outside of New York City and
her poems and essays about cultural conflicts
of immigrants to the U.S. mainland have
made Ortiz Cofer a leading literary
interpreter of the U.S.Puerto Rican
experience.
Ortiz Cofer was born in 1952 in the small
town of Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, a
semiurban municipality in the western part
of the island. The author's parents came to
the United States in 1956 and settled in
Paterson, New Jersey. As the daughter of a frequently absent military father stationed at
Brooklyn's Navy Yard and an uprooted mother nostalgic for her beloved island, Ortiz Cofer spent
portions of her childhood commuting between Hormigueros and Paterson. Even though most of
her schooling was in Paterson, she lived for extended periods at her grandmother's house in
Puerto Rico and attended the local schools. This back-and-forth movement between her two
cultures became a vital part of her poetry and fiction. There is a strong island presence in her
narratives, and the authenticity with which she captures life on the island is as powerful as her
descriptions of the harsh realities of the Paterson community.
When she was fifteen years old, Ortiz Cofer moved with her family to Augusta, Georgia. She
attended college and received an undergraduate degree in English from Augusta College. A few
years later she moved to Florida and received an M.A. from Florida Atlantic University. In 1984
she joined the faculty of the University of Georgia in Athens, where she is now Regents and
Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing.

Casa: A Partial Remembrance of ci Puerto Rican Childhood * 61

The author's first literary expressions were in poetry. One of her early chapbooks, Peregrina
(1986), won the Riverstone International Chapbook Competition. Two years later her poetry
collection Terms of Survival (1987) was published, but it was not until the publication of her first
major work of prose fiction, The Line of the Sun (1989), a novel nominated for the Pulitzer Prize,
that the author began to receive more critical attention. The Line of the Sun was also the first of
Cofer's works to be published by the University of Georgia Press, with whom she collaborated on
several later publications. After this successful debut as a fiction writer, she continued to
demonstrate her abilities in storytelling through short stories and personal essays. However, she
also kept writing poetry, which she declares "contains the essence of language," and published
two more collections, Reaching for the Mainland (1995) and A Love Story Beginning in Spanish
(2005).
Ortiz Cofer claims to have inherited the art of storytelling from her abuelita ("grandmother"), a
fact suggested in the powerful attributes of the grandmother character who appears in The Line of
the Sun and many of her other narratives. "When my abuela sat us down to tell a story, we learned
something from it, even though we always laughed. That was her way of teaching. So early on I
instinctively knew storytelling was a form of empowerment, that the women in my family were
passing on power from one generation to another through fables and stories. They were teaching
each other to cope with life in a world where women led restricted lives." Ortiz Cofer's most
powerful characters are Puerto Rican women who try to break away from restrictive cultural and
social conventions or who develop survival strategies to deal with the sexism in their own culture.
Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) is a book of
memories described as "stellar stories patterned after oral tradition." The volume also includes
poems that highlight the narratives' major themes. Silent Dancing received the 1991 PEN/Martha
Albrand Special Citation in Nonfiction and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. It was followed by The
Latin Deli (1993), a combination of poetry, short fiction, and personal narrative. In these
collections, as in her subsequent volumes, An Island Like You (1995), The Year of Our Revolution
(1998), and Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer (2000), Ortiz Cofer continues to
recall and explore through different genres the memories of her formative years. Woman in Front
of the Sun, which won an award from the Georgia Writers Association, provides invaluable
insights into the inner world of the author, what motivates her writing, and where she places
herself in terms of the American mainstream and U.S. Latino literature. In her novel The Meaning
of Consuelo (2003) Ortiz Cofer explores language and communication: communication between
the title character and her schizophrenic sister, between men and women, English and Spanish.

62 * Judith Ortiz Cofer

Many of Ortiz Cofer's stories, poems, and personal essays describe the lives of Puerto Rican
youths, straddling the Puerto Rican culture of their parents and a mainland culture consumed by
its own prejudices, while asserting their own dignity and creative potential. An Island Like You
received the 1995 Reforma Pura Belpr Medal and was listed among the best books for young
adults by the American Library Association. Call Me Mara (2004) is a young adult novel
chronicling a teenage girl's move from Puerto Rico to New York City.
Due to a growing interest in her work in Puerto Rico and in other Spanish-speaking countries, the
University of Puerto Rico published La linea del sol (1996), a Spanish translation of her
acclaimed novel The Line of the Sun. The Fondo del Cultura Econmica in Mexico published Una
isla como t (1997), a translation of An Island Like You. The same year Arte Pblico Press
released Bailando en silencio: Escenas de una niez puertorriquea (1997), a translation of Silent
Dancing. Several of the author's stories are also available in other languages.

In September of 2009, she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall
of Fame.

PARTIAL INTERVIEW
Interviewer: When and why did you decide to become a writer?
Ortiz Cofer: I always knew that I needed a creative outlet. When I was a little girl I used to dream
about being a dancer or a musician. Our lives prevented that because we were never in one place
long enough for me to take lessons of any kind. But I always kept little journals, little notebooks.
I used to make up games for my brother and me where I would transform myself into different
characters. I would say that the writing has its roots there. However, I did not think of writing for
publication until after graduate school. The main reason for that was that I always thought my
main vocation was becoming a teacher. I was always preparing myself to be in a classroom. When
I was in graduate school I started writing poems and that did it. I did not dare show them to

Casa: A Partial Remembrance of ci Puerto Rican Childhood * 63

anybody because I thought they were so much more inferior than what I was reading in my
classes. Everything changed when I met Betty Owen, my first department chair, who was very
encouraging. We were having lunch and she asked me: "Why don't you write some of these
stories that you tell me? Why don't you write some poems?" I told her that actually I had written a
few poems and after much cajoling from her I finally showed them to her, and she told me that
with a few changes the poems could be mailed out for publication. I was totally astonished.
Among them was "Latin Women Pray," one of the first poems I wrote as sort of a joke to myself.
She told me to send it out and showed me potential publication sources. I did not know there were
so many journals out there publishing poetry. I sent it to the New Mexico Humanifies Review
because it seemed to me that they would be interested in something Hispanic and I was right.
They published it. That is how I got hooked. I would write poems, Betty would critique them,
and then I would send them out. That was in 1977 or '78. I had only published something in a
college journal before that. My official career as a writer began with this woman reassuring me
that my work was publishable. I had no sense of that before when I was just writing for myself.
Interviewer: Most Latino writers in the United States have gotten their first works published by
one of the small bilingual presses, such as Arte Publicio Press and the Billingual Review
Press,and that has been the case with your books Reaching for the Mainland, Terms of Survival,
and Silent Dancing. What are the reasons that led you to make that choice?
Ortiz Cofer: It was a number of things. When I started sending out my manuscripts, and you may
have noticed that I published most of my early poems in mainstream journals but when it came to
publishing a full- length book, I initially would send it to some of the bigger publishers and
university presses and all I got was this collection of beautiful rejection letters stating basically
that "we really like your work but it has so much Spanish in it and the material is so exotic that we
do not think that we have a public for it." At the beginning, it was hard to accept that they were
willing to publish my poems individually, but when it came to publishing a book that entailed a
larger investment of money, my work became too exotic.
Interviewer: In other words, the book was not considered commercial enough?

64 * Judith Ortiz Cofer

Ortiz Cofer: It was more than not commercial enough. I sent my manuscript to a university press and
the poetry editor replied that they had a small readership that was mostly not bilingual. I think that they
were afraid to take a risk. Publishing books that contained a lot of Spanish was not as prevalent as it is
now. Finally, I started going to Latino conferences. I remember a conference in Paris where I met
Nicolas Kanellos, the Director of Arte Publico Press. I told him I had this manuscript that I had been
sending around. He asked me to give him a copy and a few days later, he passed me a note
saying that they were interested in publishing it. The same thing had happened in a conference in
Newark about three years earlier where I had met Gary Keller of the Bilingual Review/Press. I
had already published several of my poems in the Bilingual Review and they knew some of my
work. So they accepted my collection of poems Reaching for the Mainland. But, it took them
almost three years to publish it. By the time it came out I had my second book of poetry, Terms of
Survival, ready for publication. All of these decisions happened as a result of the fact that the
bilingual presses were the only publication outlets that did not have a problem with the fact that I
occasionally use Spanish, and that most of my subject matter and themes have to do with being
Puerto Rican.

Judith Ortiz Cofers

C a sa : A P a r t i a l R e m e m b r a n c e o f a P u e r t o R i c a n
C hi ld ho o d
At three or four o'clock in the afternoon, the hour of caf con leche, the women of
my family gathered in Mam's living room to speak of important things and retell
familiar stories meant to be overheard by us young girls, their daughters. In
Mam's house (everyone called my grandmother
Mam) was a large parlor built by my grandfather to his wife s exact specifications so
that it was always cool, facing away from the sun. The doorway was on the side of
stroll through and around her beautiful garden where prize-winning orchids grew in
the trunk of an ancient tree she had hollowed out for that purpose. This room

Casa: A Partial Remembrance of ci Puerto Rican Childhood * 65

was furnished with several mahogany rocking chairs, acquired at the births of her
children, and one intricately carved rocker that had passed down to Mam at
the death of her own mother.
It was on these rockers that my mother, her sisters, and my grandmother
sat on these afternoons of my childhood to tell their stories, teaching each
other, and my cousin and me, what it was like to be a woman, more specifically,
a Puerto Rican woman. They talked about life on the island, and life in Los
Nueva Yores, their way of referring to the United States from New York City
to California: the other place, not home, all the same. They told real-life stories
though, as I later learned, always embellishing them with a little or a lot of
dramatic detail. And they told cuentos, the morality and cautionary tales told
by the women in our family for generations: stories that became a part of
my subconscious as 1 grew up in two worlds, the tropical island and the cold city,
and that would later surface in my dreams and in my poetry.
One of these tales was about the woman who was left at the altar. Mam liked to tell that
one with histrionic intensity. I remember the rise and fall of her voice, the sighs, and her
constantly gesturing hands, like two birds swooping through her words. This particular story usually would come up in a conversation as a result of someone mentioning a forthcoming
engagement or wedding. The first time I remember hearing it, I was sitting on the floor at
Mam's feet, pretending to read a comic book. I may have been eleven or twelve years old, at
that difficult age when a girl was no longer a child who could be ordered to leave the room if the
women wanted freedom to take their talk into forbidden zones, nor really old enough to be
considered a part of their conclave. 1 could only sit quietly, pretending to be in another world,
while absorbing it all in a sort of unspoken agreement of my status as silent auditor. On this day,
Mam had taken my long, tangled mane of hair into her ever-busy hands. Without looking down
at me and with no interruption of her flow of words, she began braiding my hair, working at it
with the quickness and determination that characterized all her actions. My mother was
watching us impassively from her rocker across the room. On her lips played a little ironic smile. I
would never sit still for her ministrations, but even then, I instinctively knew that she did not

66 * Judith Ortiz Cofer

possess Mama's matriarchal power to command and keep everyone's attention. This was never
more evident than in the spell she cast when telling a story.
"It is not like it used to be when I was a girl,' Mam announced. "Then, a man could leave a
girl standing at the church altar with a bouquet of fresh flowers in her hands and disappear off
the face of the earth. No way to track him down if he was from another town. He could be a
married man, with maybe even two or three families all over the island. There was no way to
know. And there were men who did this. Hombres with the devil in their flesh who would come
to a pueblo, like this one, take a job at one of the haciendas, never meaning to stay, only to have
a good time and to seduce the women."
The whole time she was speaking, Mam would be weaving my hair into a flat plait that
required pulling apart the two sections of hair with little jerks that made my eyes water; but
knowing how grandmother detested whining and boba (sissy) tears, as she called them, I just
sat up as straight and stiff as 1 did at La Escuela San Jose, where the nuns enforced good
posture with a flexible plastic ruler they bounced off of slumped shoulders and heads. As
Mam s story progressed, I noticed how my young Aunt Laura lowered her eyes, refusing to
meet Mam's meaningful gaze. Laura was seventeen, in her last year of high school, and
already engaged to a boy from another town who had staked his claim with a tiny diamond
ring, then left for Los Nueva Yores to make his fortune. They were planning to get married in a
year. Mam had expressed serious doubts that the wedding would ever take place. In Mam's
eyes, a man set free without a legal contract was a man lost. She believed that marriage was
not something men desired, but simply the price they had to pay for the privilege of children
and, of course, for what no decent (synonymous with "smart ) woman would give away for
free.
" Mara La Loca was only seventeen when it happened to her." I listened closely at the
mention of this name. Maria was a town character, a fat middle-aged woman who lived with
her old mother 011 the outskirts of town. She was to be seen around the pueblo delivering the
meat pies the two women made for a living. The most peculiar thing about Maria, in my eyes,
was that she walked and moved like a little girl though she had the thick body and wrinkled face
of an old woman. She would swing her hips in an exaggerated, clownish way, and sometimes

Casa: A Partial Remembrance of ci Puerto Rican Childhood * 67

even hop and skip up to someone's house. She spoke to no one. Even if you asked her a
question, she would just look at you and smile, showing her yellow teeth. But I had heard that if
you got close enough, you could hear her humming a tune without words. The kids yelled out
nasty things at her calling her La Loca, and the men who bang out at the bodega playing
dominoes sometimes whistled mockingly as she passed by with her funny, outlandish walk. But
Maria seemed impervious to it all, carrying her basket of pasteles like a grotesque Little Red
Riding Hood through the forest.
Maria La Loca interested me, as did all the eccentrics and crazies of our pueblo. Their
weirdness was a measuring stick I used in my serious quest for a definition of normal. As a Navy
brat shuttling between New Jersey and the pueblo, I was constantly made to feel like an oddball
by my peers, who made fun of my two-way accent: a Spanish accent when I spoke English, and
when I spoke Spanish I was told that I sounded like a Gringa. Being the outsider had already
turned my brother and me into cultural chameleons. We developed early on the ability to blend
into a crowd, to sit and read quietly in a fifth story apartment building for days and days when it
was too bitterly cold to play outside, or, set free, to run wild in Mam's realm, where she took
charge of our lives, releasing Mother for a while from the intense fear for our safety that our
father's absences instilled in her. In order to keep us from harm when Father was away, Mother
kept us under strict surveillance. She even walked us to and from Public School No. 11, which
we attended during the months we lived in Paterson, New Jersey, our home base in the states.
Mam freed all three of us like pigeons from a cage. I saw her as my liberator and my model.
Her stories were parables from which to glean the Truth.
"Mara La Loca was once a beautiful girl. Everyone thought she would marry the Mndez
boy.' As everyone knew, Rogelio Mndez was the richest man in town. ' But,'' Mam continued,
knitting my hair with the same intensity she was putting into her story, "this macho made a
fool out of her and ruined her life. She paused for the effect of her use of the word "Macho,'
which at that time had not yet become a popular epithet for an unliberated man. This word had
for us the crude and comical connotation of "male of the species," stud: a macho was what you
put in a pen to increase your stock.

68 * Judith Ortiz Cofer

I peeked over my comic book at my mother. She too was under Mam's spell, smiling
conspiratorially at this little swipe at men. She was safe from Mam's contempt in this area.
Married at an early age, an unspotted lamb, she had been accepted by a good family of strict
Spaniards whose name was old and respected, though their fortune had been lost long before
my birth. In a rocker Pap had painted sky blue sat Mam's oldest child, Aunt Nena. Mother of
three children, stepmother of two more, she was a quiet woman who liked books but had
married an ignorant and abusive widower whose main interest in life was accumulating
wealth. He too was in the mainland working on his dream of returning home rich and
triumphant to buy the finca of his dreams. She was waiting for him to send for her. She would
leave her children with Mam for several years while the two of them slaved away in factories.
He would one day be a rich man, and she a sadder woman. Even now her life-light was
dimming. She spoke little, an aberration in Mam's house, and she read avidly, as if storing up
spiritual food for the long winters that awaited her in Los Nueva Yores without her family. But
even Aunt Nena came alive to Mam's words, rocking gently, her hands over a thick book in
her lap.
Her daughter, my cousin Sara, played jacks by herself on the tile porch outside the room
where we sat. She was a year older than I. We shared a bed and all our family's secrets.
Collaborators in search of answers, Sara and I discussed everything we heard the women say,
trying to fit it all together like a puzzle that, once assembled, would reveal life's mysteries to
us. Though she and I still enjoyed taking part in boys' gameschase, volleyball, and even
vaqueros, the island version of cowboys and Indians involving cap-gun battles and violent
shoot- outs under the mango tree in Mam's backyardwe loved best the quiet hours in the
afternoon when the men were still at work, and the boys had gone to play serious baseball at
the park. Then Mam's house belonged only to us women. The aroma of coffee perking in the
kitchen, the mesmerizing creaks and groans of the rockers, and the women telling their lives in
cuentos are forever woven into the fabric of my imagination, braided like my hair that day I
felt my grandmother's hands teaching me about strength, her voice convincing me of the
power of storytelling.

Casa: A Partial Remembrance of ci Puerto Rican Childhood * 69

That day Mam told how the beautiful Maria had fallen prey to a man whose name was
never the same in subsequent versions of the story;
it was Juan one time, Jos, Rafael, Diego, another. We understood that neither the name nor
any of the facts were important, only that a woman had allowed love to defeat her. Mam
put each of us in Maria's place by describing her wedding dress in loving detail: how she
looked like a princess in her lace as she waited at the altar. Then, as Mam approached the
tragic denouement of her story, J was distracted by the sound of my aunt Laura's violent
rocking. She seemed on the verge of tears. She knew the fable was intended for her. That
week she was going to have her wedding gown fitted, though no firm date had been set for
the marriage. Mam ignored Laura's obvious discomfort, digging out a ribbon from the sewing
basket she kept by her rocker while describing Maria's long illness, "a fever that would not
break for days." She spoke of a mother's despair: ""that woman climbed the church steps on
her knees every morning, wore only black as a promesa to the Holy Virgin in exchange for her
daughter's health." By the time Maria returned from her honeymoon with death, she was
ravished, no longer young or sane. '"As you can see, she is almost as old as her mother

already," Mam lamented while tying the ribbon to the ends of my hair, pulling it back with
such force that I just knew I would never be able to close my eyes completely again.
"That Maria's getting crazier every day." Mam's voice would take a lighter tone now,
expressing satisfaction, either for the perfection of my braid, or for a story well toldit was
hard to tell. "You know that tune Maria is always humming? Carried away by her enthusiasm, I
tried to nod, but Mam still had me pinned between her knees.
"Well, that's the wedding march." Surprising us all, Mam sang out, "Da, da, dara . . . da,
da, dara." Then lifting me off the floor by my skinny shoulders, she would lead me around the

70 * Judith Ortiz Cofer

room in an impromptu waltzanother session ending with the laughter of women, all of us
caught up in the infectious joke of our lives.