Ethnicity, Feminism, and Semantic Shifts in the Work of Judith Ortiz

post identity
Ethnicity, Feminism, and Semantic Shifts in the Work of Judith
Ortiz Cofer
Darlene Pagán
RAFAEL OCASIO’S 1992 INTERVIEW WITH Judith Ortiz Cofer
is poignantly titled, “Puerto Rican Literature in Georgia?
An interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” The titular inquiry
into the author’s origins and her current residence
indicate the importance of a sense of place and its
significance, in terms of how authors are defined not only
by critics and themselves, but also by literary categories. A
Puerto Rican writing in English is generally expected to
conform to certain habits, forms, or significations that
identify her as Puerto Rican, one of which is this sense of
place. However, Cofer’s case is an interesting one because
her continual movement as a child between the mainland
and the island creates what Juan Bruce-Novoa calls a
“migrating consciousness—not to be confused with
immigrating, which denotes one-way lineal movement from
a source to a goal” (93). This migrating consciousness is
evinced by Cofer’s own assertions about culture as “a habit
of movement” (qtd. in 92), and Bruce-Novoa’s analysis of
Cofer’s early work, in which “cultural identity demands
constant movement, oscillation, which ultimately places
identity in the act of movement itself” (93). While Cofer’s
work is set both on the mainland and the island, she
maintains a commitment to both through a movement
between the two in which neither is fixed or privileged.
One of the ways to maintain the act of movement and
oscillation is to move between cultural spaces as well as
significations. Certainly, if one of the markers of U.S. Latino
literature is a sense of place, another is the inclusion of the
Spanish and English languages. However, this particular
marker is often associated with a range of techniques such
as code-switching and cultural communities including
Nuyoricans, Chicanos/as, and Mexican Americans that may
find thematic parallels in Cofer’s work, but not equivalents.
Regarding the Nuyoricans, for example, Cofer asserts that
she enjoys their work but associates it with a particular
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locale in New York signif icantly different from her
experiences and situations growing up in Paterson, New
Jersey (“Puerto Rican Literature” 45). As one of the
distinguishing aspects of her work, Cofer argues that
incorporating Spanish and English indicates how “saying
one thing in a particular way is completely different than
saying the same thing in another way” (“The Art” 75).
Cofer uses Spanish to portray a particular reality and flavor,
“a formula for reminding people that what they’re reading
or hearing comes from the mind and the thoughts of
Spanish-speaking people” (“Judith Ortiz Cofer” 101). Thus,
the choice to use the Spanish language calls attention not
only to the linguistic moment in a text but also to the
particular cultural situation, event, or idea the language
articulates.
This essay focuses on how Cofer’s notions of identity
and language function as associated with the predominant
theme of women and women’s roles and identities in particular cultural contexts in the texts Silent Dancing: A
Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990)
and The Latin Deli (1993). Cofer’s plays on linguistic
markers such as mother, marriage, virginity, and prostitute,
in Spanish and English, invoking multiple stereotypes and
connotations associated with both the island and the
mainland. However, based on a notion of identity that
relies on movement and oscillation, Cofer maintains the
language associated with women in a kind of semantic flux
in which critical analysis of any linguistic marker, either in
Spanish or English, is limited because meaning builds, shifts,
and contradicts throughout these two collections. For
example, a Western reader might be inclined to call Cofer’s
texts feminist and assert that the author problematizes and
subverts terminology used to describe women and women’s
roles. However, such terminology proves subversive because
the connotations of even a single word continually shift to
include both positive and negative valences. These
continual shifts indicate how, as an observer, Cofer can
identify how women both conform to and belie cultural
constructs. The very complexity of women’s experiences
belies singular portrayals and, as a result, while Cofer
participates in an Anglo feminist tradition of reinterpreting
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the roles to which women are assigned, she also
participates in a tradition articulated by Chicana feminists
such as Gloria Anzaldúa, who cites the “pluralistic mode”
as a strategy used by women, as members of multiple
cultural communities, to circulate a wealth of terms that
define women and their experiences (79).
In the “pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the
good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing
abandoned. Not only does she [the writer] maintain
contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something
else” (79). That something else in Cofer’s work is evinced by
her movement between physical locales and her ability, as
participant and observer, to articulate the cultural codes
associated with each, without foregrounding one or the
other. Rather, Cofer reveals how women negotiate a wealth
of cultural constructs, juxtaposed with lived, embodied
experiences. Furthermore, she insists that these communicate with one another, so that meaning and signification
exists in the spaces between, or, as Bruce-Novoa asserts, in
“the inter space where new meanings are renegotiated in a
process of synthesis” (96). Ultimately, Cofer’s shifts between
two geographies and two sets of cultural codes reveal her
dual commitment to both, and the effects the negotiation
between the two cultures, histories, traditions, and
languages has on notions of identity and agency, as will be
seen, specifically for women.
Silent Dancing opens with the essay, “Casa,” which
grounds the entire collection in a community of women
associated with the oral tradition. In “Casa,” the women
gather for the afternoon ritual of café con leche, where they
tell stories meant to entertain but also to “teach each other
and my cousin and me what it was like to be a woman,
more specifically, a Puerto Rican woman” (14). While many
of the cuentos narrate real events, they are also thickly
embellished “morality and cautionary tales” (15) from which
the narrator learns appropriate behavior for women. As
participant and observer, the narrator becomes the
“cultural chameleon” (17) who can blend into crowds and,
when she returns to the mainland, repeat these stories to
connect herself to a cultural heritage she associates with
women. Additionally, readers are grounded in the
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tradition of storytelling as it is associated with the Spanish
language. While the text is primarily in English, the use of
Spanish words to articulate the traditions of café con leche
and cuentos maintains the connections between the
traditions, the language, and the island. The term casa is
one many English speaking readers can define as house, home,
or household but which, in the context of the story, refers
not to a physical structure but to a sense of home the narrator associates with Puerto Rican women, their traditions,
and the island. Since the narrator continually moves
between the island and the mainland, however, her
community of women is not fixed in either locale. Home
may signify the narrator’s connections to Puerto Rico, but
it also suggests a displacement as the narrator moves away
from that culture to the mainland.
In sharp contrast, the opening piece in The Latin Deli
is not concentrated on a community of women, but,
perhaps, on the metaphoric removal of women from a
particular cultural community. “The Latin Deli: An Ars
Poetica” focuses on a Catholic tradition surrounding the
Virgin Mary, but is set in an American context, which
alters that tradition. In this poem, the narrator plays on
the titular Latin origins of a poetic term and technique.
While the poem is not about writing poetry or a poetic
technique, it narrates a tradition that is transplanted from
one cultural situation into another. The poem opens with
the image of a plastic Madonna and child atop a formica
deli counter, thereby removing the statue from a church or
religious context into a commercial, American setting.
The Madonna is:
the Patroness of Exiles,
a woman of no-age who was never pretty,
who spends her days selling canned memories
while listening to the Puerto Ricans who complain
that it would be cheaper to fly to San Juan
than to buy a pound of Bustelo coffee here. (3)
The Virgin Mary symbolizes the exiled Latino community
and their memories of, and connections to, the homeland.
The characters’ lives in America indicate their revised
perceptions of a religious icon, not necessarily as sacrilege,
but as a means for survival in foreign territory. Traditionally,
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the Virgin Mary is sacred and familiar; in “Advanced
Biology,” the narrator asserts that “Our family talked about
La Virgen as if she were our most important relative” (124).
Later, the narrator’s mother asserts that those “who do
not have the Holy Virgin Mary” as an example “do things
for the wrong reasons” (126). The Virgin is an exemplar of
good behavior and a representative mother for good
Catholics. In this poem, however, she is more closely
connected in an American context, to the figure of a real,
human woman who “spends her days / slicing jamón y
queso” (3) and no matter what the Virgen does, she
cannot “satisfy / the hunger of the frail old man lost in the
folds / of his winter coat, who brings her lists of items /
that he reads to her like poetry” (4). Poetry is associated
not with poetic language or technique but with the lists of
items that romanticize Puerto Rican products. If the poem
is about a tradition, it is about the recontextualization of a
Catholic icon into an American context and the
negotiations performed by the deli’s patrons. Rather than
a strictly holy icon, the plastic, Americanized Madonna
comes to represent a real woman to whom the patrons
turn to recover their losses and memories of the homeland.
Still, like the women in “Casa,” the Virgin is the center of
home and community.
Whereas the Spanish in the opening piece of Silent
Dancing is directly associated with Puerto Rican traditions
of storytelling, the Spanish in The Latin Deli’s opening is
ironically linked to an American context: dollars, meringue,
and ham and cheese. While in the poem “The Latin Deli:
An Ars Poetica,” the Virgin is a plain-faced woman with
“plump arms” who “smiles understanding” (3), in others
she is entirely traditional. In “The Black Virgin,” for example,
the fervor with which Catholics worship their icon is evinced
by the women who climb on their knees “one hundred
steps to the [Virgin’s] shrine” (Silent Dancing 43). The
Black Virgin was said to appear before a woodcutter who
was about to be gored by a bull, and every year since,
people celebrate her in the Fiestas Patronales when her
figure is paraded through town (44). As the narrator asserts,
“[b]eing a woman and black made Our Lady the perfect
depository for the hopes and prayers of the sick, the weak,
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and the powerless” (44). More traditionally revered here
than in the poem set in the deli, the Virgin serves as a
mediator for God: it is through her that one’s promesas
“could get His attention” (44). The Virgin is presented as
an icon and a woman who serves her adorers in a more
traditional Catholic manner as a mediator for God in a
Puerto Rican setting.
Whether or not the Virgin Mary is an icon in her own
right or a mediator with light or dark skin, Cofer’s
representations reveal the multiple interpretations of her,
often related to the island or the mainland, and to the
Spanish or English language. I would not argue, however,
that the invocation of the Virgin Mary in an American
setting suggests only a revision of her and the Catholic
tradition, while her invocation on the island remains pure.
Rather, no single portrayal of her is presented as correct or
singular. Each represents a possible interpretation of her,
depending on the context in which she is invoked. The
author’s choice to cite the celebration of the Black Virgin
in Spanish—the Fiestas Patronales—situates that particular
tradition in Puerto Rico. More importantly, the story of
the Black Virgin is only a brief segment of a larger tale about
women’s autonomy. The narrator’s father in the essay is in
the Army. While his wife and daughter remain on the
island with his mother, they learn what it is like to live
without a man, sharing stories with their female relatives:
“The three women living alone and receiving Army checks
were the envy of every married woman in the pueblo” (39–
40). The narrator’s mother and grandmother take up
smoking and spend their days pampering the young narrator.
While their situation is referred to in ideal terms, the
suggestion is not that women are better off without men,
but that the women, in the absence of men, forge bonds
that provide them comfort, safety, and entertainment.
Situating the story of the Black Virgin Mary within the
larger story emphasizes the women’s community as a
powerful source of support for women within the larger
cultural community in which they often sacrifice their needs
and desires for others just as the Virgin does.
Like the Virgin Mary, the institution of marriage is
associated in both collections with a wealth of linguistic
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possibilities that suggest a wealth of interpretations—many
ironic and ambiguous—for what marriage means and evokes
for women. In a series entitled “From ‘Some Spanish
Verbs,’” the author titles four poems in a series according
to a Spanish infinitive followed by its translation. In the
first two poems, the marital union is explored according to
the ways in which the participants “translate” the titular
terms in their lives. The first, “Orar: To Pray,” begins with
a woman’s being left by her husband, despite her “hissed
pleas” (The Latin Deli 28). After he is gone, the woman will
“fall / on her knees to say prayers composed to sound like
praise; following / her mother’s warning never to make
demands / outright from God nor a man” (28). On one
hand, the prayers parallel religious invocations to the
Virgin Mary wherein women must seek the mediation of
the Virgin or couch direct addresses to God. On the other
hand, to suggest that the couple’s behavior is a pattern
implies that her prayers go unanswered, which would make
the title ironic because neither God nor the husband read
or respond to the wife’s pleas. Thus, both the word pray
and the ritual acts of prayer must be mediated, even if
unsuccessfully, by the Virgin for the mother and for readers.
However, the title suggests a direct translation of a term
and its connotations; the issue is not one of translation
but of mediation. As Bruce-Novoa asserts, the “interlingual,
intercultural language expresses what neither language can,
even when they engage each other in ‘accurate’ translation
of meaning from one code to the other” (94). Translation
suggests direct equivalency, and in the above poem, Cofer
intimates that direct equivalents are not actually possible
given the situation in which the characters find themselves.
Orar may literally translate as “to pray,” but within the
poem there is a rift in communication within two systems—
a religious and cultural one—in which women bear the
greater burden, despite their attempts to communicate.
There is yet another issue of mediation when, in the
same poem, the child is introduced listening to the familiar
sounds of her mother: “Knees on wood, shifting / the
pain so the floor creaked, and a woman’s / conversation
with the wind—that carried / her sad voice out of the
open window / to me” (28). The child asserts that the
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words spoken by her mother that do not reach heaven fall
on her own chest, where they become embedded “like
splinters of a cross / I also carried” (28). The poem
concludes with the mother passing her pain and sadness to
her daughter, but it is a sadness that indicates several
predicaments. First, neither God nor men can always be
relied on for assistance or solace, and second, because the
words escape, the Virgin is not always a successful mediator.
Third, and most important, the daughter learns to carry
the metaphoric splinters from the cross from her mother
because they may otherwise go unnoticed. It is the
daughter who will have to decide for herself how to carry
those splinters into her own life, how she, as a young woman,
will negotiate the titular terms of prayer as well as marriage.
It is the daughter who can revise the two systems of
religion and marriage in which her mother suffers and in
which she may participate.
In the poem “Dividir: To Divide,” the husband’s affair
with “the fake-blonde widow / next door” (29), prompts
a different response from the wife. Rather than make
demands of her husband or God, she uses silence and
suffering as a weapon, resulting in yet another breakdown
in communication. After the affair, “she chose pride; he,
humility” (29). The woman refuses “help hauling groceries,
small children, / and whatever load she carried home / up
that steep hill” (29) and suffers until her husband lay on
his deathbed, where it is rumored that she kissed him once
before he died and “Then, kneeling by the bed, / washed
and anointed his still body. / Taking it back” (39). The
poem ends with a powerful image of a woman hardened
after twenty years by her inability to forgive. As in “Orar,”
the children are implicated in this cycle: they are “punished
like him…beyond our petty crimes” (29). While the crime
seems petty to the child, the poem indicates that the
betrayal is anything but, although the silence the mother
uses as a weapon implicates her in that crime. The very
word petty is indicative of the husband’s behavior and the
wife’s response to it. The household environment after the
affair is neither healthy nor fulfilling for any of the family
members. However, that the children believe there are
alternatives to the situation is important because this
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knowledge complicates the simplistic interpretation of
infidelity which, as the title indicates, translates unsuccessfully for everyone. What is emphasized here is perspective,
not a linear act followed by specific consequences, and one
that reveals the position, and thoughts of husband, wife,
and children as responsible agents implicated in the familial
drama.
Cofer presents notions of the Virgin and marriage to
provide a wealth of cultural and linguistic markers
associated with American and Puerto Rican culture, but
markers that include, and move beyond, stereotypical
notions present in both cultures. America has popularized
the stereotype that Latino men are somehow more
chauvinistic than American men. Judit Moschkovich asserts
that this assumption is misguided, to say the least. Sexist
oppression cannot be compared in terms of degrees, but
only in terms of its existence as oppression in whatever form
it takes. Additionally, sexist or heterosexist oppression “is
more or less visible depending on how communicative a
people in a culture are” (82). Cofer’s presentation of
intimate relations complicates the stereotypes by
presenting the characters as real and not as caricatures, and
also by pointing to alternative behaviors and roles. The
focus is not on presenting Puerto Rican traditions for an
English speaking audience, but on recognizing how we
interpret and translate traditions in general. Institutions
such as marriage and the church—and the women who
participate in these—cannot be singularly defined, either
within a single cultural construct or from one to another.
In addition, the reader is made privy to the narrator/
author’s particular vantage point as “cultural chameleon”
and subtly encouraged not to attempt to literally translate
the events narrated. One powerful example of this discouragement is Cofer’s presentation of multiple interpretations
and connotations surrounding individual words, traditions,
and situations, resulting in a semantic flux that resists rigid
definitions. In terms of marriage, especially, for example,
the essay “Marina” reveals how the marital tradition and
the very notion of womanhood is debunked in a surprising
example that diffuses stereotypical notions of men and
women in a Latin American context.
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The narrator in “Marina” asserts that her relationship
with her mother after her father’s death has become
strained, in part because the narrator chose to remain in
America, while her mother returned to the island. While
the two have trouble defining “key words…such as ‘woman’
and ‘mother,’” they share the tradition of storytelling,
albeit one whose significance has changed (Silent Dancing
152). While the daughter grew to love these stories for
what they reveal of the “history and the people of the
Island,” her mother “likes recalling the old days” (153).
The import of the storytelling tradition changes from
passing information to something more nostalgic, and, as a
result, the subject of the tales changes. The mother
narrates a story of two adolescent girls, Marina and Kiki,
who become intensely attached to each other at a river
where they exchange stories of boys and their bodies. Much
to the town’s distress, the girls disappear, leaving behind a
note that tells of their elopement. What the town discovers is
that Marina’s mother was so distraught after having a boy
child, she had dressed her child “in a flowing gown of lace
and had her christened Marina” (158), and thereafter
presented the male child to the community as female. When
the narrator asks her mother what happened to the couple,
the mother responds: “‘What happens to any married
couple?’…‘They had several children, they got old…’ She
chuckled gently at my naiveté” (159). Soon after, mother
and daughter encounter the aged Marina who has returned
to Puerto Rico after Kiki’s death. The narrator is
compelled to ask a final question about whether he was a
good husband, to which her mother responds, “‘He would
know what it takes to make a woman happy’” (160). The
narrator smiles inwardly and asserts that she and her mother
“now had a new place to begin our search for the meaning
of the word woman” (160). The daughter realizes that her
mother does understand the complexities of womanhood
and woman, despite having led a “traditional” life as wife
and mother. The mother’s very acceptance of the story
indicates her awareness of alternate possibilities for women,
including the women her daughter represents as wife,
mother, and career woman.
The very name Marina also plays on a linguistic
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translation and cultural pun: while marina refers to a
seacoast or shore, in the essay it invokes the masculine
marino, which refers to a marine or a sailor. Despite
learning that Marina is actually a man, the townspeople still
refer to him as the feminine Marina who appears to suffer
no ill feelings in his community. While “Marina” represents
a nontraditional example of what it means to be a woman
in Puerto Rico and what it means to marry, “Marina” also
indicates a second pun as associated with one of the most
positive portrayals of marriage in both collections. While
previous examples of marriage suggest that women and men
marry to legitimately bear children and that women seem
to be responsible for securing marriage, “Marina” presents
an alternative. In “Marina,” wo(men) talk about their
sexuality openly, and the example set by the couple results
in a story that can be told to other women. More than a
union to bear children, the story of Marina and Kiki
fosters the notion that sexuality need not be associated
only with procreation, and that marital unions may be
grounded and based in friendship.
“Marina” reveals not only a nontraditional example of
marriage, it also hints at the dangers of sexual knowledge
and the lack thereof. One of the issues Cofer points to in
the essay is that the Marina and Kiki met at a river with
other girls to discuss the forbidden topic of sex. The
narrator asserts, “they [girls] were betrayed by their own
protective parents who could bring themselves to explain
neither the delights, nor the consequences of sex” (155).
Sexual knowledge is complicated in Cofer’s work because
it is something that is both celebratory and threatening. In
the poem “Quinceañera,” the arrival of the narrator’s
period signals a Spanish tradition of celebrating her fifteenth
birthday, which suggests not only her coming of age into
sexual knowledge, but also the dangers associated with
sexual knowledge. Because she has begun to menstruate,
the young girl’s dolls are put away “like dead children” and
she, not her mother, is expected to wash her own clothes
and sheets “as if / the fluids of my body were poison, as if
/ the little trickle of blood I believe / travels from my heart
to the world were / shameful” (Silent Dancing 50). The
coming party is ironic because, while it translates as a
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celebration, it clearly indicates a shameful mourning as
indicated by the mother, who has “nailed back” her
daughter’s hair with black hairpins (50). Even so, the
narrator recognizes the contradiction and wonders why
her blood is shameful while the blood lost by saints or men
in battle is “beautiful” (50). Only in the former case does
blood have negative connotations, primarily because it
represents the potential for young women to marry and to
become pregnant. The quinceañera invokes multiple
connotations the daughter must mediate successfully if she
is to grow into womanhood and maintain respect in her
family. Because her entrance into womanhood is fraught
with responsibility that is both celebratory and threatening,
she must navigate her entrance into womanhood by
learning to read her body as well as others’ responses to it
to arm and protect herself.
By contrast, in “Unspoken,” the narrator’s relationship with her adolescent daughter is less tumultuous. There
is no hint of the threat of sexuality represented by the
daughter’s “tender swelling of new breasts” (The Latin Deli
158). The mother even wants to tell the daughter about
“the pleasure of a lover’s hand on skin… of the moment /
when a woman first feels / a baby’s mouth at her breast”
(158). Instead the mother says “sweet dreams, / for the
secrets hidden under this blanket / like a forbidden book /
I’m not supposed to know you’ve read” (158). Sexuality is
still portrayed as a taboo subject, but for very different
reasons, which is a tacit understanding of the mother’s
part. The implication of this, as in other poems, is that a
woman’s relationship to her body is often defined by her
culture, by the persons who respond to the changes she
experiences in one light or another, all of which impact
how she perceives her body, but also how she perceives the
bodies of men. “Quinceañera” reveals one perception, while
“Unspoken” reveals another, neither of which is indicated
as correct or incorrect, but as possibilities that have
significant repercussions for young girls.
What is most significant are the sensitive lines between
cultures that define sexuality in very different terms and
elaborate what it means for a young woman to be
responsible for the behavior and attitudes of men in
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general and of men toward women. In the essay
“Quinceañera,” the daughter returns to Puerto Rico for a
visit where she learns, as a member of her “mother’s
matriarchal tribe,” what it “meant to become a woman in
Puerto Rico” (Silent Dancing 139):
[D]on’t cross your legs like that when a man is in
the room, don’t walk around in your pajamas,
never interrupt their conversations. It did not
matter that the men were my uncles, my cousins,
and my brother. Somehow my body with its new
contours and new biological powers had changed
everything: half of the world had now become a
threat, or felt threatened by its potential for disaster.
(140)
Having left and returned to the island, the young girl is
more aware of the dictates of womanhood in her culture,
few of which appear positive. She is both a threat to herself
and to men and, as in the poem, the fifteenth birthday
signals not celebration, but her new role as “trainee for the
demands of womanhood and marriage” ( 141 ). The
celebration is associated with a tradition, and it is also, for
the narrator, associated with the phenomenological, which
is not cultural but natural, although its expression is
distinctly cultural. The narrator recognizes her body’s
changes, which leads directly to how she is to control both
her body and others’ responses to it, depending on where
she finds herself.
When she finds herself attracted to a boy on the island,
she recognizes that his courtship occurs in a manner New
York has not prepared her for: “the hoots, hisses, and streetpoetry that Latinos subject women to, was radically
different from this dramatic, romantic wooing carried on
without awkwardness and surprisingly accepted by the
adults” (143). The surprise is a result of the ironies and
contradictions between her culture’s fearful response to
her coming of age versus the young boy’s behavior and her
response to it. The young girl has long been taught what is
and is not acceptable regarding her behavior around boys,
but the cultural clash occurs when she pursues the
romantic wooing and leads the young boy behind her
grandmother’s house. There she turns her face to his for a
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kiss, but he runs away. The narrator recognizes her error
and chides herself playfully: “I had made an awful mistake,
broken the rules of the game, and frightened away my gentle
admirer. How far this reckless act of mine set that boy back
with women, I do not know” (147). The narrator understands that she failed to conform to the dictates of
womanhood, in sharp contrast to the behavior of even
members of her own culture in an American context. Still,
she recognizes through both cultures “the many
directions a woman’s life can take” (148). The multiple
representations of courtship provide numerous choices to
empower a young girl who can decide for herself how to
interpret the situation of courtship on whichever shore she
finds herself. At the same time, a young girl has to
remember that some interpretations lead to specif ic
consequences. Though the above situation is portrayed in
a playful, nostalgic manner, it is clear that the potential for
ruin on the young girl’s part is no laughing matter. The
narrator establishes this when she fears afterward that the
boy might tell others and humiliate her; however, her
saving grace is that her daring act, should the boy have
mentioned it to others, would also have humiliated him
because he had refused her kiss (147).
If there are dangers in Cofer’s work associated with
young girls’ sexual knowledge, it is in how such knowledge
can be defined in demeaning and damaging terms if a young
woman is humiliated or ruined. In “Fulana,” readers learn
yet another version of the results for women who are not
protected or who do not protect themselves. Fulana
literally translates into a Mrs. or Ms. so-and-so as it refers
to a woman who is indecent or an embarrassment because
of her sexual life. In the poem, however, Fulana is a “wild
girl” because she paints her face and wants to play the wife
when the children play house; she wants to be a dancer
and a bird and eventually loses “contact with her name
during the years / when her body was light enough to fly”
(86). The young girl wants to call herself by names that are
more akin to what her changing body feels. The flight and
dance refer to sexual knowledge of her own body as well as
the bodies of men; yet, she must remember her name in
the same way she must remember her character and
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reputation. The risk is that she will be named by others as
a Fulana, who is:
not to be mentioned
in the presence of impressionable little girls
who might begin to wonder about flight,
how the houses of their earth-bound mothers,
the fields and rivers, and the schools and churches
would look from above. (86)
Sex or sexual knowledge is never mentioned directly in the
poem, but the title alone names what should not be named
and subtly indicates how loaded the term is in its cultural
construct. Fulanas are neither chastised nor celebrated in
the poem; they are named and made real. The emphasis on
naming and language indicates how cultures define sexual
knowledge and the women who have it, without implicating only Latin American cultures. At the same time, while
the term is used to name a woman without directly naming
her, Cofer uses this term in the poem specifically to name a
woman, her actions and complexities, while maintaining
the flavor of her promiscuity, which rests not in sexual acts
but acts of desire and freedom.
The worst case scenario for women who acquire sexual
knowledge outside of marriage is that they literally become
whores or prostitutes. Cofer, however, finds parallels
between the work of prostitutes and priests, which
subverts the negative connotations associated with prostitution. In “Las Magdalenas,” the narrator observes the
prostitutes who enter church for the early morning mass
and
shed la vida: stale
perfume absorbed by the censer
the angelic altar boy swings
as he leads the sleepy man
in scarlet robes—no less splendid
than the women’s evening clothes—
the altar—the man with the soft hands
who does not touch women. (The Latin Deli 83)
The portrayal of prostitutes is neither sympathetic nor
judgmental. They are juxtaposed to the church and its
religious figures, and the priest’s fine garments are likened
to those of the women to whom he offers communion,
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and places the prostitutes on the same level as him in terms
of the elaborate attire required for their work. The poem
hints that prostitutes need not be degraded for clothing
that resembles the priest’s in its finery. Additionally, the
prostitutes’ attendance at church is as ritualistic as the
priest’s, though their hope as they “bow their heads” is to
“accept what was promised Magdalene”: forgiveness for
their sins (83). Ironically, though the prostitutes’ attempts
for absolution and forgiveness appear sincere, it is also clear
that the work requiring such forgiveness will continue. In
the poem, both the priest and the prostitutes are bound
by a life of servitude, but the prostitutes’ very presence in
church belies their lot as sinners because they have the same
possibilities for redemption as Mary Magdalene. The
language in this poem presents these women both as
redeemed and sinful, as innocents and outcasts, but never
singularly defined. In the same breath that they are pitiable
and humble, they assert their place in church and continue
practices that mark them as outcasts.
In a poem diametrically opposed to “Las Magdalenas,”
“Saint Rose of Lima” examines the irony of women who
devote themselves, not to men, but to God’s service and
the divinity of others. The poem elaborates a woman’s
failure as a devotee in the most denigrating terms: she is
“the joke of the angels—a girl crazy enough for God,” for
she inflicts self-torture to attain glory (The Latin Deli 155).
The joke rests in the woman’s assuming the path to God
and holiness consists only in the torture of her physical
person and in the self-abnegation of earthly pleasures. The
woman envisions her “Master / whom she called Divine
Bridegroom, Thorn / in My Heart, Eternal Spouse” (155),
but when God’s image began to fade she “would dip the
iron bar into the coals, / and pass it gently like a magician’s
wand over her skin” (156). Whether in her imagination or
otherwise, she equates Christ’s appearance before her with
self-torture, which she defines as passion. Passion, for her,
is suffering and sacrifice and not unpurposefully aligned
with the Christ husband. The God husband and the
human husband may often solicit the same response from
women who are taught by their culture and the church
that suffering at male hands is to be expected; however,
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this poem denigrates the notion that suffering is an inherent part of worship by referring to the woman in it as a
joke and a lunatic. In previous poems, faith provides
comfort to women; in this case, worship reveals faith as
confining, and physically and emotionally debilitating. Both
are, however, possible interpretations for women. Both
represent choices women have and can make or revise at
will.
Whether as nuns, prostitutes, wives, or mothers, the
women in Cofer’s work have a support network of other
women who are vital to their survival. If one woman’s
example proves unbearable to her, there are other examples
to counteract this. If one woman subverts notions of
womanhood, as in “Fulana” or “Marina,” there are both
successful and unsuccessful examples of this. There are
enough choices and options, in other words, to provide
each woman in a community with increased possibilities for
autonomy and agency. The truth of individual situations,
definitions, or interpretations remains and rests in the
dynamic female-identified community that creates multiple
possibilities. The very word truth resists a literal translation
in Cofer’s work, particularly when she combines the poetic
form with the essay form, which is meant to distinguish
fictional from lived experiences, but which the author melds
through shared subject matter. The truth of the form is as
unstable as the truth of the subjects regarding the multitude of representations of women as both negative and
positive. There is no characterization of women that
embodies the truth. Instead, there is a series of truths that
resists singular interpretations and judgments in the same
way women both conform to and resist the roles their
cultures assign them. While the Virgin Mary is a holy figure
to whom young girls aspire on the island in “The Latin
Deli: An Ars Poetica,” she is simultaneously a real woman
“who was never pretty” when her image moves to the
United States (3); while the prostitute represents the worst
of all possible options to young girls, in the poem “Why
Providencia Has Babies” (Silent Dancing), the narrator,
like her mother is forced to work the streets to provide for
a daughter who becomes “the welfare madonna” and “the
women’s joke” (114). In “Orar: To Pray” (Latin Deli 28),
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women often seem at the mercy of unfaithful or abusive
husbands; as wives, they also make proactive choices about
their own lives and bodies. In the poem “Claims,” for
example, the grandmother, without any ill feelings on her
or her husband’s part, claims “the right to sleep alone…for
the luxur y of stretching her bones” and to avoid
pregnancy (29).
As we have seen, the women in Cofer’s poems are
multiplicitous and complex, and they are active negotiators
of the demands made upon them. Cofer’s use of language
specifically makes this multiplicity possible as it moves across
cultural boundaries and significations. As Marta Ester
Sánchez asserts, many writers combine two languages so
that readers can also directly experience how the two
cultures conflict (21). The primary use of English creates a
situation in which readers come across Spanish terms and
are forced to stop and reconsider the foreign, textual
situation, and then to consider the cultural context of those
terms in order to derive meaning from them. The shifting
signs creates an instability that forces readers to “adopt a
mobile approach to the text that could be called a habit of
movement” which reflects Cofer as author and persona
(93–4). Additionally, Bruce-Novoa notes how Cofer is able
to resist enacting in her work, “practices which, while
identifying her with her ethnic heritage, would constitute
socially symbolic acts of acceptance and confirmation of
the repressive system that enslaves women” (96). Cofer’s
use of language immerses the women characters within the
mainland and the island—and the traditions of each—but,
while she relies on language for meaning, she also resists
fixed meaning by playing up the possibilities for semantic
and symbolic flux so that individual words such as woman,
mother, wife, or prostitute are continually under
(re)consideration to circulate multiple definitions. For
example, Cofer’s emphasis on marriage as a legitimate means
of bearing children finds critical support in the work done
by Chicana feminists like Anzaldúa, who asserts that “the
onus is still on woman to be a wife/mother…[w]omen are
made to feel total failures if they don’t marry and have
children” (17). In many of Cofer’s poems those women
who are ruined by men are ruined because they are unable
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to bear children legitimately, and consequently, legitimate
their roles as sensual/sexual women. As already noted,
however, women do have options that rest outside the
traditional and the stereotypical as “Marina” indicates.
Where the word woman appears, the attuned reader
recognizes that the word continually represents an
interpretation that does not remain stable. The fluidity of
words and phrases fuels Cofer’s work and points to the
larger cultural contexts that support such instability, thus
demanding that the reader define and redefine assumptions about (con)textual meaning—where women are
concerned—in order to enter a dialogue with the text as a
whole.
Cofer herself recognized early on instances of cultural
communication and conflict as evinced through language.
In an interview, she recalls reading the Cinderella story as a
child and discovering that the same story appeared in
revised versions in cultures like Africa and China where the
heroines did not all “have pink skin and gold hair… sometimes they had braided kinky hair and sometimes they had
Asian features” (“The Art” 70). What Cofer gleaned from
her exposure to diverse literatures at a young age was the
assurance that in her reality, “the world was populated by
people as different-looking as I thought I was” (70). And
what she identified with was not just the figure of Cinderella,
but with “the woman rising out of her condition and
situation in life” (71). As a writer, Cofer elaborates the
situation of both Cinderella and women in general through
her admitted obsession with:
relationships that women create, the intricate
patterns that we weave out of affection and family
loyalties, and how those have changed and shifted
in a cosmic way from my grandmother’s time to
my own. (75)
The storytelling tradition into which Cofer was born
derives from the women in her family and it is within that
tradition that her own stories are created.
In the same way that Cofer’s representations of women
are multiplicitous, they also indicate the real consequences
of each for women. To chose certain roles means to accept
the position each role is assigned in a community, such as
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the Fulana, who subverts and resists traditional notions of
the nameless. Cofer herself reveals a cruel lesson she learned
about language in the essay “One More Lesson.” As a child
in an English speaking classroom, she had to relieve herself,
but was unable to read the warning her teacher had
written on the board that the children were to remain
seated. A peer told her that she could be excused if she
wrote her name on the board. In doing so, however, the
young Cofer was assaulted in the back of a head by a book
thrown by her teacher. Though the situation was explained
to both the teacher and Cofer, Cofer learned that
“language is the only weapon a child has against the
absolute power of adults” (Silent Dancing 66 ). The
experience also led her to build an “arsenal of words” by
reading insatiably (66).
As a woman, Cofer’s arsenal of words contributed to
the narration of women’s lives and of the diverse choices
that they have as negotiators in their cultures and faiths.
Cofer recognizes the rather stif ling situation that
institutions such as marriage can be for young women, but
she is clear that there are other options, in fiction and in
the world. Citing her poem “The Woman Who Was Left at
the Altar,” Cofer intimates that, “you can just accept the
fact that you are a woman who was left at the altar” or you
can choose something else, like one of the characters in her
essays, Maria Sabida, the mystical woman who marries and
then reforms a murderer after he tries to murder her (“An
Interview” 65). The assassin husband in the tale represents
“anything or anyone who deliberately tries to keep you
from your work,” which is not to say that men or
husbands or the demands of marriage and family are
oppressive; rather, the artist sleeps, like Maria Sabida, “with
one eye open, you’re always leading the examined life, and
exhaustedly so” (65). Ironically, however, while Cofer would
call her grandmother a “feminist,” she asserts that she
herself is not one because she is not “a man basher” (65).
Cofer’s interpretation of feminism is, I would argue, a
limited, stereotyped view of feminism, but it reveals how
Cofer emphasizes what women have to learn from each
other and the choices they can make to be content, as
individuals, as wives, and as mothers, outside of their
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relationships to men. In the same way that stories about
women have served as lessons and examples for the narrator,
they also serve as lessons and examples for readers who are
presented with a full range of women’s roles, behaviors,
and expectations that range from the strictly traditional to
the radical. The focus in Cofer’s work is on the notion
that there is a juggling of sorts that occurs where women
and their roles are concerned between the multiple
interpretations of the sentience of womanhood, within,
across, and between cultures.
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.
Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Rituals of Movement.” The Americas Review 19.3–4 (1992): 88–99.
Cofer, Judith Ortiz. “The Art of Not Forgetting: An
Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” By Marilyn Kallet.
Prairie Schooner 68.4 (1994): 68–75.
—. “An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Speaking of the
Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. By
Jocelyn Bartkevicius. Ed. by Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary
Rohrberger and Maurice Lee. Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 1997. 65.
—. “Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Puerto Rican Voices in English:
Interviews with Writers. Carmen Dolores Hernandez.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. 95–105.
—. The Latin Deli. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1993.
—. “Puerto Rican Literature in Georgia? An Interview with
Judith Ortiz Cofer.” By Rafael Ocasio. The Kenyon
Review 14.4 (1992): 43–50.
—. Silent Dancing. A Partial Remembrance of Puerto Rican
Childhood. Houston: Arte Arte Publico Press, 1990.
Moschkovich, Judit. “But I Know You, American Woman.”
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women
of Color. Ed. by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa.
Foreword by Toni Cade Bambara. New York: Kitchen
Table: Women of Color, 1983. 79–84.
Sánchez, Marta Ester. Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A
Critical Approach to An Emerging Literature. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1985.
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