When reading the non-fiction of Puerto Rican writer Judith Ortiz Cofer, it can sometimes be hard not to hear the strains of the rousing crowd-pleaser from West Side Story, “America.” Of course, she makes it easy on the reader to hear the plaintive love ballad from the same musical, “Maria” due to an essay she wrote titled “The Myth of the Lastin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria.” But that is just one essay. When applied to the entirety of her body of work in the form of essays, it is not Maria that comes to mind, but rather Anita and Bernardo. Specifically, their political discourse disguised as a barn-burner of toe-tapping fun:
Anita: Buying on credit is so nice.
Bernardo: One look at us and they charge twice.
Anita: Lots of new housing with more space.
Bernardo: Lots of doors slamming in our face.
The opening line of “Silent Dancing” situates immediately the background of the author: “We lived in Puerto Rico until my brother was born in 1954.” Some years later, Cofer writes a follow-up to that piece titled "¿La Verdad? Notes on the Writing of Silent Dancing, a Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood" and not including the title, Puerto Rico is mentioned by name only three times and the first time occurs nearly four pages in. It takes less than half a paragraph into “I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” to learn in no uncertain terms that Cofer is not at all happy with the stereotypical portrait of Latinas engendered by the song. But then she writes something kind of odd, suggesting the Puerto Rico girls can leave the island and travel as far away from it as possible but it still won’t matter because Maria is right there following Latinas everywhere they go, “especially one like me who so obviously belongs to Rita Moreno’s gene people, the Island travels with you.”
Which makes sense, of course, except that...Rita Moreno doesn’t play Maria. She fills the role of Maria’s best friend, Anita, who is the girlfriend of her older brother. It is Natalie Wood who plays Maria in the movie and Natalie Wood is notoriously not of Hispanic descent, but Russian. Her skin was darkened wit makeup to make her look Puerto Rican. It is all rather confusing to read Cofer writing a story about Maria from West Side Story with the name Maria in the title and not mentioning Natalie Wood, but instead referencing the Latina actress in the movie who did not play the character mentioned in her title. Confusing, but absolutely appropriate. Because that is the feeling one gets reading Cofer’s non-fiction which is primarily, though not exclusively, geared toward interests of Hispanic, Latina and Puerto Rican interests.
Of her most often anthologized essays—especially in school textbooks—is “Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.” The narrative opens on the image of that hour in the mid-afternoon know as cafe con leche when the women of her family would gather in the living room to discuss anything deemed of importance or interest. A key component of this ritual was the repetition of stories already shared before: the purpose of the recurrence was that they purposely be overheard the younger girls in the family. She goes on to describe how these stories would specifically be geared toward the experience of growing up as Puerto Rican female, stories which took place back on the island or there in the city, New York. “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 I grew up in two worlds, the tropical island and the cold city. and that would later surface in my dreams and in my poetry.”
And also in her essays. There is a strong sense of the duality described here existing in the experiences of the Puerto Rican women, but there is also another kind of duality that is much more akin to the debate between Anita and Bernardo as they dance atop the apartment building in their brilliantly colored outfits. The strange part, perhaps, is that Cofer herself, as writer, is the expression of duality. Her essays reflect a duality of experience and a duality of apprehension. In her non-fiction, Judith Ortiz Cofer is one-half Anita with expressions of hope about American and dismissal of Puerto Rico and one-half Bernardo, extolling the virtues of the island left behind in comparison to the unmet expectations of the land of plenty. Not so weirdly, perhaps, a girl named Maria is nowhere to be found.
