Judith Ortiz Cofer: Selected Nonfiction Literary Elements

Creative non-fiction essays.

Various, but primarily New Jersey in the last half of the 20th century dominated by a Puerto Rican immigrant culture.

Mostly first-person through an unnamed narrator strongly implied to represent the author’s mindset, experiences and perspective.

Tone is almost always conversational, but the mood varies depending upon content and subject matter, dominated by a wistful nostalgia of an adult looking backward to a more innocent time.

The overarching protagonist of Cofer’s non-fiction taken as a whole is Puerto Rican immigrant culture. The antagonist is not so much racism and discrimination as it is widespread stereotyping and ignorance among white American society at large.

The precise conflict varies from work to work, but again the overall conflict is created out of the surplus tension between trying to assimilate into the white-dominated American culture while also retaining a sense of Puerto Rican heritage while living off the island.

Each individual work has its own climax—or, sometimes, not—but the real climax of the story of Cofer’s non-fiction is that it exists. As she observes at the end of one her essays, “I am one of the lucky ones. There are thousands of Latinas without the privilege of an education or the entrees into society that I have.” Cofer enjoys a global readership comprised of people who extend well beyond the cultural regionalism to which those who came before her was destined to discover was the last stop. Her success that has been instrumental to a flowering of Latina literature is the climax of her non-fiction.

The opening paragraph of “Volar” has the author recounting how she collected Supergirl comic books when she was a young girl. This led to fantasies of being Supergirl—complete with the blond hair and all-American looks. These fantasies included superpowers that were necessarily tailored to her own specific living conditions and she eventually learned how to “program” these powers to meet the specific needs of her “current obsession.” This memory serves as retrospective foreshadowing of the approach she would take to her writing to become a “Supergirl” of Latina lit.

N/A

In her heartfelt tribute to an influential nun/schoolteacher in “My Rosetta,” Cofer alludes to the Bob Dylan and, by extension, the countercultural revolution which characterized the 1960’s by writing Rosetta’s “campaign was ultimately success, since reform was in the air then, `the times they were a-changing’ even in the Church.” The quoted line is the title and lyrical line from one of Dylan’s signature protest songs.

“Primary Lessons” is a story about Cofer’s first day at school which ends with her being chosen to host the PTA show even though she believes that a black boy in first grade should have the choice. The essay ends on a note of complicated imagery related to that boy’s financial status resulting in not having appropriate clothing being the reason he was not chosen. Judith overhears a conversation in which her teacher responds to a suggestion that the boy wear white formal suit which could be made to fit him by saying that in that attire he “would look like a fly drowned in a glass of milk.” She later asks her mother what that imagery means and is simply told it means being “different” and that she didn’t need to worry about such a thing herself. The imagery actually works on several levels of meaning ranging from outright racist to problems of translation with which a Puerto Rican immigrant family would be very concerned.

Cofer describes a mating ritual passed down to her by her mother about life on Puerto Rico in which young women got dressed up to go with their girlfriends on Saturday night to the town plaza and promenade themselves before watchful and hopeful young men. The intent, obviously, is to gain the attention of an interested—and interesting—potential suitor. The purpose turns out to hang on a paradox, however: in order to maintain the reputation for being a “decent” girl it remained incumbent upon them to react with indifference to the overtures of any boy they actually were interested in dating.

N/A

For non-Latin men interested in Latinas, those women who spark their interest have—subconsciously at least—moved beyond stereotypes into the world of metonymic figures: “an Evita or a Maria.”

An extraordinarily common type of personification that is nevertheless almost never recognized as such becomes part of the broader patina of assimilation versus cultural purity in a description which attends humanity upon furniture: “I’d wake up in my tiny bedroom with its incongruous…white `princess’ furniture my mother had chosen for me.”