“Cold/Hot, English/Spanish”: The Puerto Rican American Divide in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing

On more than one occasion Puerto Rican American writer Judith Ortiz Cofer has been questioned about her use of standard American English to express the bicultural experiences of the immigrant Puerto Ricans featured in her poetry and prose fiction. The suggestion that her linguistic selection renders suspect her ethnic identity as well as the authenticity of her literary accounts is never far from the surface of such inquiries. Ortiz Cofer's response, however, has been consistently unapologetic. In a recent interview conducted by Rafael Ocasio, she speaks forcefully about the "varied and ever changing" character of the Puerto Rican experience ("Infinite Variety" 735), asserting, "I want my work to be recognized as coming out of the Puerto Rican tradition, even though it sounds different" (734). An earlier interview reports her theorizing even more plainly on the subject: "There is not just one reality to being a Puerto Rican writer. I am putting together a different view" (Ocasio, "Puerto Rican Literature" 45). Ortiz Cofer's response is significant not only because it rejects facile definitions of cultural identity, definitions based almost exclusively on linguistic proficiency, but more importantly, because it challenges writers and scholars to adopt a more nuanced approach in their investigation of Latin peoples. As Eliana Ortega and Nancy Saporta Sternbach argue in their essay on contemporary Latina literature, it is incumbent upon those in the field of Latin American studies to consider more carefully the ways in which race, class, gender, linguistic affinity, and other social and material circumstances contribute to a more complex, more diversified account of what it means to be a person of Latin origin (7-8). Such is the defining issue at stake not only in Ortiz Cofer's status as an English-dominant Latina writer, (1) but a defining issue at stake in much of her work as well, most notably in her cross-genre autobiography entitled Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. In addition to being a text that affirms the cultural ethos of an author who "sounds different" from her Spanish-speaking contemporaries, Silent Dancing breaks new ground in Latino/a literature by speaking specifically about the bicultural experience of Puerto Rican Americans, and by demonstrating the way in which this experience is fundamentally distinct from that found in Chicano/a literature. The purpose of this paper is to chart the nature and source of these differences. In particular, I borrow from Gloria Anzaldua's theories of border identity to argue that the cultural reality encountered by the characters in Silent Dancing is neither random nor monolithically shared, but one that is shaped instead by the unique physical reality that divides these characters from their homeland. Unlike the US Texas-Mexican border which functions prominently in the formation of what Anzaldua calls the "new mestiza consciousness" of Mexican Americans, the Puerto Rican American border is not a land formation, and hence it has an entirely different psychic impact on those who traverse it. This notion is one of the most compelling insights of Ortiz Cofer's work. Silent Dancing thus not only troubles the indiscriminate application of Anzaldua's mestiza consciousness to all border culture Latino/as, but, in a much broader sense, it troubles the conclusions of any cultural analysis that would deny the "infinite variety" of the Latino/a experience. As complex as Silent Dancing is in its alternating combination of poetry and creative nonfiction essay, (2) the story itself is simple: Ortiz Cofer narrates the events of her childhood in a series of chronologically-ordered vignettes that detail her experience as a young girl shuttled back and forth between her grandmother's casa in a small Puerto Rican village and her family's American home in Paterson, New Jersey. Ortiz Cofer's father works in the Navy shipyards of Brooklyn Yard, a job that requires him to take leave of his family for months at a time. …