760 The American Century: Literature since 1945grandmother (“Claims” (1987)), a jilted woman (“The Woman Who Was Left at the
Altar” (1987)), and her father (“My Father in the Navy: A Childhood Memory”
(1987)) are all exposed to alternative perspectives. And the reader, the privileged
recipient of this defamiliarizing strategy, sees these characters released from the
confines of habit and convention, the familiar words of a single language. Like many
recent latina writers, Cofer is preoccupied in particular with sexual politics: the
disintegration of traditional family life, for example, under the pressure of migration
and male absence. “His homecomings,” she says of her father, “were the verses / we
composed over the years making up / the siren’s song that kept him coming back.”
It is the position of women, especially, in this fluid, plural world of the migrant that
especially fascinates her, compels her imagination. This is, not least, for its ironies.
“Latin women pray / Incense sweet churches / They pray in Spanish to an Anglo
God / with a Jewish heritage,” Cofer writes in one poem (“Latin Women Pray”
(1983)), “All fervently hoping / That if not omnipotent / At least he be bilingual.”
“In American literature, I, as a Puerto Rican child, did not exist,” the novelist and
short story writer Nicholasa Mohr (1935–) has observed; “and I as a Puerto Rican
woman do not exist now.” That is a gap, an absence Mohr herself has attempted to
fill. So has Esmeralda Santiago (1940–) in her memoir When I Was Puerto Rican
(1993) and her novel América’s Dream (1996). In novels like Nilda (1974) and Felita
(1979), and in the twelve stories of El Bronx Remembered (1976), Mohr focuses on
the experiences of children and adolescents to show how, as she puts it in the preface
to El Bronx Remembered, Puerto Ricans are “strangers in their own country ... with
a different language, culture, and racial mixture.” “Like so many before them,” Mohr
explains, “they hoped for a better life, a new future ... and a piece of that good life
known as the ‘American Dream.’ ” In Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio (1985),
Mohr then turns to the stories of older women. Six vignettes about Puerto Rican
women, representing different circumstances and ages, reveal strategies of survival.
Amy, for instance, the young widowed mother of four children in one episode,
“A Thanksgiving Celebration,” resorts to the ingenious use of turkey eggs and the
storytelling skills inherited from her grandmother to give the family a meaningful
Thanksgiving Day. “Yes,” Amy tells herself defiantly, “today’s for us, for me and the
kids.” A similar defiance shines through the story of the immigrant woman América
Gonzales, the central character in América’s Dream. A hotel maid on the island of
Vieques off the Puerto Rican coast, she is “not ashamed” of her job. “It’s housework,
women’s work,” she tells herself, “nothing to be ashamed of.” Nevertheless, she seems
trapped in a system of power, her identity and her very body controlled, not only by
the work she is required to do, but by an abusive partner. By the close of the novel,
however, América has made a new life for herself. Her partner killed by her when he
abused her one time too often, she moves to a Puerto Rican section of the Bronx. She
still bears the scars of the abusive relationship she has escaped. “They’re there to
remind her that she fought for her life, and that, no matter how others may interpret
it, she has a right to live her life as she chooses it,” the novel concludes. “It is, after all,
her life, and she’s the one in the middle of it.” The other woman of so much American
writing and discourse, América has laid claim to the right to be in charge and in theGGray_c05.indd 760ray_c 05 .indd 760 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM