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dedicated as Laviera and Pietri are to registering the truth of his culture. In “Mountain

Building,” for instance, past and present converge, as the mountains where the

Indians once lived metamorphose into high-rise buildings where Puerto Ricans now

live side by side with other impoverished ethnic groups, among them later

generations of Indians. “It is,” the poet observes, “the same people in the windowed /

Mountains.”

The poetry of Cruz represents, in a way, a transformation of literary English

thanks to its contact with Spanish. Witty, often erudite and sometimes violent, it

exists at the intersection between English and Spanish literary cultures. So, in

another way, do the poetry and prose of Aurora Levins Morales (1954–) and Judith

Ortiz Cofer (1952–). Morales was born in Puerto Rico, brought up in Chicago and

rural New Hampshire, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Her ethnic

origins are a similarly rich mix. “I am a child of the Americas, / ,” she writes in “Child

of the Americas” (1986), “a light-skinned mostiza of the Caribbean, / a child of many

diaspora, born into this continent at a crossroads.” “I am a U.S. Puerto Rican Jew,”

she adds in the same poem; “my first language was spanglish.” And, in order to

explain her life at the crossroads, she draws on several traditions: notably, Latin

American writers like Pablo Neruda, American feminists such as Adrienne Rich, and

the African-American author who calls herself a womanist, Alice Walker. Morales

identifies herself passionately, not just with latina women, but American women of

color. She uses the signs and symbols of her Puerto Rican and Jewish inheritance to

link the experiences of her own body to the body politic, not just on a national but

an international level – she is, for example, deeply concerned with the Middle East

conflict. Transnational and transcultural in her concerns, she is also transgenerational –

her 1986 book, Getting Home Alive, for instance, was co-authored with her mother

Rosa, and she has described it as a “cross-fertilization” between her mother’s voice

and her own. Out of this rich brew, Morales seeks to produce a new identity for

herself, the strength of which derives precisely from its plural origins. “I was born at

the crossroads / ,” Morales declares, “and I am whole.” And, like so many American

writers before her, Morales sees this her life as representative; she is bragging for

humanity, rather than herself.

“It was Puerto Rico waking up inside her,” one of the prose pieces of Morales

begins. That is a constant theme of the stories by Judith Ortiz Cofer gathered

together in An Island Like You (1995) and The Year of Our Revolution (1998). Born in

Puerto Rico and brought up in Paterson, New Jersey, Cofer invests many of her

characters with the duality of her own inheritance and experience. Typically, the

American-born teenagers who form the continuous and recursive spine of the

stories in this collection live between two competing cultures. And a moment of

encounter with Puerto Rican heritage supplies the narrative substance and dramatic

crisis. Her poems, in turn, show what Cofer herself has called the “habit of movement”

between the several levels or overlays of cultures. She has the habit of gathering

words or expressions from Puerto Rican Spanish, then recasting them into English

poems in which meaning is transported across linguistic borders. The result is a

mapping of the experience of intercultural life. The characters in her poetry, like her

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