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  • The Arrival of the Heavenly Corps
  • Judith Ortiz Cofer (bio)

They come to our Island on a mission, having heard some variation of a professor’s You must go see for yourselves how people in the rest of the world live, spoken in the vatic tone of one who may have accompanied MLK Jr. on a freedom walk, or helped levitate the Pentagon in protest of an immoral war. The young women travel south from their First World in protective packs, making their way cautiously toward the front lines, outfitted in durable adventure clothing, the latest lightweight survival gear, and carrying adequate supplies of sealed and certified bottles of American water. They are tender young things, Coppertone babies, who lug around, in the fierce tropical heat, a social conscience bigger and heavier than their backpacks. And the arrival of the radiant reformers is watched with great interest by the women of our pueblo, who take turns at their windows and balconies. Later, they will gather together in the plaza, to fan themselves on shady benches, and study more closely the lovely rubias, who have come to save them from dire poverty, the risks of standing water, and invisible parasites. Later, over their midafternoon cafés, las señoras will discuss the possible bleaching and straightening alchemy that may transform their black-as-the-bottom-of-a-cauldron, their persistent question-mark-curly mestiza hair, into the yellow silk crowning the heads of their own government-approved host of angels. [End Page 155]

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Judith Ortiz Cofer has poems, essays, and stories in recent issues of the Southern Review, Blackbird, Image, and North American Review. Her books include A Love Story Beginning in Spanish, poems; Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer, a collection of essays (both from the U of Georgia P); The Meaning of Consuelo, a novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); and others.

“Sometime during the 1960s I became aware that the planet had been partitioned into three ‘worlds,’ and that my country had been assigned to the third.”

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