“I will walk away on my own, phantom-footed”: Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Invocation of the Constant Move

Cultural production in the diaspora foregrounds themes of movement, border crossing, and the struggle over what and where home should be. To venture onto the road (or onto the airplane) and to grapple with the concept of home are key experiences for Puerto Rican Americans. For Jorge Duany, Puerto Rican realities are constructed to a large degree by the experience of el vaivén, or the back-and-forth movement “of people [that] creates a porous border zone” (“Nation on the Move” 19). Traveling over the western Atlantic in a pattern of pendular migrations¹ is a striking example of the “spreading of seed,” as the Greek roots of the word diaspora suggest (Otero 276). Among the artistic responses to this experience is a nostalgic and ultimately conservative placing of a past home in a present space. Texts by some writers of the early Nuyorican movement, such as Piri Thomas or the poets published in Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero’s Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975), relocate the island home to New York City as a means of self-defense and self-affirmation. Other authors, rejecting the idea of a newfound physical home, contend that the notion of a home for the exiled is only possible in literature.² In recent texts, a new interpretation of the idea of home in diaspora has emerged: instead of, on the one hand, a transferred, idealized, or suspended home between the present and the past, or on the other hand, a home bound to a written text, authors propose the model of home as movement. The notion of dwelling, they suggest, does not necessarily have to be associated with the concepts of stasis and origin; instead, it may also be constituted through travel.

A case in point is the writing of Puerto Rican American author Judith Ortiz Cofer. This essay charts the presentation and signification of movement in several of her works; it focuses on Ortiz Cofer’s elaboration of the act of walking in order to argue that it is through such physical and individual exercise that her characters create mobile spaces of residence. Although the notion of home is present in diverse ways in Ortiz Cofer’s texts, the description of a home in motion has become a key motif in her more recent work, especially in her poetry. Such an account of dwelling in travel is different from what has become one of the central critical concepts in this field, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s notion of nomadology. According to the two philosophers, nomadology entails a radical deterritorialization (Qu’est-ce 186). The nomadic subject travels through spaces of no horizon, without “any . . . generic axis or deep structure” (“Rhizome” 101). Language, in their view, does not connect spaces; it is a decentering force itself. In contrast, the notion of home is not abandoned in Ortiz Cofer’s writing but remains a central point of reference—although in a decidedly new fashion, echoing descriptions in anthropological studies according to which “culture may be as much a site of travel as of dwelling” (Marshall 262).

Ortiz Cofer’s fictional accounts of walking function as literary counterparts to Michel de Certeau’s suggestion of performative semantics, according to which the steps themselves fashion and model the surrounding space and may even make it a momentary place of home. Certeau asserts that the story “begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together” (97). Certeau’s description of the beginning of narration through the minute movements of the feet is of particular interest in the context of this study. The human being’s steps—minimal, idiosyncratic, and not quantifiable according to general norms of measurement—produce individual spaces by continually fathoming different possibilities...