Writing Off the Hyphen: New Critical Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora

12. Translating “Home” in the Work of Judith Ortiz Cofer

256 JOANNA BARSZEWSKA MARSHALL ---------------------------------------------------------------T he narrator of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s first novel, The Line of the Sun, is Marisol. When her father, Raphael, joins the navy, she moves from Puerto Rico to New Jersey with her mother, Ramona, and her younger brother, Gabriel. They live in an apartment house in Patterson with other Puerto Rican migrants, as well as her father during his visits home. In this place, known as “El Building,” the residents create a community that reminds Marisol of a “vertical pueblo” where life is lived at a “high pitch.”1 Believing that “all could be kept the same within the family as it had been on the Island,” the residents produce a “microcosm of Island life” in which they re-create “every day the same routines they had followed in their mamá’s houses so long ago” (170, 223). Marisol details the similarities of El Building’s sounds and smells, its staple foods (chiefly rice and beans), its typical decor (with the Sacred Heart over the kitchen table and Mary “smiling serenely from walls”), its gestures of hospitality (such as open doors), its recourse to spiritists and the cleansing power of agua florida, its beehive-like activity, intrigues, gossip groups, and domestic quarrels, its fights, separations, and reconciliations , to those of a barrio on the Island. Yet Marisol concludes that the Island way of life has been “lost” and that the attempt to re-create it in cold rooms above frozen ground is evidence of a “cultural schizophrenia” that only enhances a “fantasy” of 12 TRANSLATING “HOME” IN THE WORK OF JUDITH ORTIZ COFER T JOANNA BARSZE WSK A MARSHALL living as a Puerto Rican and even turns that way of life into a “parody” (170, 223). Although she feels “deprived” of the Island, she feels embarrassed about living in a “crowded, noisy tenement, which the residents seemed intent on turning into a bizarre facsimile of an Island barrio” (220, italics added). To some extent, Marisol is simply a typical adolescent—struggling for independence and confused, simultaneously identified with and embarrassed by her parents and their way of life. For example, Marisol thinks that a spiritist meeting she helps Ramona organize is a “silly game”; like the life of El Building in general, this game is not only a “fantasy ” but also “absurd.” But when Ramona excludes Marisol from the “fun” part, Marisol shouts her fury; when Ramona then slaps her, Marisol ends up trembling “from the pure hatred of a mother only a teenager can feel” (253–254). The context of their struggle, however, indicates that something more than typical adolescent feelings are involved. For Marisol is similarly embarrassed by her mother’s “wild beauty” that makes her akin to a “circus freak” and also by the fears that Ramona advertises in a foreign language (174, 220). Like the children in Silent Dancing, Ortiz Cofer’s memoirs, Marisol would prefer to be a cultural “chameleon” who blends in with her surroundings.2 Instead, she feels that she does not “fit” her environment; and she resents her parents, blaming them for the choices that put her in this position. Marisol believes her life would be more normal, more natural, if she had been raised on the Island, where the children use the weirdness of pueblo eccentrics to measure their own normalcy (SD, 17). But what seems normal and natural to children on the Island seems strange and “out of place” in New Jersey, where Marisol uses middle-class normalcy to measure Puerto Rican weirdness. So what seems bizarre to Marisol about Puerto Rican life in the States is related, not so much to its being a fantasy or a facsimile, but to its being Puerto Rican. The characters’ struggles over their way of life, over what and where home should be, are not simply generational ones. The idea that Puerto Rican homes and Puerto Rican behavior belong to the Island, that they are natural there and unnatural elsewhere, is part of a wider, politically charged discourse. As Jorge Duany observes in The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move, an island-centered canon has historically “promote[d] the idea that islanders were more culturally authentic”; and the founding myth of Puerto Ricanness as a mix of the Spanish, the African, and the “Home” in the Work of Judith Ortiz Cofer 257 Taíno shuns anything American as a corrupting “foreign influence...