An Analysis Of Quinceañera

Most of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s work is highly biographical and inspired by her own experience as a Puerto Rican girl growing up bilingual between the two very different cultures of her native land and New Jersey. She names her grandmother as the “feisty personage” (Rivera 109) “whose voice convinced her of the power of the power of story-telling” (Das 59) and from which Cofer “inherits her storytelling vein” (Rivera 109). She realizes “early in life, [...] that storytelling was a form of empowerment” and “that the women in [her] family were passing on power from one generation to another through fables and stories. They were teaching each other how to cope with life in a world where women led restricted lives” (Rivera 106). Indeed, said stories

It is the last piece in one of her more famous books, the memoir Silent Dancing: a Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rico Childhood (1990) and reveals the mental and physical sensations Hispanic girls encounter for the first time on their coming-out day, Quinceañera. A usually joyous occasion, Cofer depicts it in a much darker light than one would expect after having read the title, as it is the bitter, negative side of entering womanhood that she chose to describe. Quinceañera is the celebration a young girl’s coming of age in some parts of Latin America – a traditional birthday party, where customs highlight God, family and friends, food, music and dance. And yet, there is definitely nothing festive about this poem – even though we are presented with some of the stages of the preparation for the event, which would thrill and make any girl happy, Cofer’s choice of words eliminates any trace of gladness for the speaker on our part by creating imagery which is on the verge of being brutal. More often than not, children are not as mature as their bodies indicate they are, and obeying tradition by imposing customs on them can be traumatizing to both the body of a child and their