Analysis Of Latin Women Pray By Judith Ortiz Cofer

“I was chaos on the first day, waiting for the Word,” Judith Ortiz Cofer, a longtime Puerto Rican mother resident of Georgia once said. She became one of the numerous Latina writers whose reputation rose during the 1980s and 1990s. Her stories about coming-of-age experiences between the Puerto Rican communities and New York City were what gave her poems and essays the basis about the cultural conflicts of immigrants. Having a father in the U.S. Navy, Judith spent her a lot of her early years traveling back and forth between Puerto Rico and Patterson New Jersey to stay with her grandmother while her father was away. Ortiz Cofer’s constant traveling exposed her to the difference in cultural life between America and back in Puerto Rico. Judith gained a passion for storytelling from the tales her grandmother would tell of

their family (Acosta-Belen, Edna).
After reading “Latin Women Pray,” it is prevalent that the theme of male absence and women who wait on men is perhaps the major point touched.

Also, there is information about the historical background of Puerto Ricans and other minorities in the military as a way of life that divided their families yet gave them the experience of moving from one place to another. She focuses on what her readers will feel while reading her works. She intends to create responses between each reader by writing in such a way that triggers emotion from an audience to another. For instance, she tells stories of the woman immigrants through her experiences as a migrant. She also uses her skill of storytelling to display those experiences in the novel “The Line of the Sun,” where Cofer creates an autobiographical character. On the whole, her writing style mostly touches the themes of ethnicity, feminism, and progression; however, when Ortiz Cofer narrates about women's point of view instead of concentrating on the stereotypical role of women, she goes beyond normal expectations and writes about various alternatives to growing up as a woman in society (Gordon,

Stephanie).
Judith Ortiz Cofer has a great commitment to her community shown in the poem "El Olvido" which has a main theme of culture. The opening line of the poem says: "It is a dangerous thing to forget the climate of your birthplace,” uses the word climate suggesting weather conditions which are a form of feeling and emotion to emphasize her point that a person can leave where he/she have come from, but that feeling of where they have been should never leave. By using those words, it allows the reader to recognize Cofer’s style of writing in being precise but vague for a diverse audience. The author walks a fine line between writing for her own group and writing for the general audience in most of her works because she introduces Spanish and some culture items from the island but then translate them into English and U.S. culture. The style becomes an intercultural mixture.
According to Maya Socolovsky, “critics often describe Judith Ortiz Cofer's work as written by the side of two cultures: the Puerto Rican one of her parents and ancestors, and the American one of her peers and her adolescence.” Although this is very common for multicultural writers, Ortiz Cofer has challenged publishing companies' desires to categorize her work. In one example, Maya quotes a publisher as saying, "We don't know where to put Judith Cofer. Judith Cofer is writing in standard English, and she lives in Georgia." Although in part Ortiz Cofer agrees with this statement by admitting that her writing was somewhere in between her two cultures being Latin and American. She now considers herself as not being mainstream in the following quote: “I'm not a mainstream North American writer, but I publish in mainstream North American journals. I'm not an island writer."
Altogether, Judith’s publications include books of poetry, a novel, and collections of stories and essays that are written from the perspective of a latina, migrant herself, who focuses on the emotion of her readers through the themes of ethnicity, feminism, cultural conflicts and patriotism. She admits that her writing was dedicated to a diverse audience and that although before she was in between the American and the Latin writing, which sometimes could confuse the reader, she has now set a certain perspective that does not define her as North American or island writer.