Last reviewed: June 2017
Writer of prose, poetry, and drama
February 24, 1952
Hormigueros, Puerto Rico
December 30, 2016
Louisville, Georgia
Born in Hormigueros, near Mayagüez in southwest Puerto Rico, Judith Ortiz Cofer (ohr-TEEZ CO-fur) spent part of every year in Paterson, New Jersey, as she was growing up. Her father, Jesús Ortiz Lugo, who served in the U.S. Navy, was assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard during many of his service years. Although Ortiz’s mother, Fanny Morot Ortiz, saw to it that the family spent part of every year in Puerto Rico, they lived for long periods in Paterson, which became the setting of a great many of Ortiz’s stories. Some of these stories center on El Building, as their apartment house was called when the Jewish tenants left and large numbers of Puerto Ricans moved in. Ortiz Cofer calls El Building a vertical barrio.
{$S[A]Cofer, Judith Ortiz;Ortiz Cofer, Judith}
The young Judith Ortiz attended school in Puerto Rico, where she went to San José Catholic School in San Germán, and in New Jersey, where she attended public schools and later St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Paterson. When she was sixteen, her father suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to retire from the Navy. The family moved to Augusta, Georgia, where Judith completed high school and enrolled in Augusta College, from which she graduated in 1974. She received a master’s degree from Florida Atlantic University in 1977 and that year also studied at Oxford University.
Her first book, a reflective collection of stories entitled Latin Women Pray, appeared in 1980. Ortiz Cofer turned this collection into a play, which was produced in Atlanta in 1984. In 1981, Ortiz Cofer received a fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, where she subsequently served on the administrative staff during the summers of 1983 and 1984. During that time she published The Native Dancer and Among the Ancestors, and these works, as well as the poetry collection Reaching for the Mainland, appear to be a direct outcome of the Bread Loaf experience. Ortiz married Charles John Cofer during her sophomore year in college, and she taught bilingually from the time of her graduation until she completed the master’s degree. She thereupon taught English in various Florida colleges until 1984, when she joined the faculty of the University of Georgia at Athens, where she was appointed to teach creative writing.
Ortiz Cofer’s first volume of poetry, Reaching for the Mainland, which she later revised and expanded, focuses on the conflicts inherent in Puerto Ricans’ struggle to adapt to the mainland environment and to master the language, the history, and the customs of a new society. In Terms of Survival she explores some of the same problems but also hones in on the Puerto Rican dialect, emphasizing its ability to dictate the roles that males and females play in society simply through its linguistic conventions. The book is psychologically challenging and thought-provoking.
The Line of the Sun, Ortiz Cofer’s first full-fledged novel, which is set both in Salud, Puerto Rico, and in Paterson, is concerned with immigration and with the problems of adjusting to a new society. This theme also pervades Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, a collection of autobiographical essays, many of which focus on the dynamics of the vertical barrio in which Ortiz Cofer spent major portions of her childhood years.
The Latin Deli, a collection of short prose pieces and poems, captures well the outlook of transplanted Puerto Ricans, most of whom harbor the dream of working on the mainland to assure their financial security but then returning to “The Island” to live out the rest of their lives. The principals in this book cling to their old ways; the women, for example, cook the green plantains they buy at inflated prices in the neighborhood bodegas, where they also purchase the overpriced Bustelo coffee without which their afternoon coffee klatches would lack authenticity.
In this collection, especially in the story entitled “Not for Sale,” Ortiz Cofer focuses on the clash of cultures. Ortiz Cofer broaches the conflict between Puerto Ricans and African Americans in the story “The Paterson Public Library,” in which Lorraine, a black bully intimidates the story’s Puerto Rican protagonist for purely racial reasons.
Ortiz Cofer died at home in Louisville, Georgia, on December 30, 2016. She was sixty-four years old.