Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood

The theme of biculturalism is highly present in these chapters. We see it first in the film footage of the party and the comparison of two Puerto Rican women living in the United States. The first woman is a “‘novia’ […] just up from the Island” whose tense posture “makes her look insecure” (90). The other is Cofer’s cousin who grew up in the US and is confident in her integration. The most notable detail here is that Cofer says her cousin has “what Puerto Ricans call ‘la mancha’ (literally, the stain: the mark of the new immigrant—something about the posture, the voice, or the humble demeanor” (90). This passage highlights the pressures experienced by those who live in two different cultures; there is a such a drive to fit in to the new culture, to integrate and assimilate, that the immigrant community even has a name for the “mark” on those who fail to achieve this.

However, there is also pressure to maintain the cultural standards of their birthplace, particularly in relation to gender and femininity. This becomes more apparent in Cofer’s dreams of the movie, during which the partygoers talk to her, discussing each other and their differing standards and cultural expectations. One woman discusses how a young recent immigrant is acting appropriately according to Puerto Rican customs, “lower[ing] her eyes as she approaches the camera like she’s supposed to” (95). She tells Cofer that the woman will make her suitor “a good Puerto Rican-style wife” (95) unless he waits too long and she becomes “corrupted by the city, just like your cousin there” (95-96). This makes explicit the tensions between the pressure to conform to American culture and the pressure to maintain traditional Puerto Rican standards. Cofer’s cousin, who just shamed by the other woman, also speaks, defending her position and committing to her assimilation. She declares, “I’m an American woman and I will do as I please” (96), turning her back on cultural signifiers associated with Puerto Rico, insisting, “I hate rice and beans. It’s what makes these women fat” (96). Cofer’s cousin, then, responds to the pressure by attempting to abandon her Puerto Rican heritage and embracing what she perceives as American culture, getting an American boyfriend and sneaking out of the house to be with him (96). Despite her bravado and resistance to societal pressures, the cousin becomes pregnant, attempts to induce a miscarriage, and is eventually sent away to Puerto Rico, to “a place so far away from civilization that you have to ride a mule to reach it” (97), showing that she cannot escape Puerto Rican standards of gendered behavior.

Cofer’s mother also relates closely to the theme of biculturalism. Unlike Cofer’s cousin, she has no desire to integrate into US culture. Indeed, she longs for Puerto Rico and attempts to recreate as much of a sense of its culture as she can. She took great comfort in living in El Building, where she “felt surrounded by her language” (90), listening to people talk and argue in Spanish and the sound of radios playing salsas all day. The poem “The Way My Mother Walked” explores how being in the US, away from her native culture, was a source of great anxiety for Cofer’s mother. Cofer describes “the morse code of her stiletto heels sending / their Mayday-but-do-not-approach into / the darkened doorways” and explains how “Alleys / Made her grasp my hand teaching me / the braille of her anxiety” (99). Her mother’s only real respite from this anxiety was returning to her apartment, which she had designed to resemble a Puerto Rican home. Indeed, as Cofer explains, “The two flights to our apartment were her holy ascension / to a sanctuary from strangers where evil / could not follow” (99).

Her mother’s anxious refusal to integrate had a profound effect on the young Cofer. With her mother refusing to learn English or adapt her behavior, mother and daughter “developed a strong symbiotic relationship, with [Cofer] playing the part of interpreter and buffer to the world for her” (103). This made Cofer’s position between two cultures even more stark: She had to operate in both worlds, in the pseudo Puerto Rico of her mother’s apartment and in the wider reality of life in the United States. Cofer admits that it was a “shock to my senses” to have to “enter and exit this twilight zone of sights and smells that meant casa to her” (127). She notes that, in moving in and out of their Puerto Rico-style home, she “crossed the border of two countries” (125), explicitly highlighting how it reinforced her sense of belonging to two worlds.

The symbol of mirrors highlights this duality and the different experiences of fragmentation and disconnection felt by Cofer and her family. She introduces this by recalling Virginia Woolf writing in her memoir about looking in the mirror and seeing a bestial face over her shoulder, at once “both alien and familiar” (124). From this, she wonders what her mother saw in the mirror, speculating that it is “Another face, an old woman nagging, nagging, at her—Don’t bury me in foreign soil…” (128). The mirror does not just show the reality of her mother’s life in the United States but an alternate version of her, a haunting reminder of her connection to another place and way of life. Cofer observes that her father rarely looked in the mirror, even when combing his hair, and wonders, “What was he afraid of seeing? Perhaps the monster of his lost potential” (129). For her father, the mirror also reflects an alternative version of his life, highlighting the fact that Puerto Rico held no opportunities for him as a gifted child but also that his potential was still wasted because his energy was spent trying to survive as an immigrant in another culture. In both cases, the mirror symbolically demonstrates the fragmentation felt by those trying to exist in two different cultures. In her own case, Cofer relates this to adolescence, observing that this is traditionally a time of disconnection and change, and that “to a person living simultaneously in two cultures this phenomenon is intensified” (124).

This brings a return to the theme of gender and the pressure to conform to Puerto Rican standards of femininity. Upon reaching adolescence, Cofer is more profoundly aware of, and influenced by, the pressure to meet a certain model of Puerto Rican womanhood. However, at this early stage, she is still unclear exactly what this means. She notes, “my mother constantly reminded me that I was now a ‘señorita’ and needed to behave accordingly; but she never explained exactly what that entailed” (125). Instead, Cofer sensed that she should be performing in a certain way and that certain models of behavior were not considered acceptable. Two characters from El Building exemplify this unacceptable behavior. Vida introduced Cofer to Americanized sexuality, focused on a self-serving obsession with beauty and dreams of making it as a Hollywood star. Cofer was drawn in by this, at once “scared and excited” (105) by the way Vida drew a gathering of male admirers in the street. However, she was also aware that this was unacceptable, noting that it “was a dangerous game for both of us, but for me especially, since my father could come home unannounced at any time and catch me at it” (105). Although Providencia was a figure of derision, she was perhaps even more threatening to the accepted standards of womanly behavior. A single mother with multiple children fathered by different men, Providencia cheerfully defied all efforts to control her sexuality and live a “respectable” life. Indeed, the Puerto Rican immigrant women around Providencia viewed her as “a walking threat to the ideals of marriage and fidelity” (111), a challenge to the rules of acceptable behavior. Through this, Cofer began to understand how the women around her maintained the very rules that governed their behavior. Although restrictive, they served a similar function to the stories and cuentos, to prescribe behavior intended to keep women safe within a rigid patriarchal society.