To Read & To Write

The feeling of not being here - or there - with half your heart belonging to one place and the other half belonging to the other, and for completely different reasons… of wanting to live your own particular way, but having others tell you to live another particular way - this may be a roller coaster of emotions familiar to most, if not all of us. The immigrant experience, however, compounds this, no matter where you’re coming from. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood is the autobiography of Judith Cortiz Cofer. She tells the story of her childhood lived between two cultures: Puerto Rico, her birthplace and place of familial ties, a place of rural abundance, and a city in New Jersey, where Spanish was spoken at home, and English in school, where Puerto Ricans lived cramped in old buildings abandoned by previous Italian and Irish immigrants, where a mother refused her own assimilation into American culture, but encouraged her daughter to “fit-in”. Cofer’...