Product Description

Cofer tells readers of the women's lives that entangled with hers in El Building in Patterson, New Jersey. A community transplanted from what they now view as an island paradise, these Puerto Rican families yearn for the colors and tastes of their homeland. As they carve out their lives as Americans, their days are filled with drama, success and tragedy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #205569 in Books
• Published on: 1995-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 182 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for its celebration of diversity, Cofer's collection of essays, fiction and poetry depicts the Puerto Rican immigrant experience.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Poet and novelist Ortiz Cofer offers her readers an affecting view of Puerto Rican New York in this autobiographical assortment of essays and poems. Her stories celebrate, mourn, and honor Latinas, collectively and individually, and also consider the influential men in her own life: the author's beloved, unknowable, philandering father; the first boy she loved; her heartbreakingly deteriorating grandfather. The alternating sections of evocative prose and narrative poetry first construct a vision of life in the busy apartments of El Building and the shops of its neighborhood, then comment directly on self, heritage, culture clash, racism, and sexism. A strong, moving set of daughter-poems finishes this slim but substantial volume. Recommended for ethnic, womens', memoir, and larger general collections.
- Janet Ingraham, Worthington P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Ortiz Cofer's collection of her stories, essays, and poems is a delicious smorgasbord of the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds recalled from a cross-cultural girlhood. Whether delineating the yearnings for an island homeland or the frustrations of a first-generation immigrant's struggles to grow up in "el building" in a New Jersey barrio, Ortiz Cofer's work is rich in evocative detail and universal concerns. On the whole, it constitutes a coming-of-age-in-America saga focused on a young Judith baffled by anti-Hispanic prejudice, by Puerto Rican and black hostilities, by the Roman Catholic conflict between flesh and spirit, and by the challenge of an adolescence spent in "cultural compromise." Part of that coming-of-age, Ortiz Cofer shows us, was the quickening of the pulse when entering a library, for books "contained most of the information I needed to survive in two languages and two worlds. . . . Reading books empowered me." Whitney Scott