Document Type

Honors Paper

Abstract

In her creative nonfiction memoir Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, Judith Ortiz Cofer demonstrates one way of dealing with questions of bicultural identity. This creative work, Ortiz Cofer says, arose out of necessity, out of “a need to study [herself] and [her] life in retrospect; to understand what people and events formed [her]” (Cofer 11). Ortiz Cofer felt that she needed to revisit the stories of her childhood and remember the people who told them. It was listening to the stories her grandmother told “under the mango tree that [she] first began to feel the power of words” (Cofer 76). She desired to use this “power” to understand herself and her story as well as the stories of others.

Date Accepted/Awarded

Spring 2011

Terms of Use and License Information

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

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