When we knew they were busy reading their Corin Tellado romance novels to each other, and watching their telenovelas, we locked the bedroom door to whoever’s apartment it was. They’d recently started calling us by our baby names and trying to make us their nenas again, offering to take us shopping and sharing their Vanidades Magazines in Spanish. We saw their fear, and we played up to it. “Ramonita, Carmencita, Inesita, Vengan! Let’s go downtown and do a little shopping.” We saw it was a trap. They told each other where we were and paid each other visitas when we happened to be there. They claimed it was to roll each other’s hair in those hideous pink curlers, or to exchange books and magazines in Spanish. But we knew they were spying on us. We didn’t fall for it, no Señoras. “No tengo ganas,” one of us was sure to say, not in the mood for shopping, or, “We are working on el homework.” We knew our mothers wanted to curb our tastes and desires and we said “no, gracias.” It was the year of diminutives.
Author: Judith Ortiz Cofer
Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in Hormigueros, a small town in Puerto Rico, and raised in Patterson, New Jersey. For many years she taught at The University of Georgia, where she was Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emerita. She was the author of A Love Story Beginning in Spanish: Poems (2005); Call Me Maria (2006), a young adult novel; The Meaning of Consuelo (2003), a novel; Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer (2000), a collection of essays; An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (1995), a collection of short stories; The Line of the Sun (1989), a novel; Silent Dancing (1990), a collection of essays and poetry; two books of poetry, Terms of Survival (1987) and Reaching for the Mainland (1987); and The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry (1993), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Her work appeared in The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Glamour and other journals, and has been included in numerous textbooks and anthologies including: Best American Essays 1991, The Norton Book of Women's Lives, The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, The Pushcart Prize, and the O. Henry Prize Stories.
Judith Ortiz Cofer passed away on December 30th, 2016. Her extraordinary life and work were celebrated at The University of Georgia on January 27th, 2017.