Assignment 7

Judith Ortiz Cofer: “Latin Women Pray” (p. 605)

Cofer is one of a number of Latina writers who rose to prominence during the 1980s and 1990s. Her stories about coming-of-age experiences in Puerto Rican communities outside of New York City and her poems and essays about cultural conflicts of immigrants to the U.S. mainland have made Ortiz Cofer a leading literary interpreter of the U.S.–Puerto Rican experience. Since this lyric’s twenty lines of free verse are clear, the most interesting approach is to characterize its tone–that is, the relationship between the poet and the women she is describing. It is a safe bet that the women themselves would not (could not?) Describe their situation in the same way. Clearly, the description of God’s lineage and the contrast between His skin color and that of the praying women–the names in line 12 suggest a composite portrait–into the generalizations she makes about them. As befits a poem that is light rather than heavy-handed, amused rather than angry, the poem comes to a witty conclusion: however alienated the poet thinks these women should be from this God who has been “unmoved by their persistent prayers,” she understands that if He could at least speak Spanish, they would accept the oxymoron of a powerless God.