"No matter how American I may feel-and I feel that culturally I'm more an American woman than a Puerto Rican woman, just having lived in this country for so long-I'm always reminded that people do not see me that way. And basically you are really not only a product of who you think you are but of how other people see you. So if you always have to trace your ancestry for other people, then you're not exactly feeling like part of the group. I don't see that as a problem, but I also see it as determining or defining the new race issue in the United States. When the Germans and the Irish first started coming to the United States, for one generation people asked about their accents. The next generation blended in. There is no way that I'm ever going to blend in, even if I start speaking English with a southern accent. So the color issue is always present there, for Asian Americans, for Native Americans, for blacks, for Latinos-there is no blending in, no melting into the melting pot."
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Essayists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United States20th-century poets from the United StatesNovelists from Puerto RicoPoets from Puerto Rico
Original Language: English
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Judith Ortiz Cofer
Judith Ortiz Cofer (February 24, 1952 – December 30, 2016) was a Puerto Rican writer. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the G
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