A Summary of ‘Silent Dancing’ by Judith Ortiz Cofer An influential writer that contributed to the Latina literature that came out of the 1980s and 90s is Judith Ortiz Cofer. Ortiz Cofer was born in Puerto Rico in 1952. Her parents were young, and the best way her father found to support her family was to join to U.S. Navy. The family moved to Paterson, New Jersey, when Ortiz Cofer was only three, so the family could be closer to where her father was stationed at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. When her father was sent out on missions, her mother took the kids and herself to stay with Ortiz Cofer’s grandmother. This clash of cultures, the Latina homeland and the foreign mainland, spurred Ortiz Cofer’s unique writing style. She acknowledges her grandmother for teaching her “…storytelling is a form of empowerment…passing on power from one generation to another’ (45). Ortiz Cofer has fine-tuned her storytelling to ‘reverberate with symbols and images’ (45) by reflecting on experience. Dabbling in many of the writing styles, she doesn’t favor one in particular, but enjoys combining them. In this selection, “Silent Dancing”, she has done that by writing anecdotes on a home video of a New Year’s Eve party, alternating between paragraphs reflecting on growing up in New Jersey. The home video, made by her maternal uncle at a New Year’s Eve party, is ‘grainy and of short duration’ (46) but Ortiz Cofer was grateful it existed, for the ‘visual aid’ (46) it provided her memory of life at point in time. She notes it was the ‘only complete scene in color’ (46) she can bring to mind from those years, the others being ‘in shades of gray’ (46). She learned as a child that gray was a color of hardship. This symbolism is strengthened by her recounting her father’s ‘painful lessons about prejudice’ (47) when looking for an apartment for the family. The Latina were immigrating at a rapid