Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood

The power of stories is a recurring theme in the text. It often revolves around Mamá, whose telling of traditional cuentos, or parables, was a big influence on Cofer. Indeed, it was through Mamá’s stories that she first began to “feel the power of words” (76). She reflects that these stories had the ability to make her and the other children “forget the heat, the mosquitos, our past in a foreign country, and even the threat of the first day of school looming just ahead” (76). Even while she was away in the United States, these stories maintained her connection to Puerto Rico, traveling with her as her “winter store” (63). In this sense, this theme intersects with the theme of bicultural upbringing and the ways Cofer remains connected to one culture while immersed in another.

Perhaps more importantly, however, Cofer shows that stories have the power to educate. Here again, the theme intersects with other themes. Many of Mamá’s stories were intended to educate girls and women about gender, acceptable models of femininity, and the dangers of being a woman in a patriarchal society. In short, they were stories that showed what it means to be “to be a woman, more specifically, a Puerto Rican woman” (14). In this, they also intersect with the focus on unreliable memory and the truth, since it is through these early tales that Cofer learns that a story does not have to be strictly true to be powerful. As she observes of one such story, “the name, or really any of the facts, were not important, only that a woman had allowed love to defeat her” (20). This early immersion in an oral tradition concerned with a higher truth beyond the mere recollection of facts profoundly influenced Cofer’s writing, setting her on the path to writing Silent Dancing, which embraces that same spirit of storytelling.

Gender, particularly cross-cultural models of femininity and womanhood, is a key theme of the text. Initially, it is concerned primarily with Puerto Rican gender roles and the ways girls and young women learn acceptable models of behavior and attitude. This is primarily taught, with varying degrees of subtly, through stories. This is particularly true of the traditional cuentos and contemporary fables told by Mamá, which often balanced celebrations and warnings. For example, Mamá often told traditional tales of María Sabida that celebrated “the ‘prevailing woman’—the woman who ‘slept with one eye open’” (76) and her use of cunning and wit to outsmart men. However, figures of celebrated womanhood are “by implication contrasted to María la Loca, that poor girl who gave it all up for love, becoming a victim of her own foolish heart” (76). Through this combination of revered example and cautionary tale, Mamá’s stories demonstrate acceptable ways to perform womanhood and illustrate the dangers women face navigating Puerto Rico’s patriarchal culture.

Later in the text, this theme intersects with the theme of bicultural upbringing, focusing on the clashes between traditional Puerto Rican gender roles and Cofer’s growing exposure to America’s less traditional ideologies. This appears in various forms throughout the text. For example, we see it in Cofer’s dream of an old silent home movie in which different Puerto Rican immigrant women argue about acceptable forms of behavior, one warning that “she will be corrupted by the city” (95-96) and another countering that “I’m an American woman and I will do as I please” (96). It is also apparent in Puerto Rican immigrant characters like Vida and Providencia, who defy traditional models of chaste and “respectable” womanhood by embracing overtly sexualized identities, much to the shock and derision of the other women around them.

This intersection of gender and biculturalism is perhaps most stark in Cofer’s return to Puerto Rico as an adolescent girl. Used to freedom and autonomy in the United States, Cofer feels constricted by the attitudes of the older Puerto Rican women who “acted as if you carried some kind of time-bomb in your body that might go off at any minute” (140). This is a particularly significant moment in Cofer’s treatment of gender because it offers greater depth to the reader’s understanding of Puerto Rican gender roles and how women navigate them through female solidarity and community. Once old enough to identify the subtleties in women’s speech, Cofer began to identify “the subtext of sexual innuendo, to detect the sarcasm, and to find the hidden clues to their true feelings of frustrations in their marriages and in their narrowly circumscribed lives as women in Puerto Rico” (142). In this way, Cofer began to see that Puerto Rican womanhood is far more complex and nuanced than she previously realized.