Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood by Judith Ortiz Cofer, and: A Red Bikini Dream by Max Martinez, and: Becky And Her Friends by Rolando Hinojosa

Abstract

184 Western American Literature Santa Anna’s frequent swings from Spanish royalist to sycophantic Mexi­ can royalist to federalist to dictator to exile and back to dictator confirmed his reputation as an opportunist and moral chameleon. Any man who could be a nation’s president eleven times (frequently exiled for life between terms) and help it achieve nothing more promising than his final ouster must have been embarrassing to that nation. Comedy appears in the episode of Mexico’s Pastry War (1838) in which General and President Santa Anna, charging into battle, loses a leg to a French warship’s cannon fire, and of course now has the perfect weapon for con­ tinuous re-election. The comedy thickens when he has four replacement legs carved, one for each type of social occasion and costume. It gets better four years later when Santa Anna hits upon the idea of rallying public support by re-burying his long-lost leg with full military and religious honors in Mexico City’s finest cemetery, to the accompaniment of clergy, bands, troops and a funeral procession. And this of course leads to grave-robbing and monumenttoppling a few years later when the dictator is again in ill favor with the populace. Santa Anna, who lost both Texas and the rest of the American southwest, is a humiliation and embarrassment not only to Mexico but also to Spain and all of Latin America. Michener reveals in his introduction that this intriguing small book is a long chapter he had to cut out of his monumental Texas (1985) to preserve that book’s unity. But the good dual-story stuck in the mind of one of his secretaries, Debbie Brothers, who later became a publisher of State House Press, not a State of Texas organization but a creditable small press. Michener gives plenty of credit to the researchers who helped him find these interesting stories, and a few good notes to explain other theories of what happened. Also in his intro Michener gives a fascinating glimpse of how he works as a writer and how by luck and hard recoil against the blows of age and ill health he as an old man has been able to write ten books in the last four years and get seven of them published. Not bad for a wordsmith in his eighties. STARR JENKINS Emeritus, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. By Judith Ortiz Cofer. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. 158 pages, $8.50.) A Red Bikini Dream. By Max Martinez. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. 143 pages, $8.50.) Becky And Her Friends. By Rolando Hinojosa. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. 160 pages, $8.50.) Each of these novels is a working out, a search for self in today’s multi­ cultural social hegemony. As Hispanics, Ortiz Cofer, Martinez, and Hinojosa Reviews 185 write of themselves as well as characters they create, to study lives and under­ stand what people and events form them. Ortiz Cofer sifts through dreams, memories, and cultural folklore to dis­ cover what it means to be a Puerto Rican woman. A distinctly feminine piece, Silent Dancing begins with the hour of cafe con leche, when the women of Ortiz Gofer’s family “gathered in Mama’s living room to speak of important things and to tell stories for the hundredth time, as if to each other, meant to be overheard by us girls, their daughters.” A collection of poems and personal essays, Silent Dancing isalso Ortiz Cofer’s attempt to communicate to her own daughter the tenuous position in which women of color find themselves. Ortiz Cofer concludes her collection with an indication of her inability to resolve her memories with her mother’s, which represents the clash of cultures and gen­ erations she experienced living sometimes on the continent and sometimes on the island. Recipient of the Pushcart Prize for the essay “More Room,” originally published in Puerto del Sol, Silent Dancing is a clear self-portrait all the more intimate for its story-telling quality. With warmth, clarity, understandable diversions, and comforting repetitions, Ortiz Cofer’s loose use of the oral for­ mula...