“The Myth of the Latin Woman

In “The Myth of the Latin Woman”, Judith Ortiz Cofer intends to dispel several stereotypes about Hispanic women by expressing her own personal stories and observations. She starts off by relating an experience that happened on a bus in London, then she goes into explaining how her parents made her home in America a microcosm of the home they used to have in Puerto Rico. She explains why Puerto Rican women dress the way they do—because they’re protected by an honor system—and goes on to relate two more encounters with people who mistake her for someone else because of her appearance. In weaving her personal stories with explanations of stereotypes of Hispanic women, Cofer tries to show what stereotypes exist—the menial and the seductress—in order to condemn assumptions and present a more “universal truth” about Latinas.

Cofer uses several modes to get her aims across. She mainly uses the mode of example in order to show her audience how stereotypes can be encountered and experienced by a wide variety of Hispanic women. She illustrates the drunk Irish tenor on the bus to Oxford who serenades her with the song “Maria” from West Side Story. She gives a scene in which a drunk “Daddy” serenades her with “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” and then goes on into an obscene revision of “La Bamba”. She also gives the example of the woman at her poetry reading who orders coffee from Cofer, mistaking her for a worker instead of the presenter. These examples serve to prove Cofer’s idea that most people, upon seeing her typical “Rita Moreno” looks, will intrude into her life with obnoxious, wrong, and offensive assumptions. Cofer also uses the mode of compare and contrast to support these examples. She contrasts herself to any Anglo woman, whom she is sure would not be treated so offensively by “Daddy”. She compares the Puerto Rican girls, who “wear everything at once”, to their Anglo peers on Career Day to show that Hispanic females are sometimes inappropriately dressed. Her