a prime fact of my life: you can leave the Island, master the English language, and travel as far as you can, but if you are a Latina, especially one… - Judith Ortiz Cofer

I guess I went from writing poetry as self-expression to writing poetry as self-discovery when I got a grasp of my own mortality. I think it may have to do with the death of my father, who died at a very early age.

Now, as a more mature person, I realize that keeping my Spanish was a great gift.

So my work is actually a response to the idea, like if you read my short story "Nada"-my mother's generation always had this idealized concept of the island as home and the only place where you could really be happy, like, "Oh, we were poor there, but at least we had the sun, or we had this and all this." Of course, I went back year after year, and of course I saw the sun, and it is a gorgeous island, but life was hard, difficult. So actually I don't have a nostalgic yearning for the island. I write about the dream of the island as opposed to the reality of the island.