From Home to School and Back: Conflicting Identities in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Call Me María: A Novel in Letters, Poems and Prose

Abstract

This chapter engages with and expands on a segment of literary scholarship on Puerto Rican American author Judith Ortiz Cofer that sees her work as unveiling intricate and conflicting identity negotiations. Her second young adult novel, Call Me María: A Novel in Letters, Poems, and Prose (2004) fits this paradigm, as it avoids any simplistic attempts at identity resolution. This can be proved by focusing on how the main character, a Puerto Rican migrant girl, negotiates her identity in and through the spaces of the home and the school. First, I draw on Manuel Castells’ notion of “space of places” to analyze the socio-cultural discontinuities that María experiences when moving from the home to the school setting, hinting at the complex and multiple identity positions she occupies. Secondly, this chapter adopts a dialectical approach to social spaces to examine how the previously acknowledged gaps cannot always be maintained, pointing towards a more layered sense of spaces and identities.