The Line of the Sun by Judith Ortiz Cofer

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The 1930’s to the 1960’s

Locale: The fictitious town of Salud, Puerto Rico, and Paterson, New Jersey

Principal Characters:

• Marisol, the first-person narrator
• Gusmán, Marisol’s uncle
• Ramona, Marisol’s mother
• Rafael Santacruz, Marisol’s father, a fair-skinned sailor who attempts to separate his family from their Latin culture
• Rosa, a spiritist, called “La Cabra” (she-goat) by those who suspect her of wrongdoing

Form and Content

The Line of the Sun is a story of cultural integration embodied in the growth of the child Marisol into a young woman. That growth is complicated by her struggle to understand the unsteady connection between island Puerto Rican and mainland American life.

The novel is divided into two distinct sections brought together by Marisol’s imagination. The first six chapters recount the time before Marisol’s birth. In them, the island culture of Puerto Rico and Marisol’s genetic heritage are illustrated in her mythic landscaping of the memories of her grandparents, parents, and especially her uncle Gusmán. Chapters 7 through 12 move through the more realistic memories of Marisol’s childhood from age two until she is a senior in college.

Both sections use ritual to galvanize the protagonists to take up their quests. Gusmán, in part 1, is “exorcised” by Rosa and will follow her or her ideal for the rest of his life, living in exile on the mainland and eventually becoming Marisol’s guide. Marisol, in part 2, escaping the fire that results from the spiritist ritual conducted in El Building and forced to live in the suburbs, takes on the task of translating the new world to her mother, the motivation for translating life into words on the page. The form of the novel represents the two sides of Marisol’s character, which remain distinct and whole within her at the end.

The epilogue joins imagination and memory to reality through Marisol’s writing, her conscious affirmation of the harmony that those aspects produce in her. She explains that she has learned to understand her life by writing it as a story. She admits that she fills in the “blanks left by circumstance, lapses of memory, and failed communication,” and her ability to do so leads the reader to realize that she remains as deeply connected in knowledge and sensitivity to her island past as she is to her mainland future.

The first section begins with Marisol’s hearsay account of Mamá Cielo’s difficult pregnancy with Gusmán. Mamá Cielo, Marisol’s grandmother, becomes obsessed with disciplining Gusmán according to her religious beliefs, but it does no good. When she finally takes him to Rosa to have the demons exorcised from his body, he becomes obsessed with Rosa. Eventually, he is exiled from the household and leaves the island to find work and search for Rosa in New York. During the time of Gusmán’s adventures, Ramona, his older sister, grows into a beautiful woman, and falls in love with and marries his friend Rafael.

The second part of the novel begins with Marisol’s arrival with her mother Ramona in New York, where they have moved to follow Raphael’s Navy career. The family takes up residence in El Building, where Ramona fits in with the other women who have created a “microcosm of Island life,” although Rafael tries to remove them from their culture to plant them in the suburbs. Marisol’s childhood, therefore, remains strongly connected with her background; however, she is prevented from making friends by her father’s insistence that she attend the American Catholic school, where nonacceptance makes her feel exiled from both cultures.

Uncle Gusmán arrives at El Building when Marisol feels most lost between cultures, and he contributes to her self-esteem and growth as an individual. After the fire in El Building, she learns to live in the middle-class suburbs of America but continues to write about Gusmán.

Context

In Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the Sun, the blending of cultures is presented with an emphasis on the woman’s perspective, her universal struggle to be an individual when caught between powerful forces of cultural immersion.

Ortiz Cofer’s works highlight the role of American culture instead of viewing it from a perspective within the Latin culture. There is no magic in Ortiz Cofer’s work. Spiritism is used only as a practice, and its results can be explained by natural law.

Furthermore, Ortiz Cofer is separate from other Puerto Rican woman writers in the Nuyorican group, such as Nicholasa Mohr and Sandra María Esteves, who use Spanglish and write from the large Puerto Rican community in New York, which confirms and supports their culture. Ortiz Cofer writes from outside the Puerto Rican community and brings to her work the blending of sensitivities derived from her years among the people of New Jersey and her last seventeen years of living in a small town in Georgia.

Other Latina writers such as Cristina Garcia, born in Cuba and reared in New York City, or Sandra Cisneros, the Chicago-born daughter of Mexican American background now living in Texas, share the connection of language and cultural separation with Ortiz Cofer, but their history and experience define varied perspectives. Cuban women writers, for example, deal with political exile in their writing, but Ortiz Cofer has always been an American citizen.

The Line of the Sun is written for women whose lives separate them from their roots and place them among unfamiliar situations and strangers, in cultures that they must learn to understand in order to grow. Ortiz Cofer re-creates the past to show that it must contribute to a rich imaginative life in the future if people are to uncover deeper truths of human nature that are important for everyone in a changing world. In her Puerto Rican American reality, Judith Ortiz Cofer walks alone, on a cultural line that is constantly shifting, like Marisol’s line of the sun.

Bibliography

Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Rituals of Movement.” The Americas Review 19, nos. 3-4 (Winter, 1991): 88-99. Examines Ortiz Cofer’s poetry and prose in the light of the tension created by the opposing forces of culture between which she continuously moves. Specific analysis of ritual that forms the basis of island tradition and represses women is noted on one side of the power struggle.

Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Ritual in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the Sun.” Confluencia 8 (Fall, 1992): 61-69. Defines the “Habit of Movement,” the swing from one culture to another and back that results in instability, as the source of Ortiz Cofer’s creativity. Focuses on the use of ritual as a traditional basis of the old culture; that ritual becomes transformed into the new cultural experience of writing.

Ortiz Cofer, Judith. “Puerto Rican Literature in Georgia? An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Interview by Rafael Ocasio. The Kenyon Review 14, no. 4 (Fall, 1992): 43-50. Discusses Ortiz Cofer’s family, integration into American culture, tangential literary influences, and references to religion and politics.

Ortiz Cofer, Judith. “Speaking in Puerto Rican: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Interview by Rafael Ocasio and Rita Ganey. Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingue 17, no. 2 (May-August, 1992): 143-146. Discusses Ortiz Cofer’s use of poetry to fine tune her language and imagination. Discusses The Line of the Sun’s autobiographical connections and biculturalism.