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    2.RQ .7

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    Ammu
    Judith Ortiz Cofer is a Puerto Rican American writer who moved to New Jersey as a child. Much of her writing focuses on growing up Puerto Rican in the US. The excerpt is from her novel "Silent Dancing" and describes her childhood home, a tenement building called El Building, where Puerto Rican families lived segregated from their neighbors. The narrator recalls vivid childhood memories and dreams of her family living in the building, which took the form of a home movie from her past. The silent dancers in her dreams represent the Puerto Rican residents who were not allowed to socialize with others in the building.

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    2.RQ .7

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    Ammu
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    Judith Ortiz Cofer is a Puerto Rican American writer who moved to New Jersey as a child. Much of her writing focuses on growing up Puerto Rican in the US. The excerpt is from her novel "Silent Dancing" and describes her childhood home, a tenement building called El Building, where Puerto Rican families lived segregated from their neighbors. The narrator recalls vivid childhood memories and dreams of her family living in the building, which took the form of a home movie from her past. The silent dancers in her dreams represent the Puerto Rican residents who were not allowed to socialize with others in the building.

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    2.RQ_.7

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    Judith Ortiz Cofer is a Puerto Rican American writer who moved to New Jersey as a child. Much of her writing focuses on growing up Puerto Rican in the US. The excerpt is from her novel "Silent Dancing" and describes her childhood home, a tenement building called El Building, where Puerto Rican families lived segregated from their neighbors. The narrator recalls vivid childhood memories and dreams of her family living in the building, which took the form of a home movie from her past. The silent dancers in her dreams represent the Puerto Rican residents who were not allowed to socialize with others in the building.

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    5 views1 page

    2.RQ .7

    Uploaded by

    Ammu
    Judith Ortiz Cofer is a Puerto Rican American writer who moved to New Jersey as a child. Much of her writing focuses on growing up Puerto Rican in the US. The excerpt is from her novel "Silent Dancing" and describes her childhood home, a tenement building called El Building, where Puerto Rican families lived segregated from their neighbors. The narrator recalls vivid childhood memories and dreams of her family living in the building, which took the form of a home movie from her past. The silent dancers in her dreams represent the Puerto Rican residents who were not allowed to socialize with others in the building.

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    PART II, READING 7

    “Silent Dancing”
    Judith Ortiz Cofer
    Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in Puerto Rico in 1952, and moved to the mainland US with her
    family when she was four years old. A prolific writer, Ortiz Cofer has published several novels,
    as well as collections of poetry, essays and short stories, many of which have won prestigious
    awards. Much of her writing focuses on her life, sometimes fictionalized, growing up Puerto
    Rican in Patterson, New Jersey. The excerpt below comes from her novel Silent Dancing,

    Vocabulary…
    revelers (n) adept (adj) assimilation (n)
    tenement (n) demeanor (n) sensory (adj)
    vivid (adj) sensuous (adj) ubiquitous (adj)
    influx (n) yearning (v) humility (n)
    phenomenon (n) perpetually (adj) primitive (adj)
    adversary (n) permeated (v) cavernous (adj)
    upholstered (v) fraternizing (v) reverberations (n)

    Reading Questions…
    1. What do the italicized portions of the text represent? Why don’t they continue as separate
    paragraphs all the way through to the end of the text?

    2. Why does the narrator’s family live in El Building, if they are not allowed to talk to and
    befriend their neighbors? Whose rule is this?

    Discussion Questions…
    1. Why did Ortiz Cofer title her story “Silent Dancing”? How does she describe the silent
    dancers? What is their significance?

    2. Why do the narrator’s dreams (or nightmares) take the form of this home movie from her
    childhood? When she is talking about the movie itself, does it seem like a nightmare? When she
    talks about it as her dream (nightmare) what is different?

    Activities and Assignments…


    1. Childhood memories are often blurry and highly influenced by what others remember. Try to
    recall a memory from your childhood and write a short essay about it. Then ask someone else
    who was present to tell you their version of the same memory (without your input!). Compare
    the two stories. What is different? Why do things change based on who is telling the story?

    2. The Latino characters in this story talk about the discrimination they faced as a result of
    migrating from Puerto Rico (the island) to the continental United States (the mainland). What do
    you think of the ways they were treated? Is it justified? Write an essay that makes an argument
    for why they should or shouldn’t be treated this way.

    Original content by Sarah Paruolo, 2017


    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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