48 pages • 1 hour read
American History
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Themes
Migration and Displacement
Several characters in “American History” experience and contend with feelings of displacement. Elena’s parents moved to New Jersey from Puerto Rico, while Eugene’s parents have relocated to Paterson from their native Georgia. Both Elena and Eugene’s fathers are in New Jersey for work and the hope of prosperity, and both Elena and Eugene’s mothers experience unhappiness with the new setting, albeit for different reasons and in different ways. Eugene’s parents express their disaffection through isolation, while Elena and her family—particularly her mother—build friendships in their new community. The white family’s isolation curdles to hostility during Elena’s meeting with Eugene’s mother, who openly expresses her aversion to Elena and the other residents of El Building. Cofer thus illustrates the culture shocks that both sets of parents have experienced, as well as the habits, traditions, and biases they have brought with them to a place they are reluctant to call home.
The children’s experiences differ from those of their parents. Eugene does not seem to share his mother’s prejudices and would likely be happy to create a new life for himself in New Jersey. However, his parents’ racism and his own regional identity conspire to isolate him; his peers make fun of his accent, and his mother thwarts his friendship (or possible romance) with Elena—the only person to have reached out to him and shown him kindness.
Elena, meanwhile, does not share her parents’ connection to Puerto Rico; she visited Puerto Rico only once as a little girl, and then only to attend her maternal grandmother’s funeral. Her experience of the island therefore centered on losing an ancestral connection to it. She learns about the family’s homeland primarily through stories “spoken in Spanish, as fairy tales” (23): The island becomes in her imagination a magical place, but still a foreign one. Nevertheless, she also feels out of place in Paterson. Unlike Eugene, whose white identity gives him citizenship and acceptance by default, mainland America treats Elena like a foreigner despite it being the only home she has ever known. She is excluded from the honors courses that Eugene gets to take because English is not her first language, even though it’s the language that she speaks most frequently and comfortably; Cofer signals the foreignness of Spanish to Elena by italicizing Spanish words. She also places more of the language in Elena’s mother’s mouth to show the contrast in the mother and daughter’s cultural connections.
Changing Demographics in Northern Communities
Cofer depicts Paterson as a post-World War II industrial town. During this era, Paterson’s location relative to New York—close to but outside of the city—made it appealing to job seekers who wanted both employment opportunities and lower costs of living. Puerto Rico and Georgia, the respective homes of Elena and Eugene’s parents, were mostly agrarian and therefore offered fewer job opportunities in the mid-century. Both Elena and Eugene’s parents move to New Jersey for the same reason—to reap greater opportunity—but race predetermines which opportunities will be available to each family.
Elena notes that El Building, the tenement in which she lives, had once been home to Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants. The building, which Elena describes as a monstrosity, housed those deemed undesirable before their assimilation into the white mainstream. They were packed into housing that became increasingly uninhabitable as the decades progressed; by the time Elena and her family move in, El Building looks like a prison. Its residents are now Puerto Rican and Black and have not enjoyed the same economic trajectory their white predecessors did. While El Building’s previous residents were able to find jobs that lifted them out of poverty and afforded them homes in better communities, the de facto racism of Northern cities like Paterson has withheld those opportunities from Black and Latin American people.
Still, the Puerto Rican residents of El Building have claimed the tenement as their own, giving it a name of both Spanish and English derivation—an indicator of the balance Puerto Rican immigrants have attempted to strike between their American and Latin Caribbean identities. Although Eugene’s family has integrated more comfortably into Paterson in the short term, there are signs that the cultural composition of the city is changing.
Racism and Ethnic Discrimination
Cofer first illustrates Paterson’s racial stratification in the context of P.S. 13, Elena’s school, which the narrator describes as “a huge, overpopulated place” (21). Its overwhelming size and population correlate with those of El Building—signs of the community’s strained resources. Additionally, Elena’s exclusion from the honors classes that Eugene attends is due to ethnic discrimination and the false assumption that Puerto Ricans have an inferior understanding of the English language.
Elena recognizes the impact that racism has on her, her community, and their living circumstances. This is evident in the way she initially expects Eugene to respond to her: “I was ready for rejection, snobbery, the worst” (21). Elena’s expectation of snobbery also comes from her understanding of their class difference: Eugene lives in a neat, single-family house, while Elena lives in a crowded tenement. Her concern about experiencing “the worst” signals her awareness that Eugene and other white, middle-class people could harbor ill will toward her.
Internalized racism sometimes causes the Black and Puerto Rican people who live side-by-side to turn against each other in subtle ways. Elena plays jump rope with her Black classmates but “[takes] a lot of abuse” for not turning the rope to their satisfaction (18). Gail, whom Elena describes as “the biggest of the black girls,” mocks Elena’s weakness, wondering if she ate her “rice and beans and pork chops for breakfast” (20)—a dig at Elena’s ethnic heritage that reflects Gail’s assumptions about what Puerto Rican people eat. For her part, Elena describes Gail and the other Black girls somewhat menacingly. The girls seem unaware of their shared West African cultural lineage. Instead, differences in skin color and language become key markers of difference and separation.
Those markers become more pronounced during Elena’s meeting with Eugene’s mother. When observing Eugene and his mother, Elena seems fascinated by their looks—specifically, Eugene’s blond hair and his mother’s red hair, both of which predominantly appear in white populations. Eugene’s mother does not share this curiosity; for her, the fact that Elena lives in El Building is an unforgivable sign of her Puerto Rican identity (though she speaks rudely from the moment she opens the door and sees Elena). She refers to the residents of El Building as “you people,” a phrase that places distance between oneself and an invisible, racialized mass. What is most jarring to Elena is the woman’s insistence that her rejection is “nothing personal,” when Elena’s feelings and her experience are extraordinarily personal. In this instance, she learns how race and racism can interfere with the most intimate aspects of a person’s life.
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By Judith Ortiz Cofer
