Stay True

In the short story Silent Dancing by Judith Ortiz Cofer the author covered a very broad perspective of things. There were several topics that you can consistently talk about but a keyword that really poked out was cultural. Culture is enriched by the cryptic and mysterious concepts of unity, love, and being different. Culture is a much known topic throughout the story Silent Dancing a family that has been deeply rooted in the Puerto Rican culture, next thing you know the Father decides to sign up and go to the navy which is all the way in New Jersey located in the United States. That in itself is a huge culture shift if a family comes from nothing and then moves to a country that moves expeditiously that can be very hard to adapt to. This was a huge culture change for the children of this family too. These children had to change and adapt to a whole new state of mind in order to be prosperous in the American World. In this particular story it seems as if the mother was the person that wanted to maintain a cultural structure in the family; she still wanted her culture to be incorporated somehow. As of the head of the household (Father) kept his family at a place of privacy and isolation due to many different possible reasons, some may say due to ethnicity, culture, language and so on. Ethnicity played a key factor within Silent Dancing because this family struggled to find a place to live in the states due to their ethnicity. As you begin to go deeper into the text you begin to see a few prejudice encounters that the Father is victim to. This family had a sense of faith not to assimilate with the new environment they were trying to come in agreement with. It seemed as if once the family overcame one border, they had another one to endure just because they aren’t originally from the United States. As the search for them began to narrow down they found a place named the “El Building”. This place was comfortable to the mother because now culture can still be in the midst and can carry on without being judged. This was a huge blockage due to the Father not agreeing with her interacting with fellow Puerto Ricans. Without communication culture will fail to exist, Culture is a very important form of structure in my household. Somebody’s culture may be having Sunday dinner while in other cultures you may celebrate a woman coming of age. My family has a unique way of showing cultural events. They try to replace culture with gatherings and routines, but to me it’s all the same if you continuously do it. Many families are the same way they don’t like to use the word culture because they don’t really know what the word represents. Whether you’re African American or of other decent we should maintain our