Kristen Ana LaFollette
Prof. Benmayor
HCOM 328
2/10/05
View from the Fire Escape
“American History” as written by Judith Ortiz Cofer, portrays the life of fourteen- year-old Elena. She lives in 1962, Paterson, New Jersey in a Puerto Rican apartment tenement. Elena spends her afternoons on the ledge of a fire escape perched between her Puerto Rican heritage at home, and a middle-class American world outside.
She is immersed in the immigrant experience and at times identifies with parts of the
American mainstream. Elena spends solitary time as she reads American books and views Eugene’s middle-class home below her through a lens of immigration and poverty.
Her story provides strong visual imagery and personal interactions that portray the concepts of borderlands and intersectionality with clarity. Elena’s narrative is used to write back to the history of oppression faced by immigrants and to keep stories of this history from going untold.
The idea of intersections permeates Elena’s entire narrative. The author allows the experiences of the characters to collide along with the events of the world around them.
Just as President Kennedy is killed, Elena is hit with the tragic reality of negative perceptions of her identity. She mourns the death of her inexperience with direct prejudice as America mourns the death of a president. Both of these are deaths of hope and innocence. In the story, streets and buildings literally convene “where the Strait and
Narrow (streets) intersect” and represent the meetings of race and class. Elena’s home of
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Paterson is an industrial town where minority families exist as the working-class. In El
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Building, her apartment tenement, Elena is secluded within the Puerto Rican immigrant culture. Outside of school, her main access to external society is what she experiences on the fire escape as she reads, hanging in an intersection of past, present and differing cultures. Intersections play an important role as factors in Elena’s life interconnect to place her within a particular and unforgiving caste. Elena’s intersectionality converges as the time period, her Puerto Rican immigrant status, female gender, age, living conditions, and working-class family combine to peg her as an outsider and a low class member of society.
Elena recognizes some of the racism that confronts her, but much of that is shielded from her until others make it apparent. As a child she doesn’t quite realize that what she is faced with everyday is a result of intersectionality. She takes her life as normal. Her racial differences are pointed out by the Black girls on the playground, the school administration and Eugene’s mother. In PS-13 Elena confronts the competition among working-class racial groups. In the pecking order at school, Elena is at the bottom.
During the cold mornings Elena plays jump rope with the black girls. They use remarks to keep her ostracized and point out her “other” ethnicity. They comment, “Didn’t you eat your rice and beans and pork chops for breakfast today?” Elena is nicknamed “Skinny
Bones” and becomes self-conscious of her “flat–chested body”. In America, race is seen as a duality involving only black and white. Minorities such as Puerto Ricans or Asians do not fit this binary and must find their identities outside of the accepted hierarchy.
Institutionalized racism hinders Elena’s education and threatens to get in the way of her dreams of college and teaching. English is Elena’s second language and she is

tracked into slower courses although she excels in her studies. Studious Elena recognizes
LaFollette 3 that she is barred from advanced classes. According to her these were, “not open to me because English was not my first language, though I was a straight A student.” Elena is held back while Eugene is placed in all honors courses. Elena is also placed in a PE class run by a disciplinarian teacher who normally deals with “trouble” students. Her class is made up of Puerto Rican and black students and educational channeling assumes that immigrant and minority students are bound to cause trouble and must be corralled and watched over.
On the night that Kennedy has died, Elena tries to leave her apartment to go to
Eugene’s house. Her mother stops her to say, “You are forgetting who you are Niña. I have seen you staring down at that boy’s house. You are heading for humiliation and pain.” Although Elena’s mother recognizes the prejudice her daughter will encounter she is too distraught to prevent her from facing it. Elena is forewarned of how she will be received, however she has to experience the reaction first hand for it to truly imprint on her. Once at Eugene’s house she is met by his mother who is put off by her race and her perceived social class. Immediately the woman asks, “You live there?” pointing to El
Building. When the apartments are pointed to from the mother’s perspective, Elena instantly sees them through her eyes. They now appear, “like a grey prison with its many dirty windows and rusty fire escapes.” They become negative and shameful symbols when moments before they were her home.
Elena’s tenement and existence overhang the borders of class, ethnicity and generation. The Paterson tenements are segregated and separate the races and classes.
Similar economic and ethnic groups live together in particular buildings, detached from

others. El Building is positioned as a physical border between working-class, Puerto
Rican immigrants and the White middle-class. The apartments overshadow the little house that Elena spies on every day. El Building’s size and proximity represent the looming presence of poverty and immigration that encroach on a contrasting existence
LaFollette 4 represented in that little house. The house has a backyard with trees. This yard lends the house a status above surrounding homes and apartments. For years, Elena spends much of her time poised on her fire escape gazing into the neat little residence. Through it is she given a glimpse of middle-class life. Although she feels very connected to the home,
Elena is still kept at a distance in general isolation. The residents of the home do not notice that she watches them and she is never able to actually enter the home. Her desires for what the home symbolizes go unmet.
A chain link fence separates El Building from the little home and its yard. The fence is a loose border which allows two cultures to see one another without open interaction. The fence symbol, which is made of numerous holes, shows that the distinction between the two worlds is not as rigid as it may seem. The architecture of
Paterson also shows a juxtaposition of the classes. The layout of the town’s structures seems illogical where neatly packaged homes are placed amidst large awkward apartments. This again shows the intermingling of immigration into sterilized America.
Elena calls the buildings “monstrosities” displaying her shame for them and how they have been imposed on Paterson to accommodate the waves of immigrants.
Elena also lives between the borders of her parents’ immigration and her present life attempting to integrate into dominant American culture. Her family often speaks of returning to retire in Puerto Rico, but at the same time they reserve dreams for America.

Dreams of owning a home like Eugene’s in Paterson with a yard to maintain and a fence
LaFollette 5 surrounding it. Elena desires an education and a chance to teach others in America. She does not yearn to return to Puerto Rico, and envisions her future in America. Elena becomes caught up in popular books which are products of dominant America. They create for her a foundation of American reference. In reading Gone with the Wind, Elena chooses to identify with the plantation owners and not the African slaves. In her actual life she is most similar to the servants, but she fails to see that as she reads.
Elena’s border life seems to leave her homeless, uncomfortable and unaccepted in
America, yet alien and uncomfortable with her own family in Puerto Rico. As a child,
Elena visits Puerto Rico when her Grandmother dies. She hates being ostracized in
Paterson and at PS-13, yet she is uncomfortable in Puerto Rico as well. The behaviors accepted in Puerto Rico are alien to Elena and she is taken aback by the hysterical grief her mother displays at the funeral. Elena feels, “Lost in a crowd of strangers all claiming to be her aunts, uncles, and cousins.” She cannot wait to return Paterson where things are more predictable.
In Paterson, the public tragedy of Kennedy’s death crosses over to be understood in personal and culturally relevant terms by local immigrants. Elena’s family experiences remorse over the death of the president and relate to his widowed family. They later respect him as a martyr within the contexts of their religious traditions. Elena’s family does not mourn in the customary Anglo sense, but chooses to do so as they would in their culture. They observe luto to show respect, while the women of El Building dress in black in reverence for the president. Borderland is illustrated in the interplay of the mourning of an American icon, interpreted from an immigrant perspective.

By telling Elena’s story, Cofer writes back to the history of immigration and the oppression that faced people in that past and today. Although the story is told from
Elena’s young perspective, it includes the insights of an older, educated analyst. Elena discusses the waves of immigration that have come to Paterson beginning with the
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Italians, then the Irish, the Jewish up to her present experience as a Puerto Rican. She also includes commonalities between the social groups she portrays. Elena’s mother and
Eugene’s mother are both unhappy in Paterson. They have each have been moved around by their husbands in search of upward mobility at the expense of their comfort and family ties. Cofer shows that neither the working nor middle-classes are happier than the other.
All the families need to work to survive. Perhaps, the situations that each of the groups encounter can be seen as a way for them to connect. While Elena’s story is fictional, the situations she experienced have come from the real lives of generations of immigrants before and after her. Elena’s narrative may provide a model for others to record their lives and examine the social factors that have converged to place them in their current roles.