In their wedding photo Cofer’s parents look like “children dressed in adult clothes” (38). Indeed, her mother was not yet 15 years old when the picture was taken. Their families had opposed the wedding, but the young lovers were determined to marry. In doing so, they brought together two very different families: her mother’s family of farmers and her father’s family with their history of decadence and long-lost wealth. Cofer’s parents themselves are very different, her mother lively and her father quiet and grave.

A few months after the wedding, Cofer’s father joined the US Army and was stationed in Panama for the next two years, missing Cofer’s birth and infancy. Cofer’s mother lived with her husband’s mother, Mamá Nanda, in Puerto Rico. When Cofer’s father later joined the US Navy and the family moved to the United States with him, her mother, who never adapted to the pace and character of life in America, talked ceaselessly about these times to stay connected to her beloved island.

Mamá Nanda worried about her absent sons; Cofer’s father was stationed in the US, and his two brothers were fighting in the Korean War. Daily, she visited the local church where, back in the Spanish colonial period, a woodcutter was said to have been saved from a bull by a vision of

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