The Line of the Sun, titled La Línea del Sol in the Spanish translation, is a 1989 novel written by Puerto Rican-American author Judith Ortiz Cofer.
The first half of the novel, in Puerto Rico, is characterized by descriptions of tropical flora and fauna and the vibrant river valley surrounding the home of Rosa, the adolescent Guzmán's young love interest.
The novel's setting is conveyed through the primary sensory organs of the body, the ears, eyes, and nose, as Guzmán continues to explore the world around him and begins to yearn for greater adventure beyond Puerto Rico.
Guzmán's young niece, Marisol, assumes the role of narrator, conveying her family's struggle to assimilate into American culture through a series of experiences of inequality, discrimination, and misunderstanding.
Marisol observes that El Building, their tenement in inner-city Paterson, although dilapidated and cramped, acts as a "microcosm of Island life with its intrigues, its gossip groups, and even its own spiritist" for the members of its community.
Marisol, through these experiences, ultimately discovers that living in the north of the United States, El Norte, only fulfills part of its promise of opportunity and fortune for people outside their homeland.
But Marisol's mother, Ramona, remains separate from those around her, and over the rest of the novel grows increasingly dependent on her young daughter to navigate this unfamiliar political, social, and cultural world.
[3] Through the medium of stories, cooking, and religious rituals, the author shows how all the characters, in particular Guzmán, Ramona, Rafael, and the others of their generation, keep their culture and heritage alive even as El Norte, the North, continues to alienate them.
Towards the end of The Line of the Sun, when Marisol has fully taken ownership of the story, the reader discovers how she and her family fuse their experiences in the North with their native culture, roots, and practices to create a unique Puerto Rican-American narrative.
[7]Factual and historical elements based on Ortiz Cofer's own life and experiences growing up are combined in the novel with imaginative storytelling that enables characters to speak their truth as they operate in the story line.
References to the town of Salud's history, as it is written and passed down through the characters and in the narrative, echo the major historical role of storytelling in Puerto Rican tradition.
Ritual transferred from Puerto Rico to the United States transforms into a "socio-psychological defense mechanism" that migrants use to adapt to their new environment, but that other tenants and law enforcement officials in the barrio consider strange and inappropriate in an American context.
[11] Many commentators have criticized Judith Ortiz Cofer's literary style, and her treatment of Puerto Rican-American identity development, in the dual narration of The Line of the Sun.