7th Grade Reading_ Coca Cola or Coco Frio

Are you more Coca-Cola or Coco Frio?

Read the Poem, “Coca-Cola and Coco Frio” by Martin Espada. While you read, take notes on the sides of any connections or inferences you make to this poem.

Coca-Cola and Coco Frio by Martin Espada	My Connections and Inferences
On his first visit to Puerto Rico, island of family folklore, the fat boy wandered from table to table with his mouth open. At every table, some great-aunt would steer him with cool spotted hands to a glass of Coca-Cola. One even sang to him, in all the English she could remember, a Coca-Cola jingle from the forties. He drank obediently, though he was bored with this potion, familiar from soda fountains in Brooklyn. Then, at a roadside stand off the beach, the fat boy opened his mouth to coco frio, a coconut chilled, then scalped by a machete so that a straw could inhale the clear milk. The boy tilted the green shell overhead and drooled coconut milk down his chin; suddenly, Puerto Rico was not Coca-Cola or Brooklyn, and neither was he. For years afterward, the boy marveled at an island where the people drank Coca-Cola and sang jingles from World War II in a language they did not speak, while so many coconuts in the trees sagged heavy with milk, swollen and unsuckled.

Vocabulary

Folklore: stories passed down by generations

Scalped: To cut off the skin of the top of the head with a knife

Swollen: When something is so full, it expands

Suckle: to drink milk from a nipple, like a calf suckles milk from a cow’s udder

In your journal, respond to this question: Are you more Coca Cola or Coco Frio? Why?