Their American experience exposed them to events that gave them the knowledge necessary to write the things that they did. They both used their experiences as a structure for their writings. Ortiz Cofer and Reed wrote in a way that put their characters in the situations in which they once found themselves. They exposed the American experience that many others who shared ethnicity with them had. Even though they both came from two different cultures, there are similarities in the things that they wrote about that can be distinguished. Their lives enabled Ortiz Cofer and Reed to compose works which represented their experiences in some