My Broken Language: A Memoir

Virginia Perez is Quiara’s mother. She grew up in the small town of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and moved to the United States with her mother and sisters when she was 11 years old. As a young woman, Virginia becomes a carpenter. However, soon after Quiara is born, Virginia meets a pair of feminists who introduce her to community organizing and advocacy work. She begins working for a reproductive health and childcare hotline called CHOICE and opens a community center for the underserved Latina population in North Philly. The center is defunded and eventually closed, but Virginia continues working in advocacy, hired by a state senator to work on drafting legislation. 

Virginia is also an intensely spiritual woman. As a child, she sometimes experienced visions and premonitions, and in her adulthood, she practices Lukumí, a religion based on Yoruba traditions brought to Puerto Rico from West Africa. After separating from Quiara’s atheist father, Virginia experiences an “awakening” and devotes herself more fully to worship. She installs elaborate altars in the house and hosts rituals that sometimes include animal sacrifice and possession.

Her mother’s religion is both a point of interest and contention for Quiara. It is one aspect of her reality that she struggles most to put into words, especially once she starts to experience her own spiritual possessions. She longs to understand and become more fully immersed in her mother’s world, but at the same time, the strange altars often inspire “disgust” when her friends come to visit, and Quiara can’t help but wish that her mother “would worship a little bit whiter” (99).

Virginia never explains her belief system to Quiara, but when her daughter expresses interest, she buys books on the subject, leaving them for Quiara without a word. She lets her daughter learn independently and come to her own conclusions. Virginia and her spirituality become great inspirations for Quiara, and as she becomes a playwright, her mother’s “spirit world fill[s] every page” (292).

Mr. Hudes is Quiara’s father. He comes from a Jewish family who suffered losses in the Holocaust, making Quiara “a child of three catastrophes […] The Native. The African. And the Jewish” (241). His lack of a first name speaks to the diminished role he plays in his daughter’s life during his “slow fade to stranger” (201).

Quiara’s father is the opposite of her mother in many ways. He is a carpenter and an atheist who believes that “religion is the root of all evil” (19). At the beginning of Quiara’s life, her father is her hero, a “carpenter god” whose word she trusts as “inarguable fact.” He buys Quiara her first typewriter and always encourages her to read when she is bored. 

However, after learning that he cheated on her mother, Quiara’s relationship with her father changes. He remarries, starts a new family, and becomes the symbol of “normal” American suburbia. Even before the wedding, his “crisis of inconsequence” begins to unfold. He complains to Quiara about his “loveless relationship,” his lack of work, and his ensuing inability to provide for his family. For Quiara, “[l]istening was now daughterhood” (36), and she supports her father in silence. Although Quiara loves and misses her father, her visits to the suburbs decrease as she tries to avoid the uncomfortable feeling of being a guest in her father’s new family.

As the years pass, Quiara’s father and his wife Sharon become a “proper American family,” with two children whom they shuttle to birthday parties, gymnastics classes, and sporting events. However, their “well-mannered masks” don’t hide their “loneliness” and “bitterness” (187). Repeatedly, Quiara compares her father to Willy Loman, who dies by suicide after suffering the tragedy of “being average” in Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman. Even though Quiara’s father is visibly unhappy, Quiara still envies the normalcy of his “whiteness” and “suburban tableau.” Everywhere he looks, Quiara’s father can see his experience validated.

Quiara’s father appears in the narrative for the final time when Quiara visits before leaving for Yale. Their uncomfortable conversation about the “culture of poverty” and her father’s shameless peddling of middle-class American “values” causes Quiara to “take a side that lasts to this day” (194), choosing her Puerto Rican identity over her white one.

Obdulia Perez, known throughout the text as “Abuela,” is Quiara’s grandmother and the matriarch of the Perez family. 

Her parents lived in Lares, Puerto Rico, which became an important hub of activity for the independence movement in the latter half of the 1800s. During a demonstration that could have been the historic Grito de Lares uprising, Abuela’s mother was injured, and she and her husband fled to Arecibo. Abuela and her sister were both beautiful, nicknamed Las Españolas for their light skin and blue eyes. However, Abuela was never a “parlor Boricua” trying to appear more European. She married Juan Bautista Perez, a Taíno man known as “Indio.” She and Juan Perez had five children before she left him and moved with her daughters to the United States. Some family members say she left because she caught her husband with another woman. Others say it was because Juan Perez denied his daughters the opportunity to get an education. Abuela never made it past second grade and didn’t want the same future for her children. 

In North Philly, Abuela lives next door to her sister. Her house is always full of Quiara’s cousins, some popping by for a quick visit, others moving in with her if something is wrong at home. Despite her years in the United States, “[s]he scorn[s] the English language, downright refuse[s] to speak it” (237), so her house is always one of Quiara’s Spanish-language spaces. She is the family’s “oral historian;” her parchment-thin skin carries the stories of “ten thousand yesterdays” as she keeps the family’s memories safe in her body. Quiara’s mother warns her daughter that “[s]o much history will go to the grave with Abuela” (256), encouraging Quiara to become a writer and record the family’s stories.

Nuchi is one of Quiara’s older cousins. In many respects, she is Quiara’s opposite, a reflection of the Perez woman she could have been. She is curvy, “loudmouthed,” and mother to a gaggle of babies. She is a woman who wears “her trauma like a windbreaker in a blizzard” (171), living in the kind of poverty that “turned heads.” As an adult, Quiara learns that Nuchi graduated high school without learning how to read. This revelation is a shock to Quiara, and the issue of how two cousins from the same family can end up on such different paths becomes a guiding question for her as she attends Yale and, later, Brown.

While Quiara completes her education, Nuchi contracts HIV, becoming a sliver of her former self with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. However, in many respects, “Nuchi had weathered the storm” (298). Most of her children are successful; they go to college, find jobs, and have children that Nuchi watches while they work. Apart from these “red herrings,” Nuchi illustrates her success and resilience in the grace with which she has navigated life’s challenges. Through it all, her “ability to land a great punchline […] remained her most impressive humanity” (298).

Gabi is Quiara’s little sister. She is born when Quiara is around 13 years old, and she is immediately smitten with the child. They play together constantly, Quiara delighting in “a childhood more playful than [her] original go-round” (198). Gabi is “made of exclamation points” (198); she is bubbly, curly-haired, and chubby with skin the color of a “matte tan.” When Quiara leaves for Yale, Gabi is four years old. Quiara worries that her sister is “live bait in the Skinny Pale Cabaret that called itself America” (201) and dreads being gone for the girl’s school years. 

Gabi struggles in school. Although she does well in a bilingual kindergarten, she is labeled “remedial” in first grade when moved to a Center City school. Even though English is Gabi’s first language, she is placed in ESL classes. She struggles to read, and Quiara tries to tutor her during her school breaks. Teased relentlessly about her body, Gabi is “one of the toughest kids in third grade,” throwing “insults like party snaps” (305) at kids who call her “fat.” Like Nuchi, Quiara sees Gabi as a mirror in which the unfairness of their differences is reflected. They are sisters, but Gabi has to struggle in a way that Quiara doesn’t.