62 pages • 2 hours read
Quiara Alegría HudesMy Broken Language: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Living Between Cultures and the Search for Belonging
My Broken Language is a story about living on the divide between two cultures and the search for a place of true belonging. With the ability to move between both white and Latino spaces, Quiara struggles with the contradictions and disparities she finds. With her Jewish father and Puerto Rican mother, English is Quiara’s first language, followed by a “halting Spanish.” When her parents separate, these two languages exist on either side of an “hourlong gulf” in the form of a train ride between West Philly and the suburbs. Quiara is the only one to exist in that gulf, the only one to traverse both these worlds, and she wonders, “Which part of that divide did I fall on?” (52).
When her father remarries, Quiara quickly feels excluded from his new family. On his wedding day, his wife, Sharon, asks Quiara to leave a photo of her family members, and she learns not to “assume any our, ever,” deciding “it was best to relinquish all desire to belong” (38). Quiara always feels like a visitor in her father’s home, and when he and his growing family move, the new house doesn’t have a bedroom for his eldest daughter. Her visits inspire “a cavernous loneliness,” and she limits stays at her father’s more and more as she grows up. Nevertheless, her pale skin and flawless English mark her as one of them.
Meanwhile, in her mother’s house, Sedo moves in, and Quiara is suddenly surrounded by Spanish. Altars spring up in unexpected corners, and her mother cooks rice and beans for dinner. Quiara doesn’t understand many of these changes, especially her mother’s new devotion to her religion, and she feels excluded by Virginia’s lack of explanation. She worries that she is “too white” or that her Spanish is “too shaky” to be included in her mother’s world. At the same time, she excels in school and develops fluency in the western literary canon. However, Quiara “hunger[s] to decode [her] own home, to make it [her] center of belonging” (127).
Language is an important marker of social identity and a signifier of membership to a particular group. The language someone speaks and how they speak it often serves to unite or exclude individuals from social groups, even if they share other aspects of identity. To this effect, Quiara often equates fluency with a sense of belonging. If she is fluent in a language, she belongs there. Therefore, she doesn’t feel she belongs in her Puerto Rican family because of her “broken” Spanish. However, as she grows up, she realizes that belonging comes not from fluency but from a command of language, from reclaiming and making it her own. She realizes, for example, that her mother has “earned” her English by breaking it and “bestow[ing] it [with] new life with each breaking” (182). At Brown, Quiara begins learning to do the same. She creates her own “code for belonging” by reclaiming words that have been used against her and the other women in her family, asserting her own proud sense of identity.
Systemic Racism in American Society
With her Jewish father and Puerto Rican mother, Quiara’s biracial childhood allows her to inhabit both white and Latino spaces. Often, these spaces stand in sharp contrast, revealing the extremes of residential segregation, disproportional rates of poverty, and the violence and inequality perpetuated by silence and invisibility.
Quiara first begins to understand the disparity at eight or nine years old during her weekly commutes to her father’s house in the suburbs. Her father lives in Malvern, a small suburb where the white “homogeneity [is] chilling, complete” (190). As she rides the train, she is “sickened” by the transformation from graffiti and broken windows to brick houses and manicured lawns. She understands the implication that her “Perez women [are] messy derelict squalor” while “[her] English dad [is] manicured Americana” (31).
The outside perception of the Perez women is characterized by stereotypes and misrepresentations. From the white perspective of people like Quiara’s father and his new wife, the struggles the Perez family faces are due to a “culture of poverty” where parents fail to instill “values” like “graduat[ing] high school […] without getting pregnant” (192). People like her cousin Nuchi are called “welfare queens,” suspected of having babies on purpose to collect money from the government and to avoid working. These kinds of stereotypes reflect the isolation and invisibility that the Perez women live under. Due to issues like residential segregation and lack of representation in popular media, many of Quiara’s white peers and family members have no idea what the Perez women’s reality is actually like. Even Quiara doesn’t realize how isolated her family is. Growing up, she is sure Philadelphia has one of the largest Puerto Rican communities in the country; however, it was less than five percent of the city’s population during her adolescence.
Through her mother’s advocacy work, Quiara learns about the specific challenges for Philadelphia’s Hispanic population. She learns about disproportionate infant mortality rates, high instances of cervical cancer, and “evidence of an AIDS crisis decimating Hispanic women” (48). However, the consequences of this inequality aren’t immediately apparent to Quiara. Attending a magnet school with students from all over Philadelphia, she begins to realize that “classmates from other zip codes have a lower funeral count than [she does]” (74): The “run-on tragedy” of deaths and disappearances in the Perez family is “not everyone’s America” (135).
At Yale, Quiara is constantly in rooms full of white students sitting in front of a white professor. She is shocked by the “magnitude” of wealth at the university; her classmates have “Tahoe ski habits,” and very few have to work in order to make up the difference between living expenses and financial aid grants. She is troubled by both Yale’s wealth and Philly’s scarcity. However, she is even more alarmed to find extreme inequality within her own family, such as her college education set alongside Nuchi’s illiteracy. Moving between these disparate spaces inspires Quiara to become “a bridge” between her different worlds. She uses her writing to break the silence and invisibility around her family, attempting to fill “the gulf” between the Perezes and the more affluent United States.
The Role of Storytelling in Experiencing Heritage
My Broken Language is a memoir about the power of storytelling, the value of seeing one’s experiences reflected in print, and the importance of controlling that narrative. Growing up, Quiara finds solace in books, but she also recognizes that none of the texts she is assigned throughout her education reflect the experiences of her Puerto Rican family. The narratives that circulate in popular culture about people like her family are full of stereotypes and misconceptions.
In place of verbal language, the multilingual Perez family often relies more on physical forms of commutation that can “bridg[e] gaps where words fai[l]” (237). Instead of words, “bodies [are] the mother tongue at Abuela’s, with Spanish second and English third” (237). As such, the body is also seen as the holder of family history, a physical record that can be read in the Perez women’s curves. The young Perezes are “blank canvases, awaiting life’s paintbrush” (303); as they age, their life story is painted on their body.
The precedent for this physical “archive” goes back generations to the colonization of Puerto Rico in 1493. Native languages, along with culture and history, were interrupted or wiped out completely. Names and records of family lineage “were obliterated” as the surnames of enslaved people were replaced with those of their Spanish enslavers. Out of necessity, many cultural practices became secret, performed out of sight to keep them safe. 400 years later, Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States, and this erasure of language and culture was repeated. Overnight, the island was forced to adopt the English language and US culture. Two generations “were cut off from Puerto Rican arts and letters, the international Spanish-language canon, and the island’s self-created historic record” (239-40). Language proved itself to be impermanent and untrustworthy.
Now, the Perez women rely on their bodies to communicate; however, this means that their stories cannot be read outside of the family. Oftentimes, Quiara’s mother tells her daughter, “A library shelf holds tremendous power […] If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist” (24). The Perez women are largely invisible to the outside world, and this contributes to the inequality and disadvantages they experience. Virginia urges Quiara to write the family’s stories, to bring their lives out of the shadows they have survived in for centuries and “build a throne made of visibility” (257). Through her writing, Quiara reclaims many terms that have been used to erase and diminish her family, using them to create “a safe space” where she can “control the narrative, center [her]self and [her] loved ones” (293). However, she also urges the other Perez women to be their “own librarians,” insisting that the archive of family history kept in their bodies is still valid and important.
