My Broken Language: A Memoir

A library shelf holds tremendous power, Quiara. If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.”

This is Virginia’s frequent advice to her daughter, reflecting The Role of Storytelling in Experiencing Heritage. She named Quiara after the Puerto Rican anthropologist Ricardo Alegría, who first published his findings on the Taíno people, therefore allowing them to become visible for the first time. Writing to bring things into existence is an important concept throughout My Broken Language. Much of the oppression and inequality the Perez family faces stems from the silence and invisibility that surrounds them. Their lack of representation makes them almost unreal to other segments of society, and Quiara will later try to combat this invisibility with her writing.

“I shouldn’t assume any our, ever, and it was best to relinquish all desire to belong. Solitude was reliably safe and enjoyable.”

At her father’s wedding, Quiara is chased out of a photo with the bride’s family. She retreats to the forest, where she takes comfort in solitude. This passage illustrates the exclusion she begins to feel from her father’s new family, creating the sensation that she doesn’t truly belong anywhere.

“And as I became schooled in the Latina body, I grappled with the notion that I might have one. If mine was, as mom insisted, Boricua through and through, did I not carry sterilization abuse in my cellular memory? Yes, mom said. Health and sickness were shared by the collective, not siphoned individually.”

As Quiara grows up, she becomes aware of the implications of having a Latina body and of the Systemic Racism in American Society. She begins to understand how her heritage lives in her body, including past traumas her ancestors have faced. Later, Quiara will come to explain each Perez body as a record of their personal and collective history, a way of communicating and recording ancestral knowledge without words.

“All these literary patriarchs paraded their woe like it was some main event. Hamlet brooded, Romeo beat his chest, Willy went mad. Why didn’t they dance like the Perez women? Were they so above the fray? No billboards or sitcoms had declared my Perez cousins queen, and I now saw freedom in this. No false thrones, just the shitstorm of life. Grab a shovel and sing a work song. Build a throne that’s real.”

Here, Hudes writes about the Perez women’s lack of representation in literature and popular media, reflecting Systemic Racism in American Society. The "literary patriarchs” she references make a great show of their misery because they were promised more in life. However, the Perez women have been promised nothing. Therefore, they have no great expectations and no ensuing disappointment when these promises go unfulfilled.

“[D]ance and possession were dialects of the same mother tongue. I spoke neither. English, my best language, had no vocabulary for the possession nor the dance. And English was what I was made of. My words and my world did not align. That, perhaps, made me a lost soul.”

Around her, Quiara sees her family expressing themselves in languages she doesn’t understand. Both her cousins’ dancing and her mother’s experience with possessions and premonitions tap into deep, raw parts of the self to create a sense of expression that Quiara is unable to replicate with words—the only tools she has.

“Soon after I landed back from South Dakota, my search began. For god, perhaps, or for my true mother tongue. Or for the fulcrum where those two balanced. I had often struggled to squeeze my reality into words that didn’t fit me. Now I would go searching for better languages.”

Inspired by the Indigenous ceremony she witnesses in South Dakota, this passage marks the conscious start of Quiara’s search for a new language. Framing it as she does as a search for the place where god and her mother tongue meet, her quest is less about language and more about uncovering the self. She wants to learn who she is.

“Unvoiced contemplation was a skill learned at five, when mom led me out back and whispered god’s name in Spanish, far from dad’s ears. The quiet made me come alive. Zipping my lips meant swallowing my contradictions and confusions, guarding the flavor for only myself.”

Quiara spends much of her time in quiet contemplation and observation as she navigates Living Between Cultures and the Search for Belonging. Although sometimes her silence is a source of shame, like when she cannot find the words to explain herself or stand up for her family, silence and solitude can also feel like a relief. It is a space where she no longer has to struggle for words.

“My emergent superpower, an increasing fluency in Western Canon, brought exhilaration and comfort because if you’re fluent in a language, there’s a place you belong.”

Quiara’s search for a language is centered on a search for belonging. Due to her biracial heritage, she often feels excluded from both sides of her family. English is her first language, but she often finds it inadequate for describing her reality. Although she speaks Spanish, her lack of fluency in the language makes her feel like she doesn’t fully belong in her Puerto Rican family.

“Had we done something to merit the havoc? Or had the vampire crossed our threshold uninvited? I’d visited enough Center City friends, spent enough time with dad in the burbs to know that this shitstorm, this run-on tragedy, was not everyone’s America. Seeing my cousins suffer was anguish enough. Seeing the disproportionality slayed me.”

In this passage, Quiara begins to see the structural violence and inequality that affect the Perez women, invoking the Systemic Racism in American Society. She realizes that the high number of funerals and tragedies her family experiences is not common in other parts of the county or even other parts of Philadelphia. Since she inhabits both white and Latino spaces, Quiara can see how different life is for both demographics.

“But in my magnet school, commas in e. e. cummings poems were debated. In her zoned school, invisibility was lauded as a life skill. My loudmouthed cousin shrank herself to a crumb and the school rewarded her compliance with the prize of a diploma.”

Quiara is surprised by the disparity she sees between Philadelphia’s white and Latino populations. However, she is even more shocked to realize that this divide runs through her own family. When she learns about Nuchi’s illiteracy, Quiara thinks about the contrasts in their educational experiences, wondering what makes them so different.

“I eat my words. I eat my corrections como una comemierda. Mom, if you ever read this book (and make it this far without disowning me), I ask you one favor: break this English language today and tomorrow and the day after and bestow it new life with each breaking. Endow your fullness upon this cracked colonial tongue. You language genius. This is your English. You earned it. I am only a guest here.”

In this passage, Hudes addresses her mother directly. She is beginning to undo the concept of fluency as a form of belonging. Instead, she understands that the right to a language comes not from fluency but from claiming that right. A speaker must take the language and make it their own, being unafraid to break it and use it as they see best.

“It was disquieting, how my fair skin provided familiarity, how it gained me access to a conversation that blistered my heart.”

This passage appears after Quiara’s last visit to her father’s house in the suburbs. Quiara’s father and his wife, Sharon, claim that poor people living in the “inner city” are a drain on public funds. The tax dollars of people like Sharon and Quiara’s father shouldn’t go to support those who have made “poor choices” like having children out of wedlock. Thanks to Quiara’s white skin, they seem to forget that Quiara’s family lives in exactly the kind of poverty they are describing. Their casual stereotyping reflects the Systemic Racism in American Society.

“I craved an intellectual home base, a richer conversation with peers. One that didn’t blindfold itself to my culture, that didn’t other entire hemispheres of art.”

At Yale, the music department focuses almost exclusively on the classical Western canon. Any music that falls outside of this categorization is generally deemed aesthetically inferior and unworthy of study. For Quiara, this is an incredibly narrow perspective, and she misses the diversity of the music she grew up with.

“The numinous world of Ifá burst onstage. Rather than apologizing for the Orisha, as I’d done many times, rather than insisting they were not black magic or ignoring my friends’ disturbed gazes, I had created a space where the Orisha required no explanation. Where the Afro-Boricua could be hilarious and true, contradictory and complicated.”

This passage describes the play Quiara wrote while at Yale. Instead of worrying about how to explain the Orisha and her mother’s Lukumí ceremonies, Quiara creates a safe space for her reality to exist without explanation. Sometimes, the necessity to explain is inherently othering, so Quiara lets go of the pressure to explain and builds a space where her reality can simply be.

“Her success would receive no departmental honors. There would be no leather-bound degree in Latin, no brass parade. But which accomplishment ran deeper? Every string quartet I’d composed at Yale, or every night Flor fell asleep sober? Her life was a pebble skipped across a stream—a brief event whose ripples were real.”

When Flor returns after years lost to substance abuse disorder, she shows Quiara the Narcotics Anonymous necklace that commemorates her year of sobriety and tells her cousin about her path to making amends. Quiara thinks that Flor’s accomplishment will receive none of the fanfare that her degree from Yale garnered but wonders if her achievement is really any more significant.

“A question on loop, taunting: Why do I get Sterling Library and Nuchi doesn’t? It roiled and implicated me. I was troubled by both extremes: Yale’s affluence, Philly’s scarcity, but more so by the divide separating them. Truth being: the divide was where I had made my home. Until I became a bridge, if such a reconciliation was possible, there would be no peace.”

Here, Quiara again contemplates the inequalities in her family and the Systemic Racism in American Society. As someone who lives on the border between Yale and North Philly, Quiara can move in and out of these spaces and see the disparities. She wonders how she can bridge this divide and make a connection between the two worlds, a way to share knowledge and experience and perhaps make the disparities less extreme.

“English was a generations-old mastery in their homes. Their upward mobility was enabled by English, their conceptual reality sculpted and limited by it. They thought and dreamed in the language. It was the English-language god whom their families had long abandoned.”

As Quiara rides in the car with her classmates from Yale, they easily discuss the topic of faith and belief in god. Most have existed in an English-only reality for as long as they or anyone in their families can remember. All of their experiences have been shaped and explained by the language. Quiara, on the other hand, has trouble articulating her mother’s belief system and her own encounters with the spirit because they come from another world outside of the English language, reflecting The Role of Storytelling in Experiencing Heritage.

“Language was not what connected us as a family. A dinner table ritual, where people gather to discuss news of the day, was not at the heart of how we communicated. Bodies were the mother tongue at Abuela’s, with Spanish second and English third. Dancing and ass-slapping, palmfuls of rice, ponytail-pulling and wound-dressing, banging a pot to the clave beat. Hands didn’t get lost in translation. Hips bridged gaps where words failed.”

Quiara’s multigenerational, multilingual family often doesn’t rely on words to communicate. Some of the Perezes speak Spanish as their first language, some speak English. Some learned English as children, and others, like Abuela, flat-out refuse to speak it. English, Spanish, and remnants of Taíno and West African languages all combine, making silence and confusion inevitable. Therefore, the Perez women use their bodies to communicate with one another.

“You are a child of three catastrophes. You are born of three holocausts. The Native. The African. And the Jewish. You are a descendant of the survivors. It’s in your blood. The resilience. The deep memory and experience of survival.”

This is an “incantation” that Quiara’s mother often whispers to her. Virginia explains to her daughter that memory and history are passed down physically. Her body is an archive of his family’s stories and traumas.

“But I sat there like ‘story’ was a vocab word I’d never bothered learning. As though I had no name, let alone one that broke its own rules, let alone one that meant revolution masked as happiness.”

Even after her Ivy League education, Quiara doesn’t know how to explain herself and her family. She doesn’t know what she is trying to say with her music or where it is taking her, as she continues grappling with Living Between Cultures and the Search for Belonging. Like her name, she knows that her story is complex and multifaceted, but she still lacks the vocabulary to express it.

“Don’t you know how badly we need you? So much history will go to the grave with Abuela. She doesn’t have many years left. This is stuff that’s not written anywhere, Quiara. Y recuerdas que, if it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist. Didn’t I always say how much power a library shelf holds?”

Here, Virginia encourages Quiara to become a writer, telling her that someone needs to record the family history, much of which is held only in Abuela’s memory. She suggests that transcribing the Perezes’ stories will empower them, breaking the invisibility and silence that has long followed and oppressed them. This passage also reflects The Role of Storytelling in Experiencing Heritage.

“The first thing Paula Vogel did was dispel me of the notion that I must be loyal to English. Language that aims toward perfection, she told me, is a lie. Shakespeare knew this, she said, and broke English until its dictionaries grew by a thousand entries.”

The idea that she doesn’t have to adhere to the rules of language is a revelation for Quiara. She has long based her conception of belonging on mastering a level of fluency. However, as a social tool that is constantly changing and evolving, the idea of “perfection” in a language is a misnomer created to exclude individuals who might speak in a non-standard way.

“Could I build a safe space on the page, in the theater? A place where ritual could flow, where I could connect honestly with myself, with my own story and the stories that inhabited me? A place where I could control the narrative, center myself and my loved ones? Sure, all art was destined for outside (mis)interpretation. But basic theater decorum and etiquette entreated all present to listen respectfully, to watch attentively where the light was thrown.”

As she begins writing, Quiara contemplates the specific qualities of the theatre when it comes to telling her family’s stories. Instead of relying exclusively on words, she can build a multidimensional space that renders explanations unnecessary. Her reality is simply allowed to exist, and she can shine a spotlight on her family, both literally and metaphorically.