My Broken Language: A Memoir

Thinking it might help her better understand herself, Quiara starts attending Quaker meetings, where she sits in silence. Since she was a child, “silence made [her] come alive” (117), and she enjoys the time spent in quiet contemplation. During one meeting, Quiara tries to pray, but she is “a novice.” She tries to remember some of her mother’s prayers, but nothing complete comes to mind, and she wonders why her mother has excluded her from her worship, leaving her “tradition-less.” She wonders if she is “too white,” if her Spanish is “too shaky,” or if she isn’t “Puerto Rican enough” (119). She begins to shake and feels herself standing up and speaking.

Quiara remembers her mother and Sedo taking her to Puerto Rico for the first time. They drove along windy mountain roads until Virginia stopped along a seemingly unremarkable stretch, where they marched into the grass. They came out on a cliff overlooking the ocean, and Quiara nearly walked into a hole in the rock that descended into darkness. Sedo’s flashlight revealed a number of petroglyphs carved into the walls of the hole. Quiara looked down in awe at the “first edition” text that spoke of “survival and resilience, paradox and reverence, knowledge and explanation” (122). The landscape was littered with the caves and their carvings, each “a geological esophagus” that Quiara hoped would swallow her.

Back in the Quaker meeting, the other attendees thank Quiara for sharing. She is still shaking, overcome by “too much god” and hurries out “crav[ing] something atheist, even vulgar” (123). She goes to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she heads for the Duchamp exhibit. In a tiny room far from the museum’s entrance, there is Étant donnés, a life-size diorama of a naked white woman sprawled on the ground, lying “atop a bed of twigs like some X-rated Jesus in the manger” (125). Quiara strains to see, but no matter how she tries, she cannot see the woman’s face, only her bare vagina and asymmetrical labia. She feels as if she is peeking in on her own life, searching for answers.

After many trips to the exhibit, Quiara speaks “English, halting Spanish, and advanced conversational Duchamp” (126). Her piano skills are also improving, and her “increasing fluency in Western Canon” (127) gives her a sense of belonging. However, she still feels out of place in her own home and longs to “decode it.” In the evenings, she sometimes studies her mother’s altars, which Virginia never endeavors to explain. Quiara observes her mother’s elaborate shrines, called tronos in Spanish, meaning thrones. Each is “magnificent,” resplendent with carefully chosen offerings. Virginia “mastered a symbolic language” (130), just as Quiara is trying to do with her music.

Like Cucu, Nuchi, and Flor, Vivi was one of Quiara’s elder cousins, whom she looked up to. One by one, these cousins peel away, carried off by babies, college, or substance use disorder. Vivi resurfaces after being shot in the head. The bullet didn’t kill her, but it left her blind. Quiara is delighted to see Vivi back on Abuela’s stoop, but she starts to wonder again at the “disproportionality” of her family’s suffering. 

One day, Quiara asks her mother, “Are we cursed?” (135). However, despite all her years in advocacy and understanding structural violence and inequalities, Virginia doesn’t have an answer. 

When the AIDS Quilt is displayed in Washington in 1992, Quiara watches the news with relief that she is not alone in her losses. She starts frequenting a queer bookstore after school and becomes president of Peer Education Against Contracting HIV, known as PEACH. She makes friends with other kids who have lost family members to AIDS and teaches STD prevention in schools. She organizes the students to make their own AIDS Quilt, and Quiara makes three squares: one for Big Vic, one for Guillo, and one for Tico, the “vibrant” cousin who disappeared to New York to die when he learned he was infected. However, they have no way to sew the squares together, so the quilt remains incomplete. 

For World AIDS Day, Quiara wins an essay contest and delivers a speech before the mayor of Philadelphia. She names her fallen family members, offering a brief eulogy for each one. Sitting back down, her mother squeezes her hand and tells her the time has come to reclaim her middle name; she must also be able to name herself.

Quiara asks her Abuela (grandmother) for cooking lessons as an excuse to hear more of her stories. Between instructions on how many handfuls of rice to use for arroz blanco or white rice (Abuela doesn’t believe in exact measurements), Quiara learns more about Obdulia Perez, her grandmother. Obdulia’s parents, a Spaniard and a Taíno, had been active in the Puerto Rican revolution. However, after El Grito de Lares, an important Puerto Rican uprising against Spain, her parents had to flee, settling in Arecibo, where they never mentioned Lares for fear of repercussions. Obdulia and her sister were light-skinned and blue-eyed, nicknamed Las Españolas. Obdulia, however, married a dark-skinned man called Juan Bautista Perez, “aka Indio” (146).

In the 1960s, Obdulia left her husband and moved her children to New York. According to Obdulia, she caught Juan Perez cheating on her with a cousin. However, Virginia explains that her older sister, Toña, was diagnosed with a rare cancer and moved to New York for treatment. Toña recovered quickly and discovered she could make more money in New York than in Puerto Rico. She decided not to return to the island, so Abuela moved to keep her girls together. Cucu adds more to the story. Virginia’s other sister, Titi Ginny, was an athlete. She had the opportunity to compete for Olympic training in San Juan, so she snuck away with her brother. Ginny won the competition, receiving an offer for free summer training in the States and a full scholarship to La Universidad de San Jan Rio Piedras. 

However, Juan Perez refused to let his daughter go, insisting she would work on the farm like the rest of them. Abuela, who had been forced out of school, refused to let her daughter meet the same fate. She packed their bags, flew to New York, and never saw her husband again. The Perezes settled in the Bronx, entering a life much different from the one they knew in Puerto Rico. Abuela’s sister lived in Philadelphia, and when they visited, they found a place that felt more like home. The family moved to a neighborhood full of “old-growth elms and handsome brownstones” (152). There was a park, a mural of the Statue of Liberty with her crown decorated with a Puerto Rican flag, and a ball field where Ginny joined a softball team. Soon, “judges and lawyers” began moving to the neighborhood, forcing the Puerto Ricans to move “deeper north into cramped, cheaper row homes” (154). They settled on American Street, with no trees or parks in sight.

Abuela adopted more and more of her grandchildren as their mothers struggled with “addiction and domestic violence” (154). Virginia moved to West Philly with Quiara’s father, where she lived next door to Ginny. Ginny attended community college but soon dropped out to “lay foundations for the next generation” (154). The “blood-sickness” began to stalk the Perez family. Ginny suffered an ectopic pregnancy and got Hepatitis C from the blood transfusion that saved her life. She could no longer have children, but she quickly adopted Flor’s boys, JJ and Danito, when their mother disappeared into substance use disorder. She planted gardens in empty lots, taught the boys to grow and harvest food, and fed them arroz con gandules (rice with peas).

Senior year of high school, Quiara is skeptical about her teacher and annoyed with the first poem he assigns, Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” However, the poem comes alive with Dr. Phillips’ reading, and Quiara cannot deny his “respect for the spoken word” (158). The year begins with Flannery O’Connor, and in their first exam, an essay with a two-sentence prompt, Quiara is again possessed by the spirit. Feverish, she fills eight pages in 52 minutes. Afterward, she feels “subterranean and animal,” with no idea what she has written. She realizes that she has accessed the same “dormant beast” that her mother taps into and is surprised that it was awakened “by a southern white woman […] and an English teacher wearing a bow tie and sweater vest” (160).

The rest of the reading in AP English is a revelation, but nothing else awakens “the beast.” Quiara finally asks her mother for a book about Santería. When Virginia cannot find anything in English in her collection, she buys a copy of Four New World Yoruba Rituals by John Mason, leaving it for Quiara without saying anything. Quiara devours the book, and her mother soon leaves her another and then another. She learns how Puerto Rico’s Taíno population was “enslaved, mass-murdered, and significantly depleted” (163) and how Spanish colonizers imported enslaved Africans who smuggled their Yoruba beliefs to the New World. Slowly, Quiara starts “learning to describe [her] world” (164).

During Quiara’s senior year, The Bell Curve is published, arguing that there is a connection between race and intelligence. Many of her white classmates “become overnight intellectuals,” encouraged to state their superiority unapologetically. Quiana’s high school is almost evenly Black and white, with a smattering of Latinos who tend to stick together when they have the chance. Although Philadelphia is only five percent Latino in the 1990s, Quiara believes there are many more due to the residential segregation that gives her a “warped view of reality” (167).

Three boys in Quiara’s Government and Politics class perk up when someone mentions “welfare queens.” Quiara is unfamiliar with the term, but she immediately senses the insult it implies. One of “the Three” tells her that welfare queens are women who play the system, having babies to get bigger assistance checks from the government. The boys assure her that it is happening all around them, but they cannot name anyone who actually does it. Quiara thinks of her cousin Nuchi, the kind of woman that people see and “[thank] god for their blessings” (171). Quiara thinks through a huge list of Nuchi’s needs, everything from roach spray to root canals, and concludes that Nuchi also needs love. Her children supply this love, and the thought of embracing this “human want” as Nuchi’s “way of enacting some injustice” (172) is terrible to Quiara. She finds herself on her feet in class, weeping and airing Nuchi’s “dollar-store laundry.”

Back home, Quiara is in the bathtub with Nuchi, dying her cousin’s hair. She finishes applying the dye and asks Nuchi to check the instructions to see how long they should wait. Strangely, Nuchi resists. When she finally grabs the instructions, she passes them to Quiara. Baffled, Quiara pushes back, asking Nuchi to read them. Nuchi tells her she can’t read, saying she thought that Quiara knew. Shocked, Quiara asks her cousin how she graduated high school. Nuchi tells her she stayed in the back of class, and “they just pass you” (174). Quiara thinks of the differences between her high school, debating “commas in e. e. cummings poems,” and Nuchi’s, where “invisibility was lauded as a life skill” (174).

The cousins play War while they wait for the hair dye to take, but Quiara wants to rush to the library to ask her literary idols to “make sense of one nation, one family, in which two cousins could walk such different paths” (175).

After learning about Nuchi’s illiteracy, Quiara constantly wonders who she would have become without the “definitive experiences” found in books. Although each book seems to take her “further from Nuchi’s reality" (178), it also makes Quiara more aware of their difference, which has the “strange effect” of bringing the cousins closer.

When Quiara’s friends call her house, they always remark on her mother’s accent, which is unremarkable to Quiara except in a few specific words. Virginia’s mispronunciations are always a source of embarrassment, and Quiara always tries to correct her. Her mother never chides Quiara for “colonizing [her] ass” with these corrections, but she never speaks differently.

Quiara thinks about her mother learning English in school in Puerto Rico, raised by parents who speak only Spanish. She imagines Virginia moving to the United States, being teased in school for her accent, and being denied the opportunity to attend college. She thinks of her mother’s advocacy work, and the honors she received for that work and the job drafting legislature for a state senator.

Quiara thinks that English is more her mother’s language than her own, and she closes the chapter by addressing her mother directly, apologizing for the years spent correcting her mother’s accent and telling her to “break this English language today and tomorrow and the day after and bestow it new life with each breaking” (182).