My Broken Language: A Memoir

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.