My Broken Language: A Memoir

My Broken Language (2021) is a memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes. Born to a white Jewish father and a Puerto Rican mother, Hudes grows up in her West Philly townhouse, surrounded by her mother’s aunts and cousins but unsure of her true place in the family. Frustrated with the inadequacies of both English and Spanish, Hudes begins a search for her own language, one that can describe the complexities of her multicultural existence. The memoir explores themes of searching for belonging, facing inequality in American society, and discovering the importance of storytelling and representation while living between two cultures. Another work by Hudes is Water by the Spoonful (2012).

This guide uses the 2021 One World Kindle edition of the text. 

Content Warning: The source text contains references to AIDS, substance use disorder, racism, and some brief references to colonial violence, sexist slurs, child abuse, and religious animal sacrifice.

Plot Summary

At four years old, Quiara Alegría Hudes moves with her parents from their home in West Philly to a horse farm in the nearby town of Malvern. The Spanish that Quiara is used to hearing around her is suddenly replaced by English. Her mother, Virginia Perez, only speaks Spanish outdoors when she conducts rituals in her garden full of medicinal plants. Quiara’s English-speaking father is a carpenter and an atheist, very different from her spiritual mother.

When Quiara’s mother and father separate, Quiara’s mother moves back to West Philly. Quiara takes the train to spend every other week with her father, but he has remarried, and she feels more like a guest than a true family member. She also misses her mother, and the vibrancy of her Philadelphia neighborhood contrasts with the “chilling” white homogeneity of Malvern. She moves in with her mother full-time, and her visits to her father’s house become less and less frequent. 

Back in Philly, Quiara’s mother does outreach and advocacy work, opening a community center in the neighborhood to reach the underserved Latina population. Quiara often tags along with her mother and learns about issues that plague Hispanic women in Philadelphia, including disproportionate rates of infant mortality, cervical cancer, and HIV infection. She also begins to notice that her family suffers more death and tragedy than her classmates from “other zip codes.” Her childhood is full of funerals and disappearances as family members are lost to substance use disorder and AIDS, although the causes of these tragedies are never discussed. 

Quiara’s mother, who experienced visions and premonitions as a child, also progresses in her spirituality and becomes a devout worshiper of the Afro-Caribbean Lukumí religion. Strange alterations appear in their home, and Quiara struggles to explain them when her friends visit. She feels increasingly like English words are inadequate to describe her multicultural reality, and she wishes for a language that fits her better. 

As a high school senior, Quiara is accepted to Yale University, where she studies music. In North Philly, music from around the world constantly filled the air. However, at Yale, the coursework is all canonical Western classical music; anything else is dismissed as inferior, and Quiara is often frustrated with this narrow approach. She is also unsettled by the stark contrast between the wealthy university and her poor block in Philly. This discomfort grows stronger when she learns how deep the inequality runs even in her own family: One of her cousins is illiterate, and her baby sister Gabi struggles to read as she starts school. In her junior year, Quiara receives a fellowship to build a scholarly community with other students of color. The project cumulates in a musical inspired by her mother’s Santería worship, and her family comes up from Philly for the show.

After Quiara graduates, she returns to Philly and makes money playing gigs. However, she begins to grow bored with music, and still struggles to truly articulate the intricacies of her identity. She finds an “old silence” sneaking up on her when called to speak about herself, and she longs for a “better language.” When she confesses her boredom to her mother, Virginia encourages her to become a writer, telling her that her family needs her to record their stories.

Quiara accepts her mother’s advice and enrolls in Brown for a graduate program in playwriting. Her professor, Paula Vogel, encourages her to let go of her loyalty to language, telling her to write in a “broken” language if she needs to. Quiara thus begins to write plays based on her family. A lifetime of watching and listening to their stories spills onto the page, and she thinks perhaps she can create “a safe space” where she can “center [her]self and [her] loved ones” (293). 

For her thesis, she writes a queer Latina coming-of-age story with a protagonist based on her little sister. The play draws on all the ways her female family members have been shamed for their bodies and sexuality, and Quiara reclaims slurs that have been used against them to create a new “code for belonging.” However, she struggles to find inspiration for the second Act. Writing late one night in the computer lab, Quiara is possessed by a spirit in a way that has only happened a few times in her life. Four hours have passed when she recovers, and the second Act is finished. Her funny, rebellious play has turned dark and frightening, ending with the protagonist’s declaration, “I AM A WHORE” (309). Quiara is horrified by what she has written but recognizes it as her protagonist “reclaiming monstrosity as her earned, rightful power” (309).

Addressing the Perez women directly, Hudes tells her female relatives that they must become their “own librarians,” managing and protecting the family archive that lives in their bodies.