Union City, New Jersey

Daisy Hernández and her family lived in Union City, New Jersey until Hernández was seven years old, during which time she recalls attending Holy Family Catholic School and learning English. Prior to this, she recalls, "What I know of the world before kindergarten is the uneven sidewalks of Union City, New Jersey. The shop with its fat chickens hollering at us and nipping at the wire cages...The fabric store with its bins carrying spools of thread...The buses that snake up and down Bergenline Avenue. The store jammed with cigars and wrinkled men and women folding the ends of the thick brown leaves" (5). The neighborhood she lives in is majority-Latinx (Union City had the highest percentage of Hispanic residents of all New Jersey municipalities on the 2010 U.S. census); she further recalls, "everything real happens in Spanish: the way women complain...