Family and Heritage

Many aspects of the memoir examine how family and heritage are integral to Quiara’s view of herself and the world. Technically, the only requirement for a memoir is that it must recount significant moments from the author’s life. However, Quiara expands the form of the memoir to incorporate experiences of her relatives, even events that took place prior to Quiara’s birth. The thematic and conceptual significance of this fact is that Quiara views history as being formative to society, family, and personal identity. For example, in one chapter, Quiara recounts the systemic racial oppression that her mother and grandmother witnessed in New York City in the 1950s: “The mandate in those years was: if a Hispanic stepped to a white person, round up every brownie you can find. A single-suspect crime might yield fifty or a hundred arrests in one night” (153). Quiara sees...