My Broken Language
by Quiara Alegría Hudes
She built *In the Heights* from one block in North Philly.
For you if
you've ever needed art to say something that language kept failing to hold
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Hudes grew up in North Philadelphia in a Puerto Rican family where Spanish was the language of her aunts' parties and English was the language of school, and neither one could hold what she actually needed to say. My Broken Language is the memoir of how she built In the Heights — the Tony-winning musical — from the specific people and corner she grew up on, not a generic "immigrant story" but 5th and Norris. The book is about translation in every direction: between languages, between the living and the dead, between the stage and the block it came from. Hudes shows what art is for — not escape, not uplift, but the form you build when language breaks under the weight of what happened.
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