Summary

Chapter 1 opens in the mid-1980s. The author, Quiara Alegría Hudes, was a living in West Philadelphia. The neighborhood was very racially diverse, and many of Quiara’s friends spoke different languages in addition to English. Quiara’s mother—Virginia Perez—spoke Spanish and English, and her father spoke English. When Quiara was a young child, she and her parents moved to a farm, as Quiara’s mother had grown up on a farm in Puerto Rico and missed rural living.

In Chapter 2, Quiara writes about her mother’s Puerto Rican parents. They received no formal education, but Virginia’s father was an intelligent and adept farmer. When Virginia was a child, there was a period of time when she seemed to have psychic visions in dreams. She once even had a vision related to a murder that took place not far from...