Signing in Puerto Rican: A Hearing Son and His Deaf Family (review)

The author begins his tale with a recollection of traveling on the A train as a young boy accompanied by his deaf parents and their two deaf friends. Amid the stares of the other passengers, they are chatting with each other as they make their way to the Friday meeting of the Puerto Rican Society for the Catholic Deaf in Manhattan. The year is 1960, and the story takes place for the most part in the South Bronx. Throughout the memoir, the author's family plays a central role in his struggles to answer two fundamental personal questions about what it means to be a good son and how to define his own identity in relation to his deaf parents and the hearing world he inhabits.

The Torres and the Ayala families constitute the characters of this rather unique family portrait. On the paternal side, of the first five children, four were deaf. On the maternal side were four deaf sisters (las mudas). As most deaf people marry other deaf people, the author's extended family included many deaf aunts and uncles, as well as many hearing children from those marriages. Of twenty-three nuclear families, eight families were deaf, resulting in the ubiquitous presence of sign language, Spanish, and English at every family gathering.

Torres does an excellent job bringing to the fore the central role of language in his search for self-identity. Throughout the book he reflects on how little his family and the greater hearing world understood about the fact that sign language was his first language. Much of the confusion he felt centered around his lack of ability in Spanish, yet his signing abilities were rarely acknowledged. He notes that birth order is an important factor in determining how well hearing children learn to sign in deaf families: "I have never come across a case where hearing persons learned sign language from a deaf sibling who was younger" (p. 121). The fact that his deaf aunts were the older siblings meant that his other hearing aunts and uncles were taught to sign by their older sisters. In turn, those same aunts taught their hearing nieces and nephews to sign as well. In an interesting aside, he compares his own extended family to the "signing village" of Martha's Vineyard.¹

Torres vividly describes the financial hard times his parents endured in the 1950s and the critical role his network of tías y tíos (aunts and uncles) and his abuela (grandmother) played in sustaining family ties and supporting one another. However, the times he spent with his extended family brought to the fore his limitations in speaking Spanish and his feelings that his abuelita did not really comprehend that Spanish was not his first language. The unique sounds of his parents' vocalizations and the way they signed constituted his first language, a fact that the author refers to with affection when he recalls the particular way his parents pronounced his name. Struggles around language and identity manifested outside the family as well. Torres often describes the strain of having a first language that remained relatively invisible to people outside his family. He recounts his attempts at hiding his Deaf identity as he grew into adulthood, when he had to deal with the hearing world more frequently.

One particularly delightful aspect of the book is the way Torres re-creates his childhood growing up in the South Bronx. Readers with little or no knowledge of the northernmost border of Manhattan will find his descriptions of his numerous neighbors and the different families watching life from the many windows very entertaining. Life happened on his block in the Washington Heights neighborhood. Torres renders vivid descriptions of the many children congregating on the stoops, venturing up to the rooftops to chew gum and blow bubbles, and playing street games from another...