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Signing in Puerto Rican: A Hearing Son and His Deaf Family
The only child of deaf Puerto Rican immigrants, Andrés Torres grew up in New York City in a large, extended family that included several deaf aunts and uncles. In Signing in Puerto Rican: A Hearing Son and His Deaf Family , he opens a window into the little known culture of Deaf Latinos chasing the immigrant American dream. Like many children of deaf adults (codas), Torres loved his parents deeply but also longed to be free from being their interpreter to the hearing world. Torres’s story is unique in that his family communicated in three languages. The gatherings of his family reverberated with “deaf talk,” in sign, Spanish, and English. What might have struck outsiders as a strange chaos of gestures and mixed spoken languages was just normal for his family.
Torres describes his early life as one of conflicting influences in his search for identity. His parents’ deep involvement in the Puerto Rican Society for the Catholic Deaf led him to study for the priesthood. He later left the seminary as his own ambitions took hold. Torres became very active in the Puerto Rico independence party against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement and protest against the Vietnam War. Throughout these defining events, Torres’s journey never took him too far from his Deaf Puerto Rican family roots and the passion of arms, hands, and fingers filling the air with simultaneous translation and understanding.
Torres describes his early life as one of conflicting influences in his search for identity. His parents’ deep involvement in the Puerto Rican Society for the Catholic Deaf led him to study for the priesthood. He later left the seminary as his own ambitions took hold. Torres became very active in the Puerto Rico independence party against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement and protest against the Vietnam War. Throughout these defining events, Torres’s journey never took him too far from his Deaf Puerto Rican family roots and the passion of arms, hands, and fingers filling the air with simultaneous translation and understanding.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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January 15, 2024BOOK: SIGNING IN PUERTO RICAN, BY ANDRES TORRES
Commentary by Jeff Keith
I love this book; I particularly gravitate to groups and descriptions of people who are “intersectional,” meaning members of two different minority groups at the same time. Andrés grew up as the only child of a Deaf mother and father in New York, and his book is full of vivid descriptions of what that was like. Both of his parents came from mixed families, with some siblings who were Deaf and others who were hearing. They were both born and raised in Puerto Rico. His father was noticed by some kind adult, who got him a scholarship to a school for the Deaf in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he got a decent education.
His mother and three of her sisters were Deaf and lived in a small town, and didn’t get any sort of education until they were adolescents. The oldest girls never got any education, and when they found out it existed, they had an angry emotional scene with their parents. Both families moved to New York in the 1940s, and the Deaf members started networking with other Deaf people at that time. (Author Andrés Torres was born in the latter half of the 1940s, the same as me.)
Mostly the Deaf members married other Deaf people, so their two clans were mixed between hearing and Deaf, and many of the kids grew up with ASL as their first language. Andrés says his first two languages were ASL and English, and only later did he get politicized into the Puerto Rican pride movement and learn good Spanish. He was obviously the main interpreter for his parents watching TV and doing all sorts of business, and when he wasn’t around, they might make mistakes. One distressing, bad mistake resulted in his getting ripped off on a pseudo-insurance policy.
Andrés went to college in the New York area and continued to live at home through that time. It was the late 1960s, and he became more and more militant in Puerto Rican pride organizations such as the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP). On one occasion, he even got to be on a TV show with the Governor of Puerto Rico where the facilitators wanted to hear different political viewpoints. His parents were proud about that. During his early years as an activist, he was embarrassed not to have grown up speaking Spanish, and this book is an explanation, although written many years later, describing how he grew up.
In New York, his parents were deeply involved in Catholic Puerto Rican Deaf affairs, but after retirement they decided to move back to the island. They then helped in founding or strengthening groups for Deaf people in Puerto Rico. Their income was always limited, but in Puerto Rico they had family networks to help them out.
Commentary by Jeff Keith
I love this book; I particularly gravitate to groups and descriptions of people who are “intersectional,” meaning members of two different minority groups at the same time. Andrés grew up as the only child of a Deaf mother and father in New York, and his book is full of vivid descriptions of what that was like. Both of his parents came from mixed families, with some siblings who were Deaf and others who were hearing. They were both born and raised in Puerto Rico. His father was noticed by some kind adult, who got him a scholarship to a school for the Deaf in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he got a decent education.
His mother and three of her sisters were Deaf and lived in a small town, and didn’t get any sort of education until they were adolescents. The oldest girls never got any education, and when they found out it existed, they had an angry emotional scene with their parents. Both families moved to New York in the 1940s, and the Deaf members started networking with other Deaf people at that time. (Author Andrés Torres was born in the latter half of the 1940s, the same as me.)
Mostly the Deaf members married other Deaf people, so their two clans were mixed between hearing and Deaf, and many of the kids grew up with ASL as their first language. Andrés says his first two languages were ASL and English, and only later did he get politicized into the Puerto Rican pride movement and learn good Spanish. He was obviously the main interpreter for his parents watching TV and doing all sorts of business, and when he wasn’t around, they might make mistakes. One distressing, bad mistake resulted in his getting ripped off on a pseudo-insurance policy.
Andrés went to college in the New York area and continued to live at home through that time. It was the late 1960s, and he became more and more militant in Puerto Rican pride organizations such as the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP). On one occasion, he even got to be on a TV show with the Governor of Puerto Rico where the facilitators wanted to hear different political viewpoints. His parents were proud about that. During his early years as an activist, he was embarrassed not to have grown up speaking Spanish, and this book is an explanation, although written many years later, describing how he grew up.
In New York, his parents were deeply involved in Catholic Puerto Rican Deaf affairs, but after retirement they decided to move back to the island. They then helped in founding or strengthening groups for Deaf people in Puerto Rico. Their income was always limited, but in Puerto Rico they had family networks to help them out.
March 30, 2018
Overall I enjoyed it. Learning about some Puerto Rican and Puerto Rican American history was interesting, along with the Deaf and CODA experiences.
There was some jumping back in forth in time as the book was organized into topics rather than in a linear way. Not my favorite style, but I still plan to pass it on to some of my coworkers.
There was some jumping back in forth in time as the book was organized into topics rather than in a linear way. Not my favorite style, but I still plan to pass it on to some of my coworkers.
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May 17, 2013Great memoir!!!! Highly recommended for anyone that wants to explore what it is like living in both the hearing and having to translate for the deaf world.
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