I'M NOT BROKEN

A Mexican American social impact consultant looks back with raw honesty at his high-risk youth in San Diego in the 1980s and ’90s.

Leon opens this wrenching story with a significant triumph: his 2001 graduation from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The son of immigrants from the Sierra Madra region of Durango, the author endured his elderly father’s abuse while his mother worked multiple low-paying jobs to feed her children. “While she was at work,” he writes, “he would beat my brother and me with belts and TV wire hangers.” Born in 1974, Leon grew up in a diverse, pre-gentrified urban San Diego, where people still kept gardens and farm animals. Labeled a nerd by his unhelpful brother, the author was bullied in school for his intelligence, social awkwardness, and Mexican heritage. After chronicling this harassment, Leon harrowingly describes how, at age 11, he was subjected to violent sexual abuse at the hands of a shopkeeper. Even more shocking, over the course of the next three years, he was “pimped out” by a band of sexual predators. “Until I was 14,” he writes, “I would have a few hundred sex partners.” Leon sought to numb the daily terror, shame, and self-loathing with drugs and alcohol, somehow managing to get through school despite being “high all the time.” Readers will be astonished by Leon’s ability to survive such unimaginable abuse, and he capably shows how a unique support system—his devoted friend Ariyel; a community college adviser; his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor—was vital to his ability to endure and eventually flourish. Following college and graduate school, Leon has worked with many nonprofits benefitting at-risk youth, and he has built thousands of mixed-income housing via his role as a real estate developer for Bank of America. Some readers may struggle with some of the narrative’s graphic depictions, but this book is a viscerally moving story of inspiring transformation.

A remarkable story of fortitude and personal transformation.