A Mexican American Experience
Caramelo is a novel written by Sandra Cisneros, best known for the 1984 House on Mango Street. Caramelo was published in 2002, eighteen years after Cisneros' breaking hit, and although it does retain some motives central to the House on Mango Street, this work of nine years in the making claims its own recognition. What is truly epic is that the novel actually strives to depict the totality of the Mexican American experience in its myriad forms and variations resulting from a century of documented immigration and community establishment. As reviews aptly put it, millions of Mexican Americans live in the United States, but their stories vary and depend on how they got there. Numerous works are written from the perspective of either the second- or the third-generation Chicano or that of the newly arrived immigrant, but sweeping novels that combine the two quite different psyches are rare. Most Chicano novels focus on extended families since they are essential units of the Chicano community, but whereas in most books the focus remains on a single generation, Caramelo gives equal attention to three generations of the Reyes family.
From the opening line - "tell me a story, even if it's a lie" - over constant reminders throughout the narrative that the memories and history we're reading may well be imperfectly remembered, borrowed from others, partially reconstructed and partially made up, to the concluding list of people whose life and family stories Cisneros wove into that of the Reyes... The Reyes are all migrant families of Mexican origin, as their ups and downs, happy and unhappy marriages, reverence and irreverence, successful and unsuccessful assimilations - in Mexican as well as American communities - reflect the truth that there is more to the Chicano/Chicana than what literature burdened with political aims would have one believe. The Reyes are everywhere and yet not typical, for there can be little to deem 'typical' in an ethnic community of over five generations and twenty million people.
Another, technical and possibly the most relevant layer, comes from the postmodernist desire to erase borders between fictional and actual life. What Cisneros does in Caramelo is make the research all novelists undertake to create credible or familiar backdrops to their characters' lives an integral part of her novel through constant and exhaustive use of footnotes chronicling and detailing Mexico's history and celebrities - politicians, entertainers, or both. There has been much criticism regarding this move; the inclusion of footnotes, chronologies, and other intrusions of objective reality into the intensely subjective space of fiction writing makes a very subtle yet very powerful point: by making background research as obvious on the page as the text of the narrative yet giving it a subordinate role of footnote, Cisneros makes it plain that personal experience takes precedence over documented fact.
What is Postmodernism?
A complex intellectual and cultural movement in reaction to a universal TRUTH. Because after all, what is truth? What is real?
Jean Baudrillard, the most controversial, provocative thinker there might have ever been, became one of the first postmodern thinkers. He wrote that people no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch or speak to each other, but they use simulacra instead. Baudrillard referred to these representations of reality as simulations. Mass-produced images are everywhere you look; they are a simulation of reality, and in many cases, a simulation of a simulation —a copy of a copy of a copy, taking inspiration from something that is already inspired by reality. Now, because of all of the media around us, we are unable to distinguish between simulation and reality. The term Baudrillard uses for this is hyperreality, which refers to the blurring of the lines between what is real and what is simulated. Nowadays, individuals have become disenfranchised with the idea of the TRUTH. Thus, postmodernism rejects fixed meanings and embraces the idea that interpretations are subjective and context-dependent.
Postmodernism in literature is a form of literature which rely on literary conventions such as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humor and authorial self-reference.
Postmodern authors tend to reject outright meanings in their novels, stories and poems, and, instead, highlight and celebrate the possibility of multiple meanings, or a complete lack of meaning, within a single literary work. (www.englishpost.org)
Caramelo exposes conflicts both between and within generations with particular care towards the role of women, a Cisneros forte. Whereas in Chicano classics religious attitudes influence the characters' behavior, men and women of the Reyes family act according to values set not by that particular monolithic institution but by tensions between the traditional institution of the Mexican family and the changing cultures that surround it. This is also where the dichotomies of truth vs lies, story vs history, talk vs silence as investigated by Cisneros show their darker side. The stories that Lala narrates are of no less than five generations, incorporating six marriages, two of which forced by circumstances (pregnancy), two failed engagements, one of which secret, one secret common marriage, countless infidelities.
The novel brings the reader into contact with the life stories of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. But also functions as a vehicle through which Cisneros articulates her own sense of identity, the identity of those around her, and how this contributes to a sense of cultural definition. It is through variations in the autobiographical form that we come into contact with names and faces.
Sylvia Malloy, for example, defines autobiographical writing as:
“The most referential of genres”; it can be seen as re-presentation, a retelling of life that is reconstructed within the narrative. Autobiography, however, “does not depend on the events, but rather the articulation of those events, stored in memory and reproduced through remembering and verbalization” (16).
In her interpretation of Latin American literature, Malloy has classified various autobiographical texts into different types of articulation: texts that refer to other texts, childhood stories and family novels, and autobiography as history. In Cisneros's novel Caramelo, several of these aspects are included. She has pointed out in interviews that she incorporates autobiographical elements from her childhood, biographical elements that refer to her father and other family members, as well as historical data and descriptions that focus on the situation of Mexican-American immigrants.
Breakout Room Activity
Sandra Cisneros uses the phrase "Cuéntame algo, aunque sea una mentira" – "Tell me a story, even if it's a lie" – as the epigraph to her novel, Caramelo. In her "Disclaimer," she states, "I have invented what I do not know and exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy lies." When the main character, Celaya states, "Did I dream it or did someone tell me the story? I can't remember where the truth ends and the talk begins" (p. 20). And while she is assuring us, "I wish I could tell you about this episode in my family's history, but nobody talks about it, and I refuse to invent what I don't know" (p. 134), she also acknowledges, "The same story becomes a different story depending on who is telling it" (p. 156). This suggests Cisneros preference for creative storytelling over factual recounting. While the novel embraces imaginative narrative, it also explores the consequences of misrepresentation.
- Do you consider Caramelo an autobiographical novel? Considering that choosing to say "autobiographical" sounds like a contradiction in terms. Since an autobiography is a purely fact-based presentation of one's life, whereas a novel is a fictionalized tale that springs from the author's imagination, given that an autobiography is supposed to be 100 percent truthful, while a novel is an invention, how can one see the two possibly intersect in the novel Caramelo?
- What elements of postmodern literature one can see used in the novel?
Cisneros draws on moments taken from her own life but in light of others who have been involved in her world. Indeed, the novel begins precisely with a reference to self, through the voice of Celaya and from a familial perspective:
“We’re all little in the photograph above Father’s bed. We were little in Acapulco. We will always be little. For him we are just as we were then” (3). Yet as a recounting of the moment continues, the “I” speaks: I’m not here. They’ve forgotten about me when the photographer walking along the beach proposes a portrait, un recuerdo, a remembrance literally. No one notices I’m off by myself building sand houses. They won’t realize I’m missing until the photographer delivers the portrait of Catita’s house, and I look at it for the first time and ask, -- When was this taken? Where? Then everyone realized the portrait is incomplete. It’s as if I didn’t exist. It’s as if I’m the photographer walking along the beach with the tripod camera on my shoulder asking, -- Un recuerdo? A souvenir? A memory. (4)
What can be understood here is that Celaya remembers the fact that she is not present when the family photograph is taken during this family trip to Acapulco. She observes her absence in the photograph. As the author begins to recount her own story, she is in effect writing about herself, but in relation to her family and a community. The concept of life narrative is important for understanding Caramelo in terms of discovering the links that exist between the process of self figuration and a sense of cultural consciousness regarding a specific ethnic group. The narrative concerns Celaya’s observation of self; however, it is important to note that Cisneros dedicates her writing to her father. As she notes on the final page of the text, “I look into Father’s face, that face that is the same face as the Grandmother’s, the same faces as mine.” This points to the fact that she is not only observing herself but rather the self as it relates to her world. The world in this instance refers to her family, but also a larger cultural context involving a community affected by a history of displacement.
Breakout Room Activity
- How is the self-formed, and what are the key factors that contribute to its development? What makes you, you?
- Do you believe personal choices significantly shape an individual's sense of self? What are your core values, and how do they guide your choices? Please elaborate on your reasoning, considering aspects such as cultural influences, personal experiences, and the impact of relationships on one's identity.
Both ‘self’ and ‘identity’ represent part of the process of developing a sense of who one is.
Some aspects of our identities are consistent over our lives; others change as we gain skills and have different roles in life. Some aspects of our identities feel very central to who we are no matter where we are; others might feel more like background or depend on the situation. Some identities are labels that others put on us, while others see us as having that identity, we don't.
"Identity represents the process of searching for and settling on a set of commitments to personal standards and life roles (Meeus, Iedema, Helsen, & Vollebergh, 1999), and ‘self’ represents the view of oneself that develops from (and influences) these commitments" (Greenwald & Pratkanis, 1985)
The Novel's Configuration
"I didn't think I was going to be writing a history book, I thought I was writing a story about my father, based on my father's life. But in telling my father's story, I had to place him in time and history, and then I had to go back and look at how he became who he was. So I had to invent my grandmother's story and how she became who she was, so next thing I knew, there was a lot of tributaries from my main story, and footnotes, chronologies, and things like that, that I didn't anticipate when I began." (Sandra Cisneros.)
Caramelo is divided into three major sections and a brief final section. Part One, “Recuerdo de Acapulco” deals with Celaya’s childhood memories and experiences that focus on the family trips from Chicago to Mexico. Part Two, “When I Was Dirt” presents the reader with the family history of Celaya’s great-grandparents, Regina and Eleuterio, her grandparents, Soledad (The Awful Grandmother) and Narciso (Little Grandfather), as well as the story of her parents, Inocencio and Zoila, met. In Part Three, “The Eagle and the Serpent or My Mother and My Father,” Celaya focus on memories of her childhood and young adult years in Chicago and San Antonio. All three of these sections include specific historical references which provide a social and political context for memory and experience. “Fin”, the brief final section of the work, stands as a clear commentary about the imagined world of “emigrants” (435). This section also includes a short chronology of Mexican-American history from 1519 to 2002.
La Familia
The central themes of Caramelo are culture and family. The theme of family is perhaps the more important, as everything that happens revolves around what it means to be a family: no matter how dramatic and painful that experience may be.
The main protagonist, Lala, grows up and learns of the world outside her extended family, inter and intra-generational dynamics of the family, la familia, are stripped to their basic units - parents and children - and entwined with those of gender, men of Caramelo do not strike one as particularly strong, let alone threatening characters, as Cisneros makes painstaking note of obligatory chivalrous upbringing that forms them "feo, fuerte y formal", but the women are no apparent pillars of feminist empowerment either. The idea of family seems to have two rules - 'respect your elders' and 'do the right thing' -and everything else has to bend to accommodate them, causing repeated suffering, mostly on the part of women as they are through the biological fact of childbearing forced to stay inside families regardless of their quality, while the pressure on men seems to be mostly sociological: "No somos perros", "we are not dogs" is repeated to every generation of Reyes men as they prepare to abandon girls they got into trouble. The girls, now wives and mothers, are in turn bitter, especially as their husbands continue to pursue-exotic women,-all resulting in ''stories that are not told". Silence is the dangerous lie which Lala exorcises despite promises to stay silent, not ask questions (but to write is to ask questions, Cisneros notes), or tell stories the way their protagonists wish to be told, most notably grandmother Soledad.
The story of Soledad is the most prominent one in the book, overshadowing even that of Lala, and her life story is the story of her love for Narciso, the "first man who pays her a compliment" but who marries her out of obligation while his true passion lies in a wild independent woman unimpressed by his background. This Soledad knows but in the turn-of-the-century Mexico City she has no one else to turn to or bind with until her first son- Lala's father- is born and whom she becomes obsessively protective about. Her relationship with Narciso is based on silence, the dangerous lie, which Lala refuses to give in to as she narrates Narciso's persistent immaturity. The story of Soledad and Narciso mirrors in this loaded silence those of their parents, down to the need to remind one that men are not dogs. Soledad is damaged and goes on to perpetuate or foster damage in her children's nuptial lives, going as far as to ignore the fateful line when it comes to Inocencio's adolescent mistake and advising him to keep contact with his illegitimate family long after he has established a lawful and numerous one.
Soledad's pain caused by tolerance for erring men finds an outlet in torturing other women of her family- making Inocencio's wife, Zoila, suffer the way she did by telling her own daughter that she hates her because she "always did what she wanted with her life" This exchange is later mirrored between Zoila and her daughter, Lala, but there is a fundamental change between the ways in which Soledad and Zoila deal with their unfaithful husbands: "It was you I chose, over my own mother!" Inocencio says, "No Mexican man would choose his wife over his own mother!" Zoila tells the story openly to Lala, while Inocencio pretends it never happened and even dares threaten Lala with the same old line about dogs when she merely suggests living outside a traditionally structured family of her own.
There is one major parallel between the three main female characters in the book. They are all square pegs jammed into round holes. They are trying to mold themselves into what society needs them to be, and they are all miserable. Soledad, the grandmother, wanted to fit into society’s mold. Even her name, which means “loneliness” portrays this empty feeling. Zoila, Laya’s mother, is very domestic and pissed off by her wife and mother roles. She wants more than what life has handed her.
Celaya is on her way to becoming bitter and upset like her mother and grandmother, but is unique. She has opportunities they do not, living in a different time amidst two worlds. Growing up as a part of the family’s new life in Chicago, she balances 1920s Mexico with 1950s Chicago, using the combination of the traditional and the modern cultures to help her mold herself into someone she desires to be.
Breakout Room Activity
In your group discuss these questions, each student should offer their view, supported by reference to the text. Together you would try to come to a consensus around your best collective response, you might assign one student to present and share them with the rest of the class.
Group 1
- What are the significances of the novel’s opening with Celaya describing a photograph of her family, when she was a little girl, visiting Acapulco, but “I’m not here. They’ve forgotten about me . . . No one notices I’m off by myself building sand houses” (4)?
- When the Reyes family crosses the border into Mexico, “everything switches to another language. . . . Sweets sweeter, colors brighter, the bitter more bitter. . . . Every year I cross the border, it’s the same – my mind forgets. But my body always remembers” (17-18). Caramelo continuously draws distinctions between Mexican and American culture, as Celaya does here. How would you interpret these distinctions and how this could define the themes?
Group 2
- The Reyes family members move fluidly throughout the book between Mexico and the United States. Does the ease of such movement diminish for each generation? How does the immigration of Inocencio and his siblings and first cousins reflect immigration between the countries in the middle part of the twentieth century, and how has immigration to the United States from Mexico changed today?
- Celaya’s cousins have intriguing, allusive names. Aunt Licha and Uncle Fat-Face have boys named Elvis, Aristotle, and Byron. Aunt Ninfa and Uncle Baby have girls named Amor and Paz. What do Celaya’s cousins’ names and – to the extent we know them at this point – her cousins’ characters say about how girls and boys are treated, how easy their lives are made, in Mexican and Mexican-American families?
Group 3
- “Women across the republic, rich or poor, plain or beautiful, ancient or young in the times of my grandmother all owned rebozos . . . . Soledad would remember her father’s words. Just enough, but not too much. And though they were instructions on how to dye the black rebozos black, who would’ve guessed they would instruct her on how to live her life” (93-95). What symbolic meaning does the rebozo have in the novel? And how might the symbolism of the rebozo be relevant to the theme?
- In Chapter 28 - "Nothing But Story", there are several short lines toward the end of this chapter-cluster that have to do with representing reality in story-telling versus embracing fictionalizing or “lying” in narrative. “Nobody talks about it, and I refuse to invent what I don’t know” (134). Soledad “began to doubt what she’d actually seen and what she’d embroidered over time, because after a while the embroidery seems real and the real seems embroidery” (135). “This next part of the story I know sounds as if I am making it up, but the facts are so unbelievable they can only be true” (143). Could you explain these passages putting them in their context in the novel?
Group 4
- Cisneros employs elaborate and vivid food metaphors, such as "Regina was like the papaya slices she sold with lemon and a dash of chile; you could not help but want to take a little taste" [p. 117] and "Have you ever been that sad? Like a donut dunked in coffee" [p. 274]. Is taste the strongest sense her metaphors invoke? How does she also invoke the senses of smell, sight, and sound? What does Cisneros achieve stylistically or thematically by invoking these senses?
- In recounting her birth, Celaya/Lala declares, “I am the favorite child of a favorite child. I know my worth. . . . And when the Awful Grandmother saw my Father with that crazy look of joy in his eye, she knew. She was no longer his queen” (231-232). Doesn’t this quotation refute the position that Carmelo views Mexican families as having a sexist, patriarchal preference for sons?
Group 5
- In chapter 54, Aunty Light-Skin has an intimate conversation with her niece Celaya. She confides:-- "That’s how we are, we mexicanas, puro coraje y passion. That’s what we’re made of, Lala, you and me. That’s us. We love like we hate. Backward and forward, past, present, and future. With our heart and soul and our tripas, too.-- And is that good?-- It isn’t good or bad, it just is. Look, when you don’t know how to use your emotions, your emotions use you. . . . You be careful with love, Lalita. To love is a terrible, wonderful thing. The pleasure reminds you – I am alive! But the pain reminds you of the same thing – Ay! I am alive" (274-275). Is Aunty Light-Skin right? Are her views here supported by the rest of the novel? What do you think is Sandra Cisneros’ attitude toward her views?
- The characters in Caramelo make frequent observations about Mexicans. For example, Zoila asserts that "all people from Mexico City are liars" [p. 353], and Celaya comments "We're so Mexican. So much left unsaid" [p. 428]. With what tone do the characters deliver these types of generalizations, and how are they to be interpreted? Why might these characters portray their native countrymen in this way? Do people of other cultures make similarly deprecating comments, and what purpose might making such comments serve for such people?
Group 6
- As Celaya tries to process her heartbreak, she has a kind of recognition about life, one involving the rebozo. Could you please explain the following passage? ---"I look up, and la Virgen looks down at me, and, honest to God, this sounds like a lie, but it’s true. The universe is a cloth, and all humanity is interwoven. Each and every person connected to me, and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo. Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone. Each person who comes into my life affects the pattern, and I affect theirs" (389).
- As you read Caramelo, reflect on the character Celaya/Lala. Like many immigrants, she comes from two worlds. To build her identity, she relies on her family and the stories of their ancestors. How does the author present the influence of the family on identity development?
Final Remarks
In Caramelo, Chicago acts—multisensorially and transhistorically—as an epistemological standpoint that gives her the right to narrate. Lala’s resulting narrative allows her to shift the meaning of home from one tied to place or family to one based within a condition of storytelling. For Lala, storytelling, the right to narrate—even as she betrays her promise to her father never to “talk these things” (430)—stands in as her honorable labor.
The last chapter departs from Lala’s narrative style and recuperates the many histories told throughout the novel into one elaborate and sensorial sequence. It emphasizes De Genova’s point that Mexican Chicago is made up of practices, such as labor, but it also suggests that it serves as the lens of the camera, the site— perhaps randomly chosen, perhaps a destino—that focuses the family’s otherwise blurry, uncertain genealogy and geography into a comprehensible, clear set of snapshots. As the lens—the focalizing viewpoint—of Lala’s stories, Chicago frames, orders, and coordinates the narrative. It sees the past and the present, death and life, Mexico and the United States, but suggests that the “in between” (Cisneros, Caramelo 246) cannot be ignored—the thin line inherent in the translation from Spanish to English of destiny and history. Chicago made the Reyes Mexican, and it also makes Lala a particular kind of storyteller; Chicago’s oscillation between destiny and destination mirrors Lala’s between history and story as she confirms that families need stories that tell “healthy lies” to make them “turn out pretty in the end” (188). But this Chicago home can never be a static place; instead, home comes to mean and inhere within a recurrent and evolving set of stories and practices that insistently triangulate and thus make possible alternative modes of belonging. (Estill, 2016)
PBS- 2016: Sandra Cisneros looks back as a writer
References
- Adriana Estill, Mexican Chicago in Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo : Gendered Geographies , MELUS, Volume 41, Issue 2, Summer 2016, Pages 97–123, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlw005
- Kalogjera, Branka. Dynamics Between Old "and "New" Ethnicities and Multiple Identities in Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo. University of Rijeka, Croatia
- Marie, Donna and Kabalen de Bichara. Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo: The Mexican American Border Life Story as a Knowledge Source for Understanding Local Histories and Identity. Revista de Humanidades: Tecnologico de Monterrey, n m. 31-32, 2011, pp. 31-66. Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico
- ReadingGroupGuides. Caramelo. The Book Report, Inc. https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/caramelo/guide.
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