Review - Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros

US American Literature 2013 Review
Deadline: October 1st Irina Lowisky

Royal Family Bonding
In 2002, the acclaimed Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros delighted her audience with her long-awaited second novel titled Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento. Through its pages, the story deals with important topics such as language, family, identity and being on the border of two different cultures. Cisneros's main purpose when writing this remarkable novel was to convey a portrait of the life between borders and to show how this condition affects both people's feelings and behavior, and her intention was fully achieved. The same occurs in her first novel The house on Mango Street. Both novels represent the fictionalized history of Cisneros's Mexican-American family and they also focus on the Chicano heroine's development from childhood to adulthood, which is the principal characteristic of bildungsroman (coming of age) novels. In Caramelo the protagonist is Celaya Reyes, who is better known to her family as 'Lala' and the only and youngest girl between her seven brothers. Lala and her large family – that included mother, father, aunts, uncles and cousins - used to travel every summer from Chicago to the Little Grandfather and the Awful Grandmother's house in Mexico City, and for this reason, the Reyes family were compelled to cross the border between the United States and 'the other side': Mexico. This novel can be considered semi-autobiographical because Cisneros herself is also the only woman among her six brothers and because of her family's constant migration between Mexico and the United States (their homeland was Chicago, Illinois).
These constant cross-border travels not only will affect Lala's identity, but also her family and society role. For example, in one of their journeys, the three Reyes brothers (Lala's father, and her two uncles named Uncle Fat-Face and Uncle Baby) raced from Chicago to Mexico City in what Alumbaugh describes as 'separate cars that together evoke the colors of the Mexican flag' (2010:56). The disconnection between what the colors of the cars represent and the models of these cars: Cadillac, Impala, and Chevrolet, which are conventional American models, strengthen 'the connection between the US and Mexico that Cisneros consistently underscores' (Alumbaugh, 2010:56). This first situation facilitates the reader's understanding of how the entire novel will be developed: by the blending of the two cultures; and as a result, Lala' difficulty in building her identity.
In one of the trips, a photograph of the entire family is taken by a photographer who sells souvenirs in a beach of Acapulco. Everybody is in the picture except Lala, and this event will cause her to always feel excluded from her family: 'They've forgotten about me when the photographer walking along the beach proposes a portrait, un recuerdo, a remembrance literally' (Page 4). Therefore, this picture will be central for the interpretation of the novel. This picture condenses all the stories that Lala will eventually tell; stories that not only reflect Lala's struggle to find her role in the family but also her recognition of both Mexican and American cultures in which she lives. But this story is not completely true. 'Cuéntame algo, aunque sea una mentira. Tell me a story, even if it's a lie'. Before the novel starts, Cisneros hints the reader to understand that the stories in her book 'are nothing but story, bits of string, odds and ends found here and there, embroidered together to make something new'. This 'something new' she mentions are the family stories, combinations of 'healthy lies' (the ones that don't hurt anyone) with truths created throughout life, that will be knotted as the candy-colored rebozo is, as the traditional Mexican silk shawl that remains in the family. Family stories that are hold between the family members' arms, as the Awful Grandmother's shawl is 'crisscross across her breasts' (Chapter 7, 26). This is why the rebozo is a powerful motif in this novel and a central item the plot continuously introduces. As Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs describes: 'The rebozo becomes the connector of nationalism, language, and home' (2006:32). We, as readers, learn all about the members of the Reyes' family because of these stories. For example, the secret story of the washwoman and her daughter Candelaria, the Little Grandfather's military career, the sad love story of Aunty Light Skin, among other stories. As Margaret Randall states: 'Caramelo possesses the real unreality of Latin American magic realism: the stories within stories' (2002:3).
The novel is composed by eighty-six chapters which are divided into three parts. There are different voices identified in the story: in the first part Lala tells her stories as a young child, in the second part as a mature woman and in the third part as a teenager entering adulthood. The chapters narrate significant family stories in which Cisneros uses the language as an instrument to shape the personal and cultural identity of Lala and her family. The act of crossing the border not only represents a switch of one language to another one, but also a cultural switch: 'No more billboards announcing the next Stuckey's candy store, no more truck-stop donuts […]. Now we'll drink fruit-flavored sodas, tamarind, apple, pineapple' (Chapter 4, 17). Onomatopoeias also change: 'Toc, says the light switch in this country [Mexico], at home it says click. Honk, say the cars at home, here they say tán, tán, tán' (Chapter 4, 17). There is a switch in the way of living, in which Lala would eventually melt these two cultures into one: 'Every year I cross the border, it's the same – my mind forgets. But my body always remembers' (Chapter 4, 18). These two cultures live inside of her, as Margaret Randall indicates: 'She [Cisneros] weaves a new fabric of Spanish, English and Spanglish, and in so reflects the particular symbiosis of the Mexican American and American Mexican cultures that blossomed in this part of the world as the twentieth century unfolded' (2002:3). Cisneros fulfills this by, as Randall explains 'translating certain Spanish terms or phrases into absolutely literal English' (2002:3). For example, Aunty Light-Skin would call her daughter as 'my chubby' (Chapter 8, 28), which in Spanish is a vocative used to call somebody we love or care: 'mi gorda'. 'Sleeping like the dead' (Chapter 9, 31), 'she wakes up with the roster (Chapter10, 35), 'It never falls a hair in the soup' (Chapter 13, 62), 'without a mother, without a father, without even a dog to bark at me' (Chapter 22, 102), 'God squeezes but doesn't choke' (Chapter 25, 119), among other Spanish idiomatic expressions that are translated into English. This constitutes what is called as language deterritorializations, where English language is used to introduce new meanings in its culture. Caramelo emphases the interlingualism, this means the co-presence of both languages rather than the bilingualism, where languages do not meet.
A crucial characteristic of this novel are the times shifting that tend to disorientate the readers. In Part 1 'Recuerdo de Acapulco', Lala narrates the stories when she was a young girl, but in Part 2 'When I Was Dirt', Lala has grown up and tells us the Awful Grandmother's story adding and removing details as she pleased. After Soledad (Lala's grandmother) dies and stays 'neither dead nor alive, but somewhere halfway, like an elevator between floors' (Chapter 83, 408), Lala is selected as the chosen one to help her cross over, because she was the only one who could see her grandmother. Thus, Lala becomes the 'coyote who smuggles you [the Awful Grandmother] over the border' (Chapter 83, 408). 'Coyote' is a colloquial Mexican term used to refer to the people that help others to cross illegally and secretly from a country to another one. Lala's role in her family begins to flourish as a result of the task that her grandmother requests her. As Alumbaugh explains: 'Lala's ability to "hear everyone else's" thoughts in conjunction with her own is a crucial characteristic of her role as a narrative coyote' (2010:59). She will associate this task as her job, her duty: 'If you can't let me do my job and tell the story without your constant interruptions…' (Chapter 37, 172). Lala's capability to talk leads her to this important role; she will speak on behalf of those who have been overshadowed, such as her own grandmother, her Aunty Light Skin and her great-grandfather, Eleuterio Reyes. We are told that the Awful Grandmother loses her mother at an early age and so 'the language of the rebozo' (Chapter 23, 105) dissipates with her mother's death. Aunty Light Skin loses the language of cheerfulness when her husband, 'the man whose name no one is allowed to mention', leaves her. Eleuterio is also an immigrant because he leaves Spain, his native country, to move towards Mexico. He married Regina and they both brought Narciso (Lala's Little Grandfather) into the world. Eleuterio was a pianist, and after having a cataleptic attack, only the right half of his body recovered movement. As a result, he was not able to communicate properly; he only made 'a curios language made up of grunts, gestures, and spit that no one but Soledad could understand' (Chapter 30, 144). As Soledad, they were both unable to speak. Nobody paid any attention to them so they had to find comfort elsewhere: Eleuterio found comfort in his music, and Soledad in taking care of Narciso. There was a connection between Eleuterio and Soledad: she could understand and translate his babbles because 'she was as mute as he was' (Chapter 32, 151) and instead, he used to listen to her and to protect her from his son, because they were treated by others in the same ways. Everybody was busy in their lives to pay attention to 'an old man' and to the young cleaning lady. The same relation of understanding is later found among Lala and her Awful Grandmother. At the beginning of the novel their relationship was cold and distant, but while Lala assumes her role of literary coyote and transfers her grandmother's story to the readers, she starts to comprehend why the Awful Grandmother had become awful. And she also realizes that she is the Awful Grandmother: 'It hits me at once, the terrible truth of it. I am the Awful Grandmother […]. I've turned into her' (Chapter 86, 424). This statement could be based on points they have in common. For example, their lives were badly scarred because of a photograph: the picture of Acapulco and the picture of Narciso and Exaltación Henestrosa, his mistress. Lala and Soledad are affected by those photographs because they feel betrayed by the ones who were supposed to love them. Another aspect they have in common is that they are both attracted to men who later on deceive them. Narciso is unfaithful to Soledad, and Ernie abandons Lala the day before their wedding. Not having their own space is another aspect Lala and her grandmother share: after her father sends her to live with Aunty Fina and her countless children, Soledad does not have a place to be alone, and when she moves to Regina's department, she is assigned a narrow bed in the pantry off the kitchen, although Regina's place was crowded with rooms: 'Even with all those empty bedrooms, Soledad found herself without a real room of her own' (Chapter 24, 114). The same occurs to Lala; she was used to sleep on the couch of the living room and sighed for a room of her own. Lala and Soledad feel lonely, but they have each other because the caramelo rebozo embraces them into being one person. The caramelo rebozo will serve as a shield to protect them from grief. In Part 3 'the plot forces the reader to reckon with Lala's humanization of her grandmother' (Alumbaugh, 2010:65). She will no longer be awful, but human, and Lala will accept her grandmother's story as hers: 'Your story is my story' (Chapter 37, 172).
In every page of this novel readers will be able to indulge their desire for marvelous literature. As Alumbaugh states: 'Cisneros invites her readers likewise to cross borders; any reader of Caramelo has to be willing to traverse linguistic, cultural, and epistemological boundaries in order to fully reckon with the complexity of her migratory narrative. (2010:72). Cisneros provokes that upon her readers: the need for inclusion, for being part of her piece of art. It is no wonder that this novel 'is the first Chicana/o novel to appear in Spanish without the condition of first becoming a best-seller in English, as did Norma Canti's Canicula, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me Última, Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek and The House on Mango Street (Gutiérrez y Muhs, 2006:23). The first edition of Caramelo was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., an outstanding New York publishing house, on January 1st, 2002, and nine months later, Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento (En Español), was also published by the same publishing house and translated by Liliana Valenzuela, who is, as Cisneros states in an interview on December 4, 2002: 'a very, very good translator because she is also a poet and a fiction writer and a performance artist in her own right […]. I couldn't have asked for a more qualified person—plus she's an anthropologist'. Cisneros' first novel The House on Mango Street was published in a small publishing house and many years later, by Random House. The first places where she could publish her works were small Chicano feminist publishing houses. She had to fight with a lot of prejudices, because being a Chicano woman who wanted to be a writer was difficult in that time. But those days are over. Now, Cisneros' books achieved such an impact that they have been translated into Spanish, Galician, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, Greek, Iranian, Thai, and Serbo-Croatian.
Caramelo was awarded in 2005 the Premio Napoli and was nominated for the Dublin International IMPAC Literary Award, and for the Orange Prize in England. Moreover, the book sold 13,000 copies in the first six months of being published. All these facts imply the obvious: the flawlessness in Caramelo and in its writer, Sandra Cisneros.

Bibliografía
Cisneros, S. (2002) Caramelo or Puro Cuento. A Novel. Nueva York: Vintage.
Alumbaugh, H. (2010) Narrative Coyotes: Migration and Narrative Voice in Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo. Transgressing the Borders of "America", pp. 53-75. Published by: Oxford University Press. Article Stable URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/40587210
Gutiérrez y Muhs, G. (2006) Sandra Cisneros and Her Trade of the Free Word. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, pp. 23-36. Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. Article Stable URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/4143855
Randall, M. (2002) Weaving a Spell. The Women's Review of Books, pp. 1-3 Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc. Article Stable URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/4024009
Cisneros, S. (2002) Interviewed by Robert Birnbaum. Webpage. http://www.identitytheory.com/sandra-cisneros/