Narrative Coyotes: Migration and

Narrative Voice in Sandra Cisneros's

Caramelo

Author: Heather Alumbaugh

Date: Spring 2010

From: MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the

United States(Vol. 35, Issue 1)

Reprint In: Contemporary Literary Criticism(Vol. 305)

Document Type: Critical essay

Length: 10,435 words

Full Text:

[(essay date spring 2010) In the essay below, Alumbaugh analyzes migration as a theme and

narrative strategy in Caramelo. The critic shows the content and technique of the novel to be

dependent on two motifs: the coyote, a smuggler of bodies across borders, and the rebozo, a

fringed shawl woven in Mexico that originated in the intermingling of cultures colonized by the

Spanish.]

And I realize with all the noise called "talking" in my house, that talking that is nothing but

talking, that is so much a part of my house and my past and myself you can't hear it as

several conversations, but as one roar like the roar inside a shell, I realize then that this is

my life, with its dragon arabesques of voices and lives intertwined, rushing like a Ganges,

irrevocable and wild ...--Sandra Cisneros (424)

We discover toward the end of Sandra Cisneros's novel Caramelo (2002) that Celaya "Lala"

Reyes, the novel's female adolescent narrator, tells the poignant, intricate, and at times

hilarious history of her grandmother and the Reyes clan in order to help her grandmother's

ghost "cross over." As Lala stands in a hospital room over her father's unconscious body

after he has suffered a massive heart attack, she and her grandmother's ghost argue about

his "destiny."1 They eventually strike a deal: if Lala will tell her grandmother's story, one

that is inextricably tied to the family's entire history, the Awful Grandmother--whose real

name is Soledad--will allow her son Inocencio to live. Soledad explains to Lala that her

inability to speak clearly about her own experiences, whether alive or dead, literally traps

her "in the middle of nowhere":

[I]t's so lonely being like this, neither dead nor alive, but somewhere halfway, like an

elevator between floors. You have no idea. What a barbarity! I'm in the middle of nowhere.

I can't cross over to the other side till I'm forgiven. And who will forgive me with all the

knots I've made out of my tangled life? Help me, Celaya, you'll help me cross over, won't

you?--Like a coyote who smuggles you over the border?--Well ... in a manner of speaking, I

suppose.--Can't you get somebody else to carry you across?--But who? You are the only

one who can see me. ... You'll tell my story, won't you, Celaya?(408)

In this crucial conversation, Lala notes that her ability to become her grandmother's

narrative surrogate depends on her understanding of the storyteller as a type of narrative

coyote.

A coyote is a controversial figure who violates boundaries by smuggling individuals across

the US-Mexico border. Cisneros's figurative use of the term "coyote" illuminates and links

two of the primary concerns of the novel: migration and storytelling. Time and time again,

Cisneros shows that the Reyes family's decades of migration bequeath to Lala, the family's

narrator, a "tangled mess" (188) of family history even as she also draws attention to Lala's

ability to talk: "How can I explain? Talk is all I've got going for me" (353).2 Cisneros's use of

"coyote" also underscores the illicit, transgressive, and "wild" properties of Lala's narrative

voice. Because Lala's Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicano/a family members cross

many geographical--and in the case of her grandmother, supernatural--boundaries, their

stories of migration demand a narrative voice that likewise has the ability to transgress

boundaries. Thus, like a coyote, Lala smuggles her grandmother's story and her own family

history from the past to the present, from Mexico to the US, from the dead to the living,

and from one person to another. Cisneros deploys the narrative coyote explicitly in this

moment and implicitly throughout the novel to represent the relationship between

migration stories and narrative structure; consequently, Caramelo exemplifies Edward

Said's claim that "exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that

can therefore provide us with new narrative forms" (225). In her construction of Lala as a

narrative coyote, Cisneros creates a migratory narrative voice that has the ability to cross

supernatural, spatial, and narrative boundaries as a means to redress the "tangled mess"--

the partial loss of identity, knowledge, and ethnic connection--that actual physical

migration enacts in the Reyes family. Cisneros's use of Lala's "talk," then, translates Said's

vision into a new narrative practice.

The Spatial Creation of the Narrative Coyote

To create Lala's migratory narrative voice, Cisneros expands the definition of what it means

to be a migrant. Caramelo clearly embodies Salman Rushdie's impulse to think of

migration metaphorically as a means of "bearing across" (278). In a 1984 essay on Günter

Grass, Rushdie defines a "full migrant" as one who "suffers, traditionally, a triple

disruption" from place, language, and social environment (277-78). According to Rushdie,

Grass is a representative figure because like most of us, he is only "a half-migrant ... a

maybe-only-one-third-migrant"; his estrangement is not from place or language but "from

his past" (277, 279). Through his ruminations on Grass, Rushdie expands his definition of

migration beyond "literalistic discussions" of it and writes:

Migration across national frontiers is by no means the only form of the phenomenon. ... I

want to go further than such literalistic discussions; because migration also offers us one of

the richest metaphors of our age. The very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek word

for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images.

Migrants--borne-across humans--are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and

migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us.(278-79)

Although Rushdie acknowledges the more orthodox definition of migration as a movement

across geographical borders, he is clearly more interested in it as a metaphor. Here,

Rushdie draws an analogy between movement across space and language; language use is

a "sort of migration" because we all use language to translate our experiences into

intelligibility so that others can understand them.

Cisneros's sophisticated treatment of space facilitates her creation of a narrator who, like

Rushdie's Grass, is a migrant--"a borne-across human" and a "metaphorical being"--even if

she is never an immigrant to one country from another like her father and grandmother.

To phrase this another way, Cisneros uses space to create Lala's migratory narrative desire

and ability, which in turn enables Lala to "bear across" her family's bilingual and bicultural

stories. In Cisneros's writing, place and space constantly interpenetrate. Whereas place is a

concrete location, space represents how individuals enact and experience place in

everyday life: materially, psychologically, socially, culturally, discursively, and ideologically.

Cisneros represents place as natural and built environments such as the regions and

houses the Reyes clan inhabits over the course of the novel; through her use of space, she

investigates how these lived environments enact different types of identities.

Space in Caramelo is not merely reflective of the society and culture that exist in the places

Cisneros's novel documents, for it is also, and more importantly, productive. As a means to

articulate how space is productive, I follow Mary Pat Brady's assertion that space, although

distinct from discourse, is nevertheless similar to discourse in that both share the

performative ability to call into being subjectivity and sociocultural identity. Brady writes:

Literature thrives on the intersections between the shaping powers of language and the

productive powers of space. ... If the production of space is a highly social process, then it is

a process that has an effect on the formation of subjectivity, identity, sociality, and

physicality in myriad ways. Taking the performativity of space seriously also means

understanding that categories such as gender, race, and sexuality are not only discursively

constructed, but spatially enacted and created as well.(8)

In a novel obsessed with spatial crossings, it is no accident that Cisneros uses multiple

spaces--ranging from liminal spaces such as geographical borders, buildings, and houses to

Lala's lack of private space--to produce Lala's migratory narrative ability.

Cisneros's focus on space and place as crucial aspects of the narration challenges more

traditional definitions of narrative structure. Gérard Genette declares that "the temporal

determinations of the narrating instance are manifestly more important than its spatial

determinations" and "the narrating place is very rarely specified, and is almost never

relevant" (215-16). In contrast to Genette's claims, Cisneros's novel emphatically

demonstrates that "spatial determinations" are profoundly relevant to stories about

migration because Lala's "talk" documents and negotiates the gains and losses caused by

spatial movements. As a result, we almost always know where Lala is as both narrator and

a character.

Images of physical crossings of borders abound in Caramelo and depict the Reyes family as

a clan of "borne-across humans." In the first short chapter of the book, Lala paints the

picture of her extended family "racing" from Chicago "to the Little Grandfather's and Awful

Grandmother's house in Mexico City" in separate cars that together evoke the colors of the

Mexican flag: "Uncle Fat-Face's brand-new used white Cadillac, Uncle Baby's green Impala,

Father's red Chevrolet station wagon bought that summer on credit" (5). The fact that these

cars--Cadillac, Impala, and Chevrolet--are "typical" American models reinforces the

connection between the US and Mexico that Cisneros consistently underscores. The Reyes

brothers' and their families' annual returns to Mexico represent only a small portion of the

multiple migrations the members of the family make. Eleuterio Reyes, Lala's great-

grandfather, first emigrated from Spain to Mexico upon fleeing both Seville and his first

wife after witnessing a murder in a bar where he worked as a piano player. Narciso Reyes,

Lala's grandfather, was shipped off to the US by his mother, Regina, during the Mexican

Revolution, and upon his return to Mexico, he migrated across Oaxaca as a bookkeeper for

the Mexican National Roads Commission. Inocencio Reyes, Lala's father, "chose to take the

road and join his brother Fat-Face [in the US] hitching trains and picking up women. At

least this is how Inocencio imagined it" (207). Soledad--Lala's Awful Grandmother, Narciso's

long-suffering wife, and Inocencio's adoring mother--moved to Mexico City from San Luis

Potosi after her mother's death and her father's subsequent abandonment of her; after

Narciso's death, she joins her sons in the US. Lala's immediate family moves from Chicago

to San Antonio and back to Chicago.

Cisneros uses metonymy to link Lala's identity to space; space is then linked to narrative

desire and ability. More specifically, Cisneros employs architectural metaphors to construct

Lala's racial, ethnic, and class identity in the United States. As Lala's immediate family and

the Awful Grandmother plan to move to San Antonio with the hope of moving "up," she

contemplates the apartments that her family occupied while living in Chicago. The

architectural signifiers of these apartments construct Lala's identity as a poor, urban,

migratory, and ethnically and racially marked "other." Cisneros's implicit comparison of

these apartments to the disembodied standard of the American suburban home they

clearly fail to fulfill reinforces Lala's "otherness":

When I was a kid I slept in the living room on the orange Naugahyde La-Z-Boy, but I got too

big to sleep there comfortably. ... I can remember every flat we've ever rented, especially

the ones I want to forget. Their hallways and their hallway smell, dank and dusty or reeking

of Pine-Sol. ... Voices behind the apartment doors. People downstairs who talk too loud, or

people upstairs who walk too much. ... Floorboards thumping to Mexican country music

early in the morning, even on the weekends when you're trying to sleep, for crying out

loud.(301)

Despite Father's claim that the family is not poor, the dilapidated conditions of their

residence--the absence of a yard, the darkness in the hallways, and the eroding paint--

attest to their poverty.3 In addition, their lack of privacy within the individual flats and

throughout the apartment buildings and their lack of money to improve their built

environment underscore the Reyes family's socioeconomic status. The door, "blunted with

kicks, carved initials, and the scars of locks like appendectomies" (301), represents a liminal

space between public and private that is marked by the previous tenants and as such

functions as a palimpsest. The door documents not only the urban migratory status of the

Reyes's and other families' moves from apartment to apartment in the US, but also the

phenomenon of Mexican migration to the United States, one that the three Reyes brothers'

migrations from Mexico City to Chicago most clearly embody. As well as being marked by

the histories of previous tenants, the apartments are both ethnically and racially marked,

as can be seen by the constant presence of Mexican music, the ethnic names of the

inhabitants, and the darkness that permeates throughout and that cannot be erased by

whitewashing with Pine-Sol.

Lala's lack of privacy creates a desire for her own space, and before the family moves to

San Antonio, she notes:

Father promised me the next address I'd have a room of my own, because even he admits

I'm "una señorita" now, and he's making good on that promise. I guess. There's never

anywhere we've lived that's had enough bedrooms for all of us. ... All this traffic, never any

privacy, and noise all the time, and having to dress and undress in the bathroom, the only

room with a lock on the door except for the exit doors.(301)

Father's promise, however, is one he cannot keep, for when the family moves to San

Antonio, the Awful Grandmother claims Lala's room as her own, and there are simply not

enough rooms for everyone. Throughout the novel, Lala's hopes for a room of her own are

thwarted. In San Antonio, Lala continues to sleep in the middle of the living room and has

nowhere to escape the sound of the multiple televisions (one in her grandmother's room,

one in her parents' room, and one in the living room), her grandmother's and father's

screams to one another over the sound of their televisions, and her brothers' stomping up

and down the stairs "like a football team in training" (333).

Despite Lala's lamentations, her lack of privacy and longing for her own room in the

apartments in Chicago and the house in San Antonio paradoxically create her migratory

narrative ability. By evoking Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Cisneros engages and

revises this spatial metaphor.4 Woolf imagines this room as a space that both symbolizes

and produces female independence. She represents this independence not only as

socioeconomic, but also as narrative. In other words, Woolf links the female socioeconomic

right to a private space to the female ability to write, or put more abstractly, to the female

ability to tell stories. Cisneros "[preserves] Woolf's feminist architecture" in Lala's desire for

a private space within her home (Doyle 26).5 Lala excavates what little space she can in this

domestic cacophony by reading:

I've pushed two chairs next to the space heater in the dining room, and this is where I'm

trying to read a book on Cleopatra. I've got no privacy to hear my own thoughts in this

stupid house, but I can hear everyone else's. ... My Cleopatra book is a fat one, which is all I

ask from a book these days. A cheap ticket out of here. Biographies are the best, the

thicker, the better. Joan of Arc. Jean Harlow. Marie Antoinette. Their lives like the white

crosses on the side of the road. Watch out! Don't go there! You'll be sorry!(332)

Like Woolf, Cisneros defines as female the need for private space, since she presents Lala's

gender identity as the reason she should have her own space (after all, even Father "admits

I'm 'una señorita' now") as well as the reason she does not (the boys have a room at least,

because they are boys and because they are older). In addition, again like Woolf, Cisneros

represents this as a narrative need, as Lala uses her self-created pseudo-private space to

read.

However, Cisneros revises Woolf's metaphor; she defines Lala's storytelling ability not only

by her desire for a physical-intellectual space of her own, but also by her inability to attain

it. As a matter of fact, the lack of a room of her own does not inhibit Lala's migratory

narrative ability, but rather produces it. In the little privacy Lala carves out in her family's

home, she does not write; instead, she reads. Cisneros presents the creation of Lala's

narrative ability here as consumptive; Lala literally and figuratively consumes the

biographies of other women as an imaginative "cheap ticket out of here." The physical

reality of her lived environment accordingly produces her ability to appreciate other

women's "biographies ... the thicker the better." In a circular manner, the lack of private

space in which she can write her own history produces her desire to consume other

females' histories. In keeping with this moment in the text, we see that Lala's storytelling

ability emerges out of the tension between consumption and production: she consumes

her grandmother's story as a means to tell her own. 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. Her ability to tell her story accordingly depends upon her ultimate understanding

that it exists in a dialogical relationship to others' stories.6 Cisneros's revision of Woolf's

architectural metaphor articulates a mode of female storytelling that is more communal

and public than private.

The Narrative Coyote and Rascuache: How to Tell a Communal Tale

Lala's co-narration of her grandmother's history in Part Two, "When I Was Dirt," most

obviously manifests the communal nature of her migratory narrative voice--her ability to

consume and renarrate others' stories and the resulting unique form that her narration

assumes. In the epigraph to Part Two, Cisneros introduces the idea that the stories Lala will

tell are not solely her own: "'When I was dirt' ... is how we begin a story that was before our

time. Before we were born" (89). Cisneros's pronominal decisions are very telling here, for

Lala's use of the pronoun "we" before she repeats a similar line with the singular pronoun

"my"--"before my time"--reiterates her narrative's preoccupation with the concept of

communally told stories. The Chicano word and concept rascuache, which is a word Lala

uses to define her family's house in San Antonio, helps illuminate the communal aspect of

her narration.7 In his assessment of Oscar Zeta Acosta, Ilan Stavans cites the Chicano critic

Tomás Ybarra-Frausto's definition of rascuache:

"To be rascuache is to posit a bawdy, spunky consciousness, to seek to subvert and turn

ruling paradigms upside down. It is a witty, irreverent, and impertinent posture that

recodes and moves outside established boundaries. ... rascuachismo is an underdog

perspective--a view from los de abajo, an attitude rooted in resourcefulness and

adaptability, yet mindful of stance and style."(qtd. in Stavans 6)

Cisneros's narrator fully elaborates the aspects of rascuache that Ybarra-Frausto asserts

make it subversive within the US cultural context; consequently, the term is useful for our

investigation of the illicit and transgressive properties of the narrative coyote.

In Caramelo, Lala's migratory narrative voice assumes an "impertinent posture" to "subvert

and turn ruling paradigms upside down." Lala's narrative overturns the typical form of the

bildungsroman by rejecting a single narrative language as well as a single narrative voice; in

turn, both of these aspects contribute to the communal character of Lala's narration.

Lourdes Torres evaluates Cisneros's and other Latino/a writers' use of code-switching,

which is "the alternation of two languages in a verbal or written text" (76) such as the use of

Spanish words and "creative English renditions of Spanish words and phrases" called

"calques" (78). Torres would call Cisneros's rejection of a single narrative language a

subversive "artistic choice with political ramifications" (76).8 Torres writes:

In the United States, the presence of large and small Latino/a communities across the

country, increasing numbers of Latino/a immigrants, and the US/Mexican border means

that code-switching in literature is not only metaphorical, but represents a reality where

segments of the population are living between cultures and languages; literary language

actualizes the discourse of the border and bilingual/bicultural communities.(76)

Cisneros's code-switching crafts Lala's migratory narrative voice as one that necessarily

crosses linguistic boundaries in order to represent the reality of her bilingual and

multicultural family.

Cisneros fashions Soledad's and Lala's different uses of Spanish not only to construct their

co-narration in Part Two, but also to express their unique subject positions and voices.

Cisneros frequently does not translate many of the Spanish words and phrases Soledad

uses to describe herself or her culture when she shares her story with Lala, such as "so this

part of the story if it were a fotonovela or telenovela could be called Solamente Soledad or

Sola en el mundo" (95), "chaparrita," "Like nosotros, los pobres" (98), "atole con pan" (111), and

"qué microwave oven, ni qué nada" (121). Soledad's Spanish, which is her beloved first

language, represents her identity as a Mexican born in Mexico, and although multiple

ethnicities and two nationalities inform her identity--she is Mexic-Amerindian and

permanently moves to the US before her death--Spanish is the language she most fervently

associates with her ethnic identity. In contrast, Cisneros translates almost all of Lala's

Spanish. This represents Lala's Chicana identity, a hybridized identity that is the direct

creation of US/Mexican relations and that, as the concept rascuache indicates, self-

consciously inhabits the two cultures that inform it.

Although the two women's Spanish is distinct, the names Lala frequently utilizes to label

herself and her grandmother reveal the shared rascuache nature of their bilingual narrative

as well as their similarities as storytellers: "Metiche, Mirona, Mitotera, Hocicona--en Otras

Palabras, Cuentista--Busybody, Ogler, Liar/Gossip/Troublemaker, Big-Mouth--in Other Words,

Storyteller" (351). As is typical in Lala's narration, Cisneros first italicizes the Spanish words

and then translates them directly to explicitly communicate what she wants a monolingual

reader to understand, Still, Torres asserts that in Cisneros's other work, her "use of both

languages doubly rewards the bilingual, bicultural reader" (84) because, as Cisneros posits,

Chicanos are the readers who can "'catch all of the subtexts and subtleties'" in her texts

(qtd. in Torres 84-85).

Indeed, one has to be a bilingual reader to catch the "subtleties" of Cisneros's translation.

Although words such as "troublemaker" and "big-mouth" that describe the storytellers are

gender neutral in English, in Spanish, all adjectives are gender specific. Thus, Lala and

Soledad are not simply "troublemakers," but rather female troublemakers, and as the

Spanish words additionally indicate, ethnic female "mitotera[s]." Soledad's and Lala's

Spanish enables their rascuache narrative to speak to different communities in different

ways, and as a result, their conarration irreverently redefines the form of a typically

monolingual bildungsroman.

Cisneros's employment of two voices in Part Two likewise represents a subversive "artistic

choice with political ramifications" (Torres 76). Jacqueline Stefanko asserts in an article on

Latina narratives that "[d]ue to the shifting, unstable terrain they inhabit, Latin American

(migrant) women writers question and reject the assumption that a unitary, synthesizing

narrator is capable of telling the stories they have to disclose, instead opting for a narrative

stance that includes multiple voicings" (51). Lala's narration fulfills Stefanko's claims about

Latina narratives because it is bivocal; in turn, the "multiple voices" in Part Two also make

the narrative communal. The bivocal narrative assumes two forms, and the first and more

prominent occurs when Lala is the main speaker and Soledad provides uncanny

interruptions:

[Lala] Is there anyone alive who remembers the Awful Grandmother when she was a child?

Is there anyone left in the world who once heard her call out "Mamá?" It was such a long,

long time ago.[Grandmother] ¡Qué exagerada eres! It wasn't that long ago![Lala] I have to

exaggerate. It's just for the sake of the story. I need details. You never tell me

anything.[Grandmother] And if I told you everything, what would there be for you to do,

eh? I tell you just enough ...[Lala] But not too much. Well, let me go on with the story,

then.[Grandmother] And who's stopping you?(91-92)

Although Lala is the primary speaker, Soledad's voice is nevertheless important, for Lala

would not have a story to tell without the details her grandmother provides. As elsewhere

in the novel, Lala's role here as a narrative coyote is to translate her grandmother's

experiences both literally (responding to the Spanish adjective "exagerada" with the English

verb "exaggerate") and figuratively (changing the form of her Grandmother's story from a

private, solitary narration to one that is public and communal). In Chapter 25, "God

Squeezes," Soledad tells an abridged story of her life to her granddaughter in order to

justify her actions--"Because I wasn't bad, understand?" (119)--and Lala interrupts. In both

cases, the listener provides narrative direction, clarification, and commentary on the

primary speaker's narration, reinforcing the importance of both figures in the communal

retelling. In Part Two, Lala's and Soledad's rascuache "multiple voicings" constantly

interrogate and complete one another's narrative perspectives; thus, they both function as

narrative coyotes. As they exchange details about Soledad's past, they "smuggle" them

over in two languages from the dead to the living, from the past to the present, and from

the individual to the communal. In doing so, they violate supernatural and narrative

borders.

Their communal narration in Part Two can also be understood in terms of what Said labels

"disruptive articulations." For Said, the "historical problem of modernism" was the moment

when "the subaltern and the constitutively different suddenly achieved disruptive

articulation exactly where in European culture silence and compliance could previously be

depended on to quiet them down" (223). Although Said focuses on the relationship

between the colonizer and the subaltern and the concomitant voice and silence this

hierarchy attempts to achieve, his discussion about "disruptive articulations" can be

applied to other "ruling paradigms" and the "established boundaries" these paradigms

create (Ybarra-Frausto, qtd. in Stavans 6). Cisneros employs Lala's migratory narrative voice

to subvert and disrupt a number of hierarchies such as those based on language, gender,

race, ethnicity, class, and nationality as a means to assert the right of the voiceless to

speak. For example, both Soledad and Lala repeatedly emphasize Soledad's isolation and

demonstrate that her isolation silences her. Soledad tells Lala, "You have no idea what it

was like to be so alone, to be left like the saying 'without a mother; without a father,

without even a dog to bark at me'" (102), and Lala informs the reader that "there was no

one, you see, to guide her" (106). A number of circumstances contribute to Soledad's

isolation: for most of her life, Soledad is an abandoned racial and ethnic other, and until

her marriage to Narciso, she is gut-wrenchingly poor. Because of Soledad's subject

position, her story is one that should have remained silent but nevertheless finds

articulation when both women act as narrative coyotes. When both Soledad and Lala finally

"talk" about Soledad's history and Lala's heritage, their female voices represent "disruptive

articulations" about how migration narratives should be told.

The Narrative Coyote's Roles: Excavation, Reclamation, and Preservation

Cisneros uses Lala's and Soledad's "disruptive articulations" to unravel the grandmother's

story as one of los de abajo; consequently, the narrative is rascuache not only in the form it

assumes, but also in the content it excavates and documents. Literally translated as "those

from below," this phrase embodies how Lala's narrative consistently gives voice to those

places and people that do not have one, ranging from her grandmother to her father, to

Chicanos/as in the US, and to forgotten Mexican icons.9 Lala's migratory narrative voice is

rascuache precisely because it excavates, reclaims, and preserves the concealed and

forgotten memories of her grandmother, the Reyes clan, and los de abajo in general. As a

consequence of this impulse to give "the underdog perspective" (Ybarra-Frausto, qtd. in

Stavans 6), one of the primary concerns of the novel is how migration can erode personal,

familial, and historical knowledge. As a narrator, Lala is always aware of how spatial and

temporal migrations--in other words, movement across place/space and the teleological

progression of time--have the capacity to affect her memory; for example, she notes during

one border crossing: "But the light [in Mexico]. That I don't remember forgetting until I

remember it" (16). The spatial migrations Lala and her family make complicate her

individual memory of her own experiences and mask much of the family's history. As a

means to redress this phenomenon, Cisneros uses the "shaping powers" of Lala's

"language" to unearth the knowledge that her family's spatial migrations and willful

silences have suppressed (Brady 8).

Ellen McCracken concurs that "the story of the Reyes clan, loosely based on Cisneros' own

family history, is the excavation project of Celaya Reyes, who attempts to uncover the

repressed secrets of both her family and the larger historical master narrative" (par. 15).10

In the introduction to Part One, Cisneros uses Lala's interpretation of a family photograph

to symbolically inaugurate Lala's "excavation project." As Lala looks at a picture of her

family on vacation in Acapulco, she notes that she is the only one missing from the

photograph, although she was there: "[I]t's as if I'm the photographer walking along the

beach asking, ...--¿Un recuerdo? A souvenir? A memory?" (4). When Lala aligns herself with

the photographer, she explicitly defines herself as one who documents and preserves

"recuerdos." In this introductory moment, Cisneros illuminates Lala's ability to cross

temporal boundaries in order to tell her family's buried memories; as a narrator, she

figuratively travels to her family's past in order to remember someone else's memories and

to summon a past moment to the present.11 Her ability to bear her family's experiences

across time enables what Said calls the "painstaking recovery of implicit or internalized

histories" that mark all "ethnographic quests" (213). Lala's "ethnographic quest" to uncover

and co-narrate her grandmother's story additionally exemplifies Rushdie's expanded

understanding of migration in terms of how language translates experiences (the Reyes

familial history and Soledad's tortured past in particular) into something more concrete

and intelligible (Lala's actual narration and co-narration).

Lala's rascuache "excavation project" and "ethnographic quest" directly dictate the thematic

and narrative specificities of the text. For a number of reasons, Soledad's life history is

central to Lala's "excavation project." First, Lala becomes a narrative coyote to help the

Awful Grandmother "cross over"; thus, co-narrating Soledad's personal history provides the

opportunity and impetus for Lala's narration. Second, Cisneros repeatedly draws parallels

between Lala and Soledad, and in Part Three, Lala unwittingly repeats many aspects of

Soledad's past in uncanny ways. Cisneros shows that Soledad's and Lala's migrations

inhibit their formation of a strong sense of ethnic female identity; as a consequence, they

are vulnerable and are both seduced by men who leave them empty and abandoned in

different ways. Lala needs the knowledge that spatial and temporal migrations have erased

to know and to tell her own story. Her ability to know the past comes not only from her

own experiences, but also from the past her grandmother shares with her. Finally, Lala and

Soledad's relationship has structural implications throughout the novel. Through Lala's

excavation, reclamation, and preservation of Soledad's story in conjunction with Lala's own,

Cisneros ties together the narrative coyote's roles and the structure of the text. In

particular, the narrative direction Soledad gives Lala directly dictates the novel's plot

structure.

In Chapter 21, "So Here My History Begins for Your Good Understanding and My Poor

Telling," which is the first chapter in Part Two, Lala begins to retell her grandmother's story.

As stated earlier, her grandmother repeatedly interrupts Lala with specific narrative

directions. Soledad commands her to be "careful" and to tell "[j]ust enough but not too

much" (92). The title of the chapter emphasizes the relationship between the co-narrators

and the importance of Soledad's story to Lala, especially since the reader is not

immediately sure if "my" refers to Lala's story, Soledad's story, or both. This pronominal

ambiguity once again underscores the communal nature of the story and of the migratory

narrative voice. To further demonstrate their narrative relationship, Cisneros deploys Lala's

self-conscious adoption of her grandmother's narrative direction to "tell you just enough ...

but not too much" as the plot structure of the novel (92). The novel does not follow

chronological order, nor does it use a consistent verb tense. Both of these aspects

reinforce Lala's narrative ability to cross spatial and temporal boundaries in the act of

excavation. Lala tells Parts One and Two in the past tense; in Part One, she recounts the

Reyes family's extended return to Mexico when Lala was a child, whereas in Part Two, she

reveals her grandmother's and father's personal histories, with some surprising and

important omissions (such as the fact that her father has an illegitimate child with the

washer woman). In Part Three, the section of the novel Lala narrates in the present tense,

Lala addresses the Awful Grandmother's move to the US, the grandmother's subsequent

death, and her own family's move from Chicago to San Antonio and back.

This plot structure allows Cisneros's migratory narrator to violate temporal boundaries as a

means to uncover and reveal the complexity of the Awful Grandmother's character.

Accordingly, Lala first introduces Soledad to the readers in Part One as the Awful

Grandmother who is "like the witch in that story of Hansel and Gretel. She likes to eat boys

and girls. She'll swallow us whole, if you let her" (23). Verbally abusive to all but her eldest

son, Inocencio, the Awful Grandmother of Parts One and Three is anything but a

sympathetic character. In Part Two--the section of the novel Lala tells after the Awful

Grandmother's death, which is narrated in Part Three--Lala narrates the transformation of

Soledad into the Awful Grandmother: "[T]his story is from the time of before. Before my

Awful Grandmother became awful, before she became my father's mother. Once she had

been a young woman who men looked at and women listened to" (91). Structurally, to get

to the present tense of the text in Part Three, the reader must read Soledad's past first. The

plot forces the reader to reckon with Lala's humanization of her grandmother and sets up

the patterns of behavior that Soledad inaugurates and Lala repeats. Lala tells "just enough,

but not too much" to make her reader understand Soledad's identity.

In Part Two, Cisneros uses Lala's poignant and humorous co-narration of Soledad's painful

life to document an individual history of loss, betrayal, and strength as emblematic of

migratory Latina experience. This section of the novel is the most meta-narrative; Cisneros

constantly reminds us that Lala is the predominant, but not sole, narrator of Soledad's

story and consistently highlights the importance of language to granddaughter and

grandmother alike. When Lala asks her grandmother's ghost, "Who's telling this story, you

or me?" Soledad responds, "You" (97). Because of the rascuache bivocal narrative, we also

know that Lala would not be able to retell Soledad's story without the knowledge Soledad

imparts, and Lala wisely asserts that "it's the stories you never talk about that you have the

most to say" (109). We learn from Lala that multiple migrations affect Soledad's life, and a

double migration in particular defines her youth: her mother's death, which is a crossing

over of sorts, and her subsequent move to Mexico City. After her mother's death, Soledad

does not learn the complex craft of shawl making that made the women in her family

revered and unique: "It is only right, then, that she should have been a knotter of fringe as

well, but when Soledad was still too little to braid her own hair, her mother died and left

her without the language of knots and rosettes" (94). Her mother's death and her father's

abandonment of her leave Soledad without a "language" for self-expression. Lala explains:

"Oh, if only her mother were alive. She could have told her how to speak with her rebozo

[shawl]" (105). To underscore Soledad's inability to "speak" about the things her mother

would have taught her--the family and ethnic history the rebozo embodies and the artistic

and intellectual creativity the craft of shawl making requires--Cisneros figures Soledad as

mute time and time again in Lala's retelling: "Poor Soledad. She understood Eleuterio

because she was as mute as he was, perhaps more so because she had no piano" (151).

Soledad's muteness about her own painful past traps her "in the middle of nowhere" (408)

and necessitates the formation of Lala's migratory narrative voice.

Lala's narration reveals that as a result of the multiple absences in Soledad's life and the

lack of a language of self-expression, Soledad models her behavior after Regina Reyes, her

employer, her future mother-in-law, and her pseudo-surrogate mother. Cisneros draws

striking similarities between Regina and Soledad, just as she does between Soledad and

Lala. Regina was the daughter of a "mecapalero, a man whose job it was to be a beast of

burden, an ambulatory porter carrying on his back objects ten times his weight--chifforobes,

barrels, other humans." In addition, she was of Mexic-Amerindian descent, "was as dark as

cajeta and as humble as a tortilla of nixtamal" (116), and sold "papaya slices ... with lemon and

a dash of chile" (117). Her marriage to the lighter-skinned, better-educated Spaniard

Eleuterio Reyes (after he impregnates her with Narciso) inaugurates the Reyes familial

history in the "new world." Like Regina, Soledad has an Indian background that ethnically

and racially marks her: "It must be remembered that Soledad was a Reyes too, although of

that backward Indian variety that reminded Regina too much of her own humble roots"

(113). Also like Regina, Soledad comes from a lower class than the Reyes men, of which fact

Regina constantly reminds her: "The clothes, the gifts of things la Señora Regina didn't want

anymore made Soledad feel worse for having to accept and wear them.--Now, Soledad,

you'll see. There's no need to thank me. You can't help it if you were raised wiping your ass

with corn shucks and wandering about without shoes" (115). Lala's narration not only

underscores the similarities between her grandmother and great-grandmother, but also

reveals Soledad's influence in Lala's assessment of Regina: Lala only knows who Regina is

because of Soledad, and Soledad's opinion of her harsh, critical mother-in-law is anything

but sympathetic. Lala's excavation of her grandmother's history is indebted to Soledad for

both the content it excavates and the structure and language it utilizes to describe the

details of Soledad's past.

One of the most important similarities Lala reveals between the two women is their

relationship to the Reyes men. Soledad's relationship with Narciso transforms her from the

"sweet" girl who adores Narciso (151) to the Awful Grandmother. In comparison to the men

they marry, both women are of a lower class and, due to their Mexic-Amerindian

background, are racial and ethnic others whose appearance attracts the Reyes men. 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" (117), and Soledad had "those funny Charlie Chaplin eyebrows and the

dark little eyes beneath them" (151). Both women are also preyed upon sexually by the

Reyes men, impregnated by them, and subsequently married to them due to the men's

obligation to be "gentlemen." However, whereas Regina is able to use her shrewd business

acumen during the Mexican Revolution to enrich the family and to transform her identity

from colonized to colonizer, Soledad is never successful at acquiring an individual sense of

self.12 We see additionally through Lala's co-narration of her grandmother's story that

Soledad learns from Regina an alternate language of self-expression: she learns to be

ashamed. Regina essentially transfers her embarrassment regarding her own background

onto Soledad as a means to distance herself from it, and in the process she teaches

Soledad to be ashamed of her own ethnic, racial, and class identity; this, in turn, leaves her

open to seduction by Narciso. Ultimately, as a result of Regina's teachings and Narciso's

semi-abandonment of her through his affair with another woman, Soledad internalizes

Regina's shame and repeats the strategies her mother-in-law used to deflect it by blindly

loving and idolizing her eldest son while ridiculing the inadequacies of her domestic help,

her daughters-in-law, and her grandchildren. Instead of "remembering" her dead mother's

creativity, Soledad adopts the venomous posture that alienates her from her family.

In the parts of the story Lala narrates in the present tense, Lala does not know her

grandmother's history, and until their fateful conversation over Inocencio's hospital bed,

she understands Soledad only as the Awful Grandmother. Accordingly, Lala repeats her

grandmother's history because she does not know it. Lala's blundering repetition of her

grandmother's mistakes occasions the need for her excavation project in the first place.

Her family's repeated movements across the US-Mexico border and within the United

States also leave Lala confused about her identity. Cisneros uses Lala's gender, ethnic, and

racial difference to show that, like Soledad, she does not fully belong anywhere until she

learns and recounts her grandmother's story (356). Lala summarizes her difference in her

usual succinct and humorous manner: "No wonder I'm always depressed." According to

her grandmother, she is not sufficiently feminine. The Awful Grandmother tells her before

she dies, "You look like a sheep dog. The last time I saw you, you were a normal little girl.

And now look. You're as big as a Russian. Don't you think you should exercise and try to

look more feminine?" (258). In Mexico, Lala is not quite Mexican enough because she does

not speak Spanish like her father and because she was born in the US, despite the fact that

she feels "Mexican on Both Sides" (351). Of course, Soledad thinks it is a "barbarity" that only

one of her grandchildren, Lala's brother, speaks fluent Spanish. In Chicago, she is a poor,

racial, and ethnic other. In San Antonio, deep in the heart of Aztlán, her Chicana peers call

her a gabacha, a white girl, with unintentional irony because her Spanish is better than

theirs and because her grandfather emigrated from Spain to Mexico. Lala's response to

this name-calling is typically amusing: "Who wants to be called a white girl? I mean, not

even white girls want to be called white girls" (354).

As with her grandmother before her, Lala's migrations cause her to feel alienated and

unable to define her identity in a consistently viable way. Not surprisingly, Cisneros

represents Lala's identity crisis and sense of confusion spatially. After the Chicana "perras,"

dogs, as Lala calls them, attack her one day after school, she runs:

first back toward the school, then along the access road north, thinking I can cross over on

the next overpass. But before I even get there, I can see some girls waiting there for me

too. ... There's no choice but to scramble over the chain-link fence and make a run for it

through the interstate. ... A pickup honks and changes lanes to avoid me, I don't care, I

don't care. ... I don't care, I never belonged here. I don't know where I belong

anymore.(356)

This moment figures her crisis and search for self as a series of "crossings." Her movement

(in the form of running) paradoxically saves her even as another movement (crossing over

the interstate) puts her at risk. The paradox here is a symbol for the formation of her

identity: the migrations with her family put her sense of self at risk even as those very

migrations define who she is as a Mexican American female and as a storyteller. Lala finally

finds temporary respite in the guardrail in the "middle" of the interstate, where for the first

time since her grandmother's death she hears Soledad call her full name: "Celaya" (357).

Soledad's willingness to speak in order to save her granddaughter inaugurates the

existence of the narrative coyote. Her voice carries Lala over to the other side of the

highway.

Still, Lala continues to repeat her grandmother's story precisely because at first she refuses

to listen to her grandmother's voice. Whereas Cisneros represents Soledad as partially

mute, she represents Lala as partially deaf. As a result, when her family decides to move

back to Chicago, Lala elopes to Mexico City with her first love, Ernie Calderón, "a good

Catholic Mexican Texican boy" (365) who, like Lala, is simultaneously masculine and

feminine and who has a "heart like a soft-boiled egg" (369). Like Soledad, Lala is abandoned

by her love, albeit in a more literal fashion. Whereas Narciso gives his heart to another

even as he remains married to Soledad, Ernie makes love to Lala the night before their

"wedding" and then leaves her alone in Mexico City because of a spiritual crisis. After Ernie

abandons her, Lala puts on the grandmother's caramelo rebozo (caramel-colored shawl) for

comfort: "I get dressed, tie the Grandmother's caramelo rebozo on my head like a gypsy,

and start sucking the fringe. It has a familiar sweet taste to it, like carrots, like camote, that

calms me" (388). She acknowledges: "[E]ach and every person [is] connected to me, and me

connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo" (389). The caramelo rebozo--the shawl that

Lala inherited from Soledad, who inherited it from her own mother, who made it--makes

explicit the connection between Lala's and Soledad's stories, which is a connection even

Lala begins to recognize and appreciate in this moment.

The Strands that Connect: The Narrative Coyote and the Caramelo Rebozo

McCracken argues that the rebozo is the "central motif" of the novel as it simultaneously

represents "ethnic identity," "family history," and, I add, migration and female artistic

creation (par. 2).13 As Lala begins to suck the strands of her grandmother's shawl, another

moment of consumption, she slowly begins to recognize the various strands the shawl

connects. These are clues that Lala's narrative has given us all along through its "just

enough, but not too much" structure. In one of the novel's multiple footnotes, Cisneros

asserts that the rebozo represents the various Amerindian and imperial cultures that have

historically comprised Mexican ethnic identity:

[T]he rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere. It evolved from

the cloths Indian women used to carry their babies, borrowed its knotted fringe from Spanish

shawls, and was influenced by the silk embroideries from the imperial court of China exported to

Manila, then Acapulco, via the Spanish galleons.(96)

Lala's family likewise embodies the mixture of the Amerindian (her grandmother and great-

grandmother) and the Spanish (her great-grandfather and his male descendents) that

make up the rebozo's heritage; in addition, her Chicana mother adds another knot to the

Reyes family history and expands Lala's mestizo heritage. The rebozo also represents both

spatial and temporal migrations. In Part Two, Lala explains that the "art of las

empuntadoras is so old no one remembers whether it arrived from the east, from the

macramé of Arabia through Spain, or from the west from the blue-sky bay of Acapulco. ...

Perhaps, as is often the case with things Mexican, it came from neither and both" (92-93).

Here, Lala underscores multiple possible origins of the rebozo--Arabia, Spain, and Acapulco-

-that mimic the migration of the Spanish conquistadors out of southern Spain (the land of

the Moors), across the globe, and ultimately into the "new world." She also notes that "no

one remembers" its exact origin, calling attention once again to time's ability to erode

cultural memory.

The caramelo rebozo's most important symbolic role is to represent ethnic female artistic

production and innovation; consequently, it functions as an analog to storytelling. Lala and

Soledad both figure the art of las empuntadoras, of the rebozo makers, as a creative act that

is passed down in a matrilineal fashion, from mother to daughter to granddaughter, and is

reinforced by a female community of shawl makers. Soledad's mother, Guillermina,

learned the art from her own mother and practiced with the women in her community of

Santa María del Río:

Guillermina's mother had taught her the empuntadora's art of counting and dividing the silk

strands, of braiding and knotting them into fastidious rosettes, arcs, stars, diamonds,

names, dates, and even dedications, and before her, her mother taught her as her own

mother had learned it, so it was as if all the mothers and daughters were at work, all one

thread interlocking and double-looping, each woman learning from the woman before, but

adding a flourish that became her signature, then passing it on.(93)

This artistic practice includes individual artistic innovation, which Cisneros figures here as

the "flourish" that each woman adds as her own act of artistic self-naming, and connects

one woman to another, one culture to another, and one strand to another. In other words,

like Lala's migratory narrative voice, the art of rebozo making is more communal than

private. Because the art of shawl making dies with Guillermina, Lala's migratory narrative

voice, her "talk," replaces her great-grandmother's art. This explains why Cisneros figures

the art of las empuntadoras and the art of la cuentista (the female storyteller) in stunningly

similar terms. Lala understands that "a life contains a multitude of stories and not a single

strand explains precisely the who of who one is" (115), just as her great-grandmother

understood how to link the silk strands of the rebozo.14

By retelling her grandmother's past, Lala links her personal history to her familial history,

and thus "It hits me at once, the terrible truth of it. I am the Awful Grandmother" (424). Like

the knots that connect the rebozo, the story comes full circle: after Inocencio travels to

Mexico City to retrieve Lala, the family moves back to Chicago, and Inocencio has his fateful

heart attack; only then do Lala and Soledad's ghost finally meet and begin to "talk." As

Soledad pleads with Lala to tell her story, part of her rationale is that her story will save

Lala: "I can't bear it. Why do you insist on repeating my life? Is that what you want? To live

as I did? There's no sin in falling in love with your heart and with your body, but wait till

you're old enough to love yourself first. How do you know what love is? You're still just a

child" (406). When Soledad shares her history with Lala to redress the absence of

knowledge their various migrations enact, Lala finally becomes aware of the power of the

storyteller as a border crosser who excavates, reclaims, and preserves histories. Lala not

only comes to believe that "You're the author of the telenovela of your life," but also

recognizes that the story of her own life is deeply indebted to those of her family (345):

And I realize with all the noise called "talking" in my house, that talking that is nothing but

talking, that is so much a part of my house and my past and myself you can't hear it as

several conversations, but as one roar like the roar inside a shell, I realize then that this is

my life, with its dragon arabesques of voices and lives intertwined, rushing like a Ganges,

irrevocable and wild, carrying away everything in reach, whole villages, pigs, shoes,

coffeepots ...(424)

Cisneros shows here that the "talk" that "intertwines" is a multivocal expression of "several

conversations" at once; the "talk" of storytelling ultimately crosses the borders between the

self and the other.

Cisneros's voluminous and at times encyclopedic experiment with migration and narrative

voice underscores the importance of aesthetics to the reclamation of suppressed and

forgotten histories. If, as Said claims, "exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries

are experiences that can ... provide us with new narrative forms" (225), then Cisneros's

narrator illuminates exactly what that narrative form looks like. Cisneros treats migration in

Caramelo not only as a theme, but also as a narrative opportunity and strategy. As a result,

her use of migration as a constitutive narrative category in and of itself forces us to rethink

other hierarchies with which we are so familiar: citizen and migrant, margin and center,

colonizer and colonized, and subject and object of narration. Cisneros deploys the illicit

properties of the narrative coyote to excavate and preserve various marginalized or

misrepresented histories--ranging from the history of the Reyes clan (loosely based on

Cisneros's own family), to a retelling of US-Mexico border relations, to the documentation

of a constellation of American, Chicano, and Mexican cultural artifacts and icons. Yet she

also uses the narrative coyote to reveal how storytelling shapes the communal and

personal histories it documents. 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.

Notes

1. Lala consistently plays with the double meaning of the Spanish noun "destino," which

means simultaneously destination and destiny; this word explicitly connects the family's

fate with movement through time and space.

2. The epigraph that begins the novel--"Cuéntame algo, aunque sea una mentira [Tell me a

story, even if it's a lie]"--and the final line of the chronology that ends the book--"All over

the world, millions leave their homes and cross borders illegally" (439)--reinforce the

connection Cisneros makes between storytelling and migration.

3. The built environment the family occupies in Chicago testifies to their inability to fulfill a

form of the "American dream" as it is defined by the acquisition of certain types of houses

that advertise both a family's upward mobility and their "American-ness." Monika Kaup

evaluates the ethnicity of housing and argues that "in the United States in particular, the

home is more than just a shelter; it is a national institution almost as sacred as the

American flag. In home ownership, the American Dream and the American Way are

manifest: the civic values of individualism, economic success, and self-sufficiency are

asserted, according to Gwendolyn Wright, in 'the single-family detached house in the

suburbs'" (361). This architectural form, for both Wright and Kaup, represents "the uniform

ideology of the white middle-class American home," which operates as "a smokescreen

that obstructs the recognition of other house forms in the United States" (362).

4. See Chapter 6 in particular of Virginia Woolf's feminist text.

5. Several articles evaluate Cisneros's use of Woolf's architectural metaphor in her first

book. The House on Mango Street. As Caramelo judiciously maintains and expands this

theme, I find these articles to be pertinent to my analysis. See Jacqueline Doyle, Kaup, and

Julián Olivares.

6. For further discussion of dialogic discourses, see M. M. Bakhtin.

7. Lala describes her family's house on El Dorado Street in San Antonio, deep in the heart

of Atzlán, as rascuache: "Rascuache. That's the only word for it. Homemade half-ass. Our

house is one of those haphazard, ramshackle, self-invented types, as if each room was

added on as the family who built it got bigger, when they could afford it, layer upon layer of

self-improvement, somebody trying their very best, even if that best isn't very much. Some

of it in wood, some of it in funky siding, and some parts of it in brick" (305-06).

8. Mary Pat Brady likewise underscores the importance of aesthetic choices in Chicana

writing: "Chicana literature offers an important theoretics of space, one that, like many

critical space studies, implicates the production of space in the everyday, in the social, but

that unlike many space theories suggests the relevance of aesthetics, of 'the literary mode

of knowing' for understanding the intermeshing of the spatial and the social" (6). Although

Brady focuses on the "theoretics of space" and Torres evaluates "code-switching," both

authors underscore "the relevance of aesthetics" to the political dimension of Chicana

writing.

9. In her review of Caramelo, Jane Ciabattari describes Cisneros's storytelling similarly to

how I define Lala's: "[Cisneros] is particularly gifted at showing how the ebb and flow of

history affect those previously marginalized: the poor, the immigrants, the women who

have been traditionally without a voice in literature. In this lovingly told and poetic novel,

she uses the storytelling art to give these voiceless ones a voice, and to find the border to

the past, imbuing the struggles of her family and her countries with the richness of myth"

(R3). In addition to giving voice to the marginalized members of society, Cisneros also

documents the cultural contributions of a number of Mexican icons. Gabriella Gutiérrez y

Muhs asserts that Cisneros "brings to the American cultural menu a new set of popular

icons" (24). Gutiérrez y Muhs notes that the icons Cisneros specifically references, such as

Tongolele, Pedro Infante, and Lola Beltrán, "are people who are border-crossers,

transgressors, and multicultural and transnational symbols from a time in the 1950s and

1960s when difference was not a symbol of empowerment yet reigned in Mexico" (24). It

makes sense that as a border-crosser, Lala's migratory narrative gives voice to the

forgotten stories of other cultural "transgressors."

10. Ellen McCracken uses Cisneros's biography to explain the impulse behind Lala's

"excavation project," noting how migration, which she instead calls "diaspora," suppresses

"key elements" of Cisneros's personal, cultural, and ethnic history. McCracken writes: "If

diaspora functioned to erode key elements of her forbears' Mexican culture--her father's

exile to the United States in the late 1930s and maternal grandparents' similar

displacement during the Mexican Revolution--and the ideology of the melting pot in the

new country further occluded this culture, then Cisneros the Chicana writer would seek in

her writing and her public persona to recapture the eroding cultural memory and identity"

(par. 3). My essay focuses on narrative voice whereas McCracken evaluates the

constellation of postmodern ethnic spectacles Cisneros deploys to represent cultural

identity.

11. In the small chapter "Mexico, Our Nearest Neighbor to the South" in Part One of the novel,

Cisneros represents Lala's desire from a young age to remember someone else's memory;

this, as with Lala's narrative practice, makes history more communal than individual. As her

family drives South from Chicago in their annual summer migration to Mexico City, her

father asks her mother if she remembers one treacherous journey through the Sierra

Madre; instead, Lala responds, "I remember." When her brother Rafa points out that she

"was still dirt" (not born) when the story occurred, Lala's mother clarifies: "You mean you

remember the stories somebody told you" (19). When Lala asserts that she "can't

remember where the truth ends and the talk begins" (20), she collapses another's

experience; the story of that experience becomes part of her memory. The above phrase

illuminates one of Lala's most powerful roles as a narrative coyote: her desire and ability to

hear and articulate others' stories even if she "was still dirt" when they occurred.

12. By taking advantage of the suspension of social, cultural, and political power relations

the turmoil of the war enacts, Regina transforms her sense of self. The family's cluttered

apartment in Mexico City perfectly represents how Regina's business shrewdness during

the instability of the war not only improves the family's economic standing, but also alters

power relations for her: "For Regina the war had meant an opportunity at finding her true

calling. As in all wars, those who flourish are not the best people but the most clever and

hard-hearted. Regina's little commerce not only sustained the family through difficult

times, but prospered and moved them up a notch in economic status." In lieu of cash,

Regina also accepts various family "treasures" as payments for her cigarettes, and thus

"[n]ow their apartment was packed with enough furniture to make it look like La Ciudad de

Londres" (149). No longer merely a racial and ethnic female other to be consumed like the

papayas she sold, Regina has a business acuity that gives her the power to consume the

domestic trinkets that embody other people's histories. Just as her husband's Spanish

ethnicity figures him as a type of conquistador ("He was like a big grizzled vulture, but so pale

and hazel-eyed, Mexicans considered him handsome because of his Spanish blood" [117]),

Regina's consumption here transforms her from colonized to colonizer.

13. Although McCracken acknowledges that the rebozo additionally symbolizes "narrative"

(par. 2), I think Cisneros is much more specific about what type of "narrative" it represents,

which is ethnic female storytelling that assumes a migratory narrative voice.

14. Gutiérrez y Muhs likewise notes that the metaphor of the rebozo "[expresses] the

circularity of the novel" (33) and draws our attention to the following moment in the text

when Lala adopts the language of the rebozo to explain her role as a narrative coyote:

"'Maybe it's my job to separate the strands and knot the words together for everyone who

can't say them, and make it all right in the end'" (qtd. in Gutiérrez y Muhs 33).

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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

Alumbaugh, Heather. "Narrative Coyotes: Migration and Narrative Voice in Sandra

Cisneros's Caramelo." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 305,

Gale, 2011. Gale Literature Resource Center,

link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1100105247/LitRC?u=uprpiedras&sid=bookmark-

LitRC&xid=d6db3c5d. Accessed 12 Aug. 2021. Originally published in MELUS: The Journal of

the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 35, no. 1, Spring

2010, pp. 53-75.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1100105247