caramelo

Novel Module 9 :—Multiculturalism and the Hyphenated American: Caramelo

Hear Cisneros read from Caramelo (6 minute audio)	Representative Text: Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo (2002) "I'm trying to write the stories that haven't been written. I feel like a cartographer; I'm determined to fill a literary void," Cisneros says . . . . Born in Chicago in 1954, Cisneros grew up in a family of six brothers and a father, or "seven fathers," as she puts it. She recalls spending much of her early childhood moving from place to place. Because her paternal grandmother was so attached to her favorite son, the Cisneros family returned to Mexico City "like the tides." "The moving back and forth, the new schools, were very upsetting to me as a child. They caused me to be very introverted and shy. I do not remember making friends easily, and I was terribly self-conscious . . . . I retreated inside myself." It was that "retreat" that transformed Cisneros into an observer, a role she feels she still plays today. --from "Sandra Cisneros: Conveying the riches of the Latin American culture"
read first Commentary	read second Interview From the September/October 2002 issue of Book magazine Then Read the Novel Caramelo has 86 short chapters and a Fin Read through Chapter 50 to page 299 for Tuesday Please Submit Topics and Questions You Would Like to Discuss In Class Finish the novel for Thursday Please Submit Topics and Questions You Would Like to Discuss In Class	Additional Sources

Commentary

That was what was so much fun for me. To hold up mirrors: from the Mexicans to see themselves from the point of view of the Mexican-Americans. Mexicans-Americans to see themselves from the point of view of the Mexicans, Americans as seen by Mexicans, all those mirrors that get refracted . . . . If you are Mexican, they feel like crying because they feel no one has written about this and they are emotionally overwhelmed. I get a lot of weepers. If you are of another culture, say Persian or Chinese or African-American, you will come up surprised and say, "Well, I'm Persian but this could have been my family." People from very different cultures than mine see themselves in this book. Even the most gringo gringo will, when I see them in the audience, will be laughing at the appropriate moment. I think there is a place for them even though it is specifically about a culture that is unlike my listeners. There is a place for them to identify with. --Sandra Cisneros from an interview on Identitytheory.com

The terms used in title of this section of ENGL 441—multiculturalism and the hyphenated American—raise controversies in the study of American literature today. Many Americans, including some of the writers discussed in this section, strongly oppose the use of hyphenation, arguing that we are all “Americans” and that the ethnic labels create divisions between us. Bharati Mukherjee, for example, identifies herself as an American of Bengali-Indian origin and opposes the Asian-American writer label, arguing that it leads to further marginalization. “I am an American, not an Asian-American,” Mukherjee asserts. “My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally” (1).

Mukherjee, in her adamant assertion of her American status, reminds us of two of the enduring themes in the nation’s literature, democracy and the American Dream. Ethnic origins, however, can greatly affect how we view and define these themes. Recognition of different views of the same themes leads some Americans to argue that hyphenation is a positive means of identification because it allows people to claim their ethnic influences and at the same time their Americaness. Hyphenation also allows us to represent varying views of what constitutes American identity.

In Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, for example, the Chinese-American mothers share the American Dream of opportunity and success for their daughters, but their version of this dream emerges from a particular Chinese perspective. Their daughter’s successes, they hope, will come from excellence in education, talent, and career and will bring honor to their families. Yet the Chinese-American daughters’ American dream of success highlights individual freedom; they are less sure about personal achievement and far from convinced that their duty is to bring honor to their families. When June goes to China at the end of the novel, she finally interweaves the three most important strands of her identity—Chinese, American, and female. But rather than being a Chinese and an American woman, she has an integrated identity as a Chinese-American woman.

Both sides in the multicultural debate make legitimate points. In all likelihood the current practice of hyphenation is a temporary one. We can see how terms of identity evolve by looking at the example of Langston Hughes.. During the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes was identified as a Negro writer, in the 1960s he became a black writer, and in the 1970s an African-American writer. Hughes, of course, remained the same person, but how we view him and his work has changed over time. This evolution is, on the whole, a positive process. We keep the past current by reevaluating it as we learn more; and just as learning is never complete, the process of naming, defining, and describing ourselves is never finished. Who knows by what terms African-American, Asian-American, or Native-American writers will be defined tomorrow? But we can bet that whatever the terms, we will look back on the literature that they have created and that has endured and discover new things to question and to appreciate; and, in doing so, we will also discover new things about ourselves and our lives.

Therefore, the current tendency towards hyphenation may be temporary but may also be useful and desirable for the present. Classification and division is an essential step in the process of learning; and we are now in the process of learning more about multiculturalism in American society and in its literature. Although we continue to bring the same human concerns—love, death, growing up—to literature, we are nevertheless also looking for a variety of perspectives on these themes. A personal exigency exists as well: we are in the process of identifying the different aspects of ourselves with the ultimate goal of establishing a full and coherent sense of identity.
For example, a high school or college student reading a coming-of-age novel, such as Catcher in the Rye about an alienated but affluent, white American male, may be eager to discover other texts that represent the experiences of females, or of growing up in poor neighborhoods and families, or of another ethnic group that he or she belongs to or goes to school with. Fortunately, the field of the contemporary American novel is thriving in this area and producing the most richly diverse literature in history.

It is this balance between the specifics of belonging to particular group and of belonging to humanity as a whole that makes these texts literature rather than sociology or history. Amy Tan asserts that her work is ultimately more about the common ground between human beings than it is about differences:

I don't see myself, for example, writing about cultural dichotomies, but about human connections. All of us go through angst and identity crises. And even when you write in a specific context, you still tap into that subtext of emotions that we all feel about love and hope, and mothers and obligations and responsibilities. (“The Spirit Within” 1)

On the other hand, Sandra Cisneros, who writes fiction about the experiences of Latina women in contemporary America, has a more social view of her work. "The meaning of literary success," she states, "is that I could change the way someone thinks about my community, or my gender, or my class" (Milligan 16). Tan emphasizes sameness, or so-called universals, while Cisneros emphasizes understanding differences.

Novelists today have many different views on ethnicity, gender, and class in society and in literature, and at present these are the themes most prevalent in our literature. As you read the representative text, Caramelo , look for these themes and ask how these issues effect the growth and development of Lala, the young narrator and protagonist. And ask yourself how you would represent these themes if you were writing a fictional account of your own growing up.

Works Cited

Milligan, Bryce. "A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros and Pat Mora." Texas Journal of Ideas, History and Culture. 17 (Fall/ Winter 1994): 12-17.

Mukherjee, Bharati. “American Dreamer.” Mother Jones . Jan/Feb. 1997.

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Ivy Books, 1994.

---. Interview with Amy Tan: “The Spirit Within.” Salon. 12 Nov 1995.

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Interview From the September/October 2002 issue of Book magazine

Sandra Cisneros, the acclaimed author of The House on Mango Street , shows up at the Liberty Bar, a ramshackle restaurant not far from San Antonio's defunct Pearl Brewery, says hi to a couple of the waiters and takes a seat. The city has endured several days of heavy rain, and now, like much of Central Texas, it's pretty well flooded. Cisneros is carrying a white canvas bag, which, it turns out, is protecting a treasure she wants to show off. She reaches in and produces a silk shawl colored a light turquoise. It's a rebozo.

The rebozo is Mexico's quintessential mestizo—or mixed—object, Cisneros says, fingering the eight-foot-long piece of fabric. Traditionally, she explains, the body is woven on a loom by men. "But this," she adds, sliding her hand down to the fringe, more than a foot of gossamer spiderweb, "this is often woven by hand, by women." A distilled product of Spanish and native Indian influences, the rebozo has been used for a variety of purposes over the centuries: shawl, apron, scarf, headdress, baby sling and tablecloth. In the past, in parts of the country, the way a woman wore one signaled her status: married, single, prostitute. Now Cisneros has put one of them to use as a central image in her expansive new novel, providing Caramelo with its title. (A caramelo is a particular type of rebozo highly prized for its candy-striped pattern.)

The turquoise rebozo Cisneros is holding is very finely made, a rare collector's item. "I could get one like it for $200," she says. Then she grins. "You?" (I'm a white guy from Dallas.) "You'd get it for $400."

Cisneros, 47, has been honored -- a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, an American Book Award -- primarily as a short-story writer and poet, but her novel The House on Mango Street is what made her, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, America's most widely read Latina author. Since its publication in 1984, Mango Street has sold more than 2 million copies, becoming a perennial on library and classroom reading lists across the country. It is the story of Esperanza, a young, alienated Chicana girl growing up in a gritty, inner-city neighborhood in Chicago, a feminist and Hispanic coming-of-age tale.

As a writer, Cisneros is known for the vividness and vitality of her prose and her ability to capture working-class Mexican-Americans with immediacy and poignancy, weaving together their voices quickly and lyrically. Mango Street is a novel, but it is made up of bursts, with chapters often only a few paragraphs long. As Cisneros says simply, "I'm a miniaturist," meaning the scale of her work is small but intense.

Caramelo, however, is anything but small. Even with its earthiness and mock-heroic tone, at 440 pages the book is Cisneros' shot at a Latino epic, a multigenerational saga and historical novel complete with footnotes, appearances by the likes of dancer Josephine Baker and coverage of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. In part, it's the story of Cisneros' own family and their treks from Mexico City to Chicago and back; and in part, it's the story of the great Latino immigration to the United States. Irish and Jewish writers have had their family tales of New York City's Lower East Side, the tenements and sweatshops. Cisneros' fictionalized family experience, however, is filled with road trips in the back of a crowded red Chevy station wagon and fond memories of Mexican film stars.

Caramelo took Cisneros a long time -- nine years -- to write. She says she originally just wanted to explain the life of her father. But to do that, she had to explain her "Awful Grandmother," her father's mother, a bossy, melodramatic woman. But to do that, she first had to tell the story of her "Little Grandfather." Each step took her story back in time and upped the tale's complexity until, at one point in Caramelo, the Awful Grandmother breaks in as a quarrelsome narrator, comically objecting to the way her life is being told.

"Postmodernism, people call it," Cisneros says of the storytelling games and footnotes found in novels by Manuel Puig and David Foster Wallace, and now in her own. "De nada," she says, waggling her hand in dismissal. "It's just the way people talk. You start a story—oh, but you have to explain something first. So you take a detour, but that leads to something else. Then you get back to your story."

Cisneros' stories often have narrators who need to speak, who feel they have to fight to be heard. That presence is essentially a ghost of the author's Chicago childhood. She was la consentida of the family, her "daddy's little princess." She had six brothers and no sisters, but if she was the only daughter, as she's written, she was also only a daughter. Her father, Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral, reserved his boasting for his many sons -- but he was the person who taught Cisneros, she feels, to take pride in her work. A skilled upholsterer, he started A. Cisneros & Sons, a business that still exists despite Alfredo's death from cancer in 1997. He wasn't altogether comfortable living in Chicago; every few years he took the family back to Mexico City, where he was raised. "He missed his mother," Cisneros says with a groan.

Alfredo supported his daughter's decision to attend Chicago's Loyola University on scholarship and then the University of Iowa's famed Writers' Workshop, where she was the only Latina student. This was in the late '70s, long before Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin were pop icons, and Cisneros felt out of place, isolated and frightened. Her father thought schooling would improve her chances of marrying, and marrying above her class. "All that time, he thought I was getting my marriage degree," Cisneros says, rolling her eyes. "When I graduated, he thought I'd wasted my chance to catch a college guy." (She's still single, but says she has a "male partner.")

After leaving Iowa, Cisneros returned to Chicago and struggled to make a living teaching underprivileged high schoolers. In 1984 she came to San Antonio, where she now lives, to work at a local arts center. Mango Street was originally published by Houston's Arte Publico Press that year, but Cisneros still had to survive on grant money and the occasional teaching gig, even going so far, at one point, as to post flyers in supermarkets promoting her own creative writing classes. Her agent, however, managed to sell some of Cisneros' short stories and the rights to Mango Street to Random House. The publisher reissued the novel in 1991, along with the story collection Woman Hollering Creek.

It was good timing. The year before, Oscar Hijuelos had become the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love), and Cisneros' books were released about the same time as were new novels by Julia Alvarez (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents) and Ana Castillo (Sapogonia). In short, it was a watershed moment for Latino writers. The '90s would be the decade they -- Cisneros included -- reached the rest of America.

"I was lucky," Cisneros admits. As she worked on the stories that would become Woman Hollering Creek, she says the project began to feel like Noah's Ark. "It was my first book with a major publisher and I might not have another chance. So I shoved my own voice to the background and tried to gather all the voices that hadn't been heard, to tell the story of our community in all its diversity."

San Antonio suits Cisneros. As far as she's concerned, Austin -- traditionally the state's literary crossroads -- is just too white and too expensive. San Antonio is funkier, more savory, more easygoing. It doesn't have the aggressive corporate gleam of Dallas or Houston -- or, for that matter, Austin. The Alamo City is poorer, cheaper, and its population is nearly 60 percent Hispanic. After a childhood spent shuttling between Mexico and the United States, Cisneros is living in a place where the two nations are interwoven.

But her relationship to San Antonio hasn't always been an easy one. She was already a literary star in 1997, when that relationship was tested by a local city commission that took issue with her house. Or, more specifically, with her house paint.]

In 1992, after the success of her books, Cisneros purchased a vintage 1903 metal-roofed house in one of the oldest neighborhoods in Texas, a national historic district south of downtown San Antonio called King William. (Being able to afford a house -- a home in the heart, as it says in Mango Street -- had been one of her obsessions. "For a writer, for the solitude to write," she says, "you don't need a room of your own, you need a house.") King William is diverse, with some stately Victorian mansions as well as a few crumbling bungalows and red-brick warehouses, but according to the city commission, the purple, turquoise and pink paint job that Cisneros applied to her place a few years after moving in violated the district's code of period authenticity. Cisneros was outraged. What about the area's original Mexican settlers and their taste in colors?

After several years of meetings, the purple had faded, as all things do, in the subtropical sun. The dispute was resolved in typical San Antonio fashion when the resultant lavender was deemed acceptable. The house went unchanged, but the fiasco made national headlines and the author's reputation grew substantially.

"I knew Sandra before she was Sandra Cisneros," jokes Dagoberto Gilb, a 51-year-old Austinite, the author of Woodcuts of Women and a New Yorker contributor. The two met after each received a Dobie Paisano, a fellowship named for Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie that bestows upon the state's authors six months' worth of writing time at a ranch house near Austin. "She's like my sister," he adds. "We came up together. But her rise -- her rise went much higher than mine. Talking about Sandra Cisneros these days is like talking about Frida Kahlo." Like the legendary Mexican painter, Cisneros has cross-cultural appeal; she's a popular artist whose life and work have come to embody larger forces in society, and she seems to fulfill needs beyond her readership's ordinary desire for a story with a few entertaining characters. It's a lot of responsibility for a writer to bear, and Cisneros, who says she's a Buddhist, sometimes seeks spiritual guidance. "I ask for help to honor the people I'm connected to," she says. "I ask, 'What should I be saying?' " As a writer with an audience that crosses ethnic and national lines, she feels this is "what I was put on this planet to do -- to do work that's bigger than just me."

Outside the Liberty Bar, the rain has let up, if only for the moment. Cisneros gently lays the rebozo across her lap, and the conversation turns back to Caramelo. Writing it, she says, was like backtracking through ancestors and the "healthy lies" of family legend, linking herself to "this long thread of people." History, Cisneros claims, is all plot; it's deadly dull without the life of human detail and human connection. And where history didn't provide the connections ... well, she's a novelist: She made them up. "I don't have women who are writers in my family," she says, spreading her arms as if to indicate not just her mother, aunts and grandmothers but all of Latin and American literature. "Who are my antecedents?" Without such role models, without such guidance, she says she simply "imagined these women as weavers, and I am part of their tradition. Writing is like sewing together what I call these 'buttons,' these bits and pieces."

The storyteller as weaver. The storyteller as a maker of rebozos.

"I can't even sew a button," Cisneros says. "But I do with words what they did with cloth."
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Please Submit Topics and Questions You Would Like to Discuss In Class

You now know a lot about American Novel and I invite you to create our discussions topics. Please submit your suggestions and check back to this site to prepare for class. Submit your ideas via email: cbarks - at - fitzgeraldsociety.org I will post the agenda for Tuesday on Monday, and for Thursday on Wednesday. You are also invited to submit quiz questions for Thursday's reading quiz.

Discussion for Tuesday
This novel is autobiographical, meaning it is a fiction based on Cisneros's own life and family, with the protagonist, Lala, created by Cisneros as a representation of herself. She is remembering and creating the story of who she is--her identity formation--for herself, and at the same time, offering this imaginative creation to readers. Therefore, her stories (if we internalize them) become our stories, and her identity formation offers us new choices in our own identity formations. For Tuesday's class, the topic will be:

Childhood Experiences and Identity (in Caramelo and those of our own that the novel reminds of us)
Please have passages and examples marked in your text and bring it to class.

pictures (of self and family)
sensory experiences and memories
family stories
the role multicultural experiences play
comparisons and contrasts to Cather's My Antonia

*from Bonny Busch on sensory memories: "something that is really interesting me is all the sensory details (smells, sights, sounds, textures), and the idea of knowing/remembering something with one's body but not with one's mind. One example of this is when Lala says, "Every year I cross the border, it's the same--my mind forgets. But my body always remembers" (18). I was thinking about this in relationship to the physical and somewhat animalistic worlds of both An American Tragedy and They Shoot Horses Don't They? (and Fight Club too, in some ways). Sandra Cisneros' world is very PHYSICAL and tangible, but in a completely different way than Dreiser's, McCoy's or Palahniuk's. Her world comes closer to Willa Cather's, I think."

Caramelo covers a wide range of human experience but is essentially positive and life-affirming (not a tragic novel). Some of the themes of Cisneros's vision of the human experience might be that because we born into families that existed when we were dirt and that will continue when we return to dirt our lives are more collective than individual, that a human life is not one story, starring the individual, but is instead lots of short, incomplete interconnected stories about our own experiences and those of everyone around us. Based on your own lives, do you agree or disagree?

One last note for Tuesday: You will not be tested on this but I wanted you to think about an intertextual connection you might not make on your own since it is regarding a French novel rather than an American: but the other novel is so prominent that I think the connection is important to point out: Marcel Proust's high modernist seven-book novel A la Recherché du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), published in French in 1913 to 1927. The novels have huge differences across every literary element but the importance of involuntary sensory memories from childhood is crucial to both and crucial also to human experience. If we think about those sensory perceptions consciously, we bring into play another element of our lives to be creative with, as Cisneros and Proust have been in the fictional accounts of their lives. The following is a blurb about Remembrance of Things Past;

In January 1909, Proust experienced the involuntary recall of a childhood memory when he tasted a rusk (a twice-baked bread, which in his novel became a madeleine) dipped in tea. The novel is the story of Proust's own life, told as an allegorical search for truth. It is the major work of French fiction in the early 20th century. In July he retired from the world to write his novel, finishing the first draft in September 1912. The first volume, Du Cote de chez Swann (Swann's Way), was refused by two publishers and was finally issued at the author's expense in November 1913. Proust at this time planned only two further volumes. During the war years he revised the remainder of his novel, enriching and deepening its feeling, texture, and construction, enhancing the realistic and satirical elements, and tripling its length. In so doing he transformed it into one of the most profound achievements of the human imagination . . . . The novel begins with the middle-aged narrator's memories of his happy childhood. Marcel tells the story of his life, introducing along the way a series of memorable characters . . . . . Marcel's world expands to encompass both the cultivated and the corrupt, and he sees the full range of human folly and misery. At his lowest ebb, he feels that time is lost; beauty and meaning have faded from all he ever pursued and won; and he renounces the book he has always hoped to write. At a reception after the war, the narrator realizes, through a series of incidents of unconscious memory, that all the beauty he has experienced in the past is eternally alive . Time is regained, and he sets to work, racing against death, to write the very novel the reader has just experienced. In his quest for time lost, he invented nothing but altered everything, selecting, fusing, and transmuting the facts so that their underlying unity and universal [ ? or larger human] significance would be revealed.
--from amazon, emphasis added.

Additional Sources

Sandra Cisneros Web : Anne Koroknay contributed this excellent, innovative site. Thanks, Anne.

Sandra Cisneros: Conveying the riches of the Latin American culture is the author's literary goal

Voices from the Gaps: "a great place to learn about the lives and works of North American women writers of color. "

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~eradamo/ghostworld.html

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