UDK 821.111(73=1.72).09-31 Cisneros S. 
DYNAMICS BETWEEN 'OLD' AND 'NEW' ETHNICITIES AND MULTIPLE 
IDENTITIES IN SANDRA CISNEROS' CARAMELO 
Branka Kalogjera 
Abstract 
The paper takes Candra Cisneros' epic semi-biographical novel Caramelo as a literary insight 
into dynamics between generations within a single ethnic (Chicano) community, and compares it 
against classics of the genre in its shifting definition of one's ethnic identity; here the postmodern 
approach of entwining fiction and fact and awarding them equal legitimacy mirrors the possibility of 
embracing multiple identities, as exemplified by the novel's _protagonist. 
There are two ways of looking at the issues that arise from differences between 
'old' and 'new' ethnicities, depending on the relationship between the two groups: there 
is the often uneasy but never uninteresting, or irrelevant, interaction between various 
ethnic groups defined by the hierarchy set according to the chronological order in which 
the communities were established, and then there is a subtler variant thereof, existing 
within generations of the same ethnic group.' As every aspect of a community's life 
changes with the passing of time, the three to five generations of any ethnic group begin 
to form more distinct layers; observation of resulting differences in customs, problems 
and attitude offers one a greater understanding of the changing world as a whole- main-
stream, integrating, and fringe communities alike- as the ethnic mindset often registers 
the shifts in general trends with greater sensitivity, especi~lly in regards to the shift from 
the rural to the urban lifestyle. I propose to illustrate how the differences between 'the 
old' and 'the new' within ethnicities document and contribute to our understanding of 
the changing, modern world, using the most appropriate documentary medium - ethnic 
literature, of which, within the literature of the United Staets, the Chicano/Chicana 
corpus is the most varied, exhaustive, and telling. 
Caramelo (or puro cuento) is the latest novel by the acclaimed writer Sandra 
Cisneros, best known for the 1984 House on Mango Street. Caramelo was published 
in 2002, eighteen years after Cisneros' breaking hit, and although it does retain some 
motives central to the House on Mango Street, this work of nine years in the making2 
1 Monika Kaup, "The Architecture of Ethnicity in Chicano Literature", American Literature, 69.2(1997): 
361-97. 
2 Cisneros' interview in Identity Theory (Robert Birnbaum, 4 December 2004.) 
109 
is truly epic in that it actually strives to depict the totality of the Mexican American 
experience in its myriad forms and variations resulting from a century of documented 
immigration and community establishment. As reviews aptly put it, milions of Mexican 
Americans live in the United States, but their stories vary and depend on how they got 
there. Numerous works are written from the perspective of either the second- or the 
third- generation Chicano or that of the newly arrived immigrant, but sweeping novels 
that combine the two quite different psyches are rare. Most Chicano novels focus on 
extended families since they are essential units of the Chicano community,3 but whereas 
in most books the focus remains on a single generation, Caramelo gives equal atten-
tion to three generations of the Reyes family. In this it has something of a precedent 
in Arturo Islas' 1990 Migrant Souls, a richly layered history of the family Angel, but 
while its protagonist Josie through her youth and adulthood remains a family member 
as knowledgeable and influential as any other, Lala, the narrator of Caramelo, has a 
more powerful role despite her young age. What sets Caramelo apart from similarly 
themed books, however, is a curious insistence on the fickle nature of its narrative which 
enables Cisneros to realise the book's epic scope. 
From the opening line- tell me a story, even if it's a lie (borrowed, as the author 
acknowledges, from an anthropological study of border dwellers)4 - over constant re-
minders throughout the narrative that the memories and history we're reading may well 
be imperfectly remembered, borrowed from others, partially reconstructed and partially 
made up, to the concluding list of people whose life and family stories Cisneros wove 
into that of the Reyes,5 it is clear that her choice of a common name for the family is 
meant to evoke more than a few remarks made in the book regarding their numbers and 
omnipresence or fictional royal ancestry. The Reyes are all migrant families of Mexican 
origin, as their ups and downs, happy and unhappy marriages, reverence and irreverence, 
successful and unsuccessful assimilations - in Mexican as well as American communi-
ties - reflect the truth that there is more to the Chicano/Chicana than what literature 
burdened with political aims would have one believe. The Reyes are everywhere and 
yet not typical, for there can be little to deem 'typical' in an ethnic community of over 
five generations and twenty million people. 
Certainly, such an ambition - to represent a world and note endless variations 
of stories resulting from human interaction - provoked criticism that the book lacks 
focus that drove House on Mango Street,6 but this may easily be explained through 
frequent references to tele- and fotonovelas such as La Familia Burron which carry 
on for years with their often improbable convoluted plots. The telenovela format was 
even more intensely used in Ana Castillo's breathless 1993 novel So Far From God and 
the Mexicans' ve for such stories is mentioned almost without exception: Alejandro 
Murguia talks of his neighbourhood's telenovela mentality' which his alter ego of 
This War Called Love (2002) unsuccessfully tries to replace with cinematographic 
3 Thomas Vallejos, "Ritual Process and the Family in the Chicano Novel", MELUS, 10.4(1983):5-16; Teresa 
MacKenna, Migrant Song: Politics and Process in Contemporary Chicano Literature, VTP, 1997: 8-26 
4 Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border With Esperanza's Story, Beacon Press, 1994. 
5 Cisneros' interview in the San Francisco Chronicle (Heidi Benson, 25 October, 2002.) 
6 Melanie Haupt, Caramelo's review in the Austin Chronicle, 4 October 2002. 
no 
achievements of the seventies' Movimiento.1 Despite that, telenovelas are often re-
placed by romantic or adventurous films as preferred sources of storytelling, even 
identity. Where identity is concerned, escapism is understandable: unable to identify 
with either the American or Mexican communities and way of life - for Mexico, as 
Caramelo also shows, is just as burdened with racial and class issues as are the States, 
not to mention political and economic instability- some participants of the Chicano 
revolution looked towards the mythical past of Aztlan as a source of pride, essential 
to group - if not all human - survival. While some modern authors, especially the 
feminists such as Gloria Anzaldua or Estella Portillo Trambley used the spirits and 
symbols inherited from pre-Columbian and folk beliefs successfully in order to go 
against patriarchal and chauvinistic prejudices strongly present in their culture,8 
ultimate futility of addressing the mystical to deal with real life is frequently shown 
in works of fiction, notably for example in seduction and subsequent disillusion in 
Cisneros' 1991 One Holy Night. Telenovelas and films on the other hand- the myths 
of modern age which are permanently locked with real life in that they originate from 
it, exaggerate it, influence it, to take from it again - serve a constructive purpose in 
Caramelo in adding another layer of importance to the book's insistence on cuentos, 
pure stories, regardless of how much truth they carry. 
Another, technical and possibly the most relevant layer, comes from the post-
modernistdesire to erase borders between fictional and actual life. What Cisneros does 
in Caramelo is make the research all novelists undertake to create credible or familiar 
backdrops to their characters' lives an integral part of her novel through a constant and 
exhaustive use of footnotes chronicling and detailing Mexico's history and celebrities 
- politicians, entertainers, or both. There has been much criticism regarding this move, 
mostly in that it ruins the book's already hazy focus, but I believe that the inclusion of 
foqtnotes, chronologies, and other intrusions of objective reality into the intensely sub-
jective space of fiction writing make a very subtle yet very powerful point: by making 
background research as obvious on the page as the text of the narrative yet giving it it 
a subordinate role of footnote, Cisneros makes it plain that personal experience takes 
precedence over documented fact. Indeed, historical and anthropological research shows 
that material objects documenting the past are subject to deliberate oblivion and more 
importantly falsification, and if this is the attitude towards minorities why not turn to 
anecdote as a channel for writing history. This practice threatens to result in nothing but 
destruction, but history and life can be changed because they are human dimensions of 
past and present, showing that categories such as time and space can belong to humans 
and be defined by them, instead of defining them. 
While most Chicano/Chicana authors go as far as to deconstruct identities forced 
upon them by the border, lafrontera, to rebuild a transcedental new one,9 the story of 
Cisneros' Lala shows that one can change, replace, or discard identities as one wishes, 
or carry many at once. The border was, after all - like all entities seemingly greater 
than fe- created by humans, and can be undone by them. In the words of Arturo Islas, 
"The [family Angel] had not sailed across the ocean or ridden in wagons and trains 
7 Alejandro Murguia, This War Called Love: Nine Stories, City Lights Books, (2002): 99. 
8 Jorge Huerta, "Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth", CUP (2005): 140-141. 
9 Rosaura Sanchez, Postmodernism and Chicano Literature, Aztlan, 18(1987): 1-14. 
Ill 
across half a continent in search of a new life. They were migrant, not immigrant, 
souls. They surely and naturally went from one bloody side of the river to the other 
and into a land that just a few decades earlier had been Mexico."10 Islas' characters 
admittedly define themselves as Children of the Border, but do so highly irreverently. 
To Lala the border is a place where sensations - colours, smells, and sounds, notably 
language - signify the change of cultures, but as the crossing is an annual ritual, its 
frequency diminishes the role of the border as a divider, let alone an 'open wound', a 
'scar', 'sore', or 'garbage dump', as it has been called by various writers.U It serves 
to introduce us the issue of greatest importance in this novel, and that is family rela-
tions, or the lack thereof. 
Cisneros' themes, reflected by what Lala notices and deems important, are inter-
generational family dynamics as well as those between women and men, and entwined 
issues of race, language and class. While the family Angel of Migrant Souls is divided 
on the issue of religion, a common motif in Chicano literature, the Reyes are perfectly 
unburdened by it, Catholicism and folk superstition alike: "In our house votive candles 
never flicker from bedroom bureaus night and day. No chubby statue of the baby Jesus 
dressed as the Santa Nino de Atocha ... no dusty rosary swags across the wall above our 
beds ... Nobody murmurs a novena, and no dinner demands we say grace. We don't have 
'the fear' swept from us with the broom. Nobody cures us of the evil eye with an egg."12 
Th~ only- religious icon in their house-was installed by Lala' s father Inocencio at the 
demand of grandmother Soledad despite protests from Lala's mother Zoila. "Father is a 
true devotee of mothers, both mortal and divine," Lala says, "though it could be argued 
that Mother is a mother too, but no one but Mother would argue her seniority over the 
other two."13 Inocencio's worship of Soledad, often at the expense of his own wife, is 
only one of the conflicts sparking up in this family so full of competing authorities that 
they hardly need religious ones. 
Caramelo exposes conflicts both between and within generations with particular 
care towards the role of women, a Cisneros forte. Whereas in Chicano classics religious 
attitudes influence the characters' behaviour,14 men and women of the Reyes family 
act according to values set not by that particular monolithic institution but by tensions 
between the traditional institution of the Mexican family and the changing cultures that 
surround it. This is also where the dichotomies of truth vs lies, story vs history, talk vs 
silence as investigated by Cisneros show their darker side. The stories that Lala narrates 
are of no less than five generations, incorporating six marriages, two of which forced 
by circumstances (pregnancy), two failed engagements, one of which secret, one secret 
common marriage, countless infidelities. Interestingly enough, most of the racial issues 
responsible for the failure or secrecy of unresolved relationships underline the oft-ignored 
prejudices against the Indios by Mexicans of real or fictional Spanish heritage, less so 
between Mexican Americans and Anglos, although they are barely present to analyse; 
10 Arturo Islas, Migrant Souls, Avon Book, (1991): 164-65. 
11 Candida Hepworth, in Beginning Ethnic American Literatures, Manchester UP (2001): 20-211. 
12 Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo, Knopf (2002): 47. 
13 Cisneros, 44. 
14 Alberto Lopez Pulido, "Chicano religions through Chicano literature: Reinscribing Chicano religions 
as a hermeneutics of movement", Religion and Literature, 35.2-3:67-81. 
112 
the names of non-Chicano additions to the Reyes family betray ethnic origin- Slavic 
and Far Eastern, respectively. The issue of language is likewise impossible to divorce 
from the question of class and personal dignity, equality of which makes or breaks 
Caramelo relationships. With stock motifs such as oppression by the Catholic Church 
r North American xenophobia omitted, also since the characters are not driven across 
the border for economic reasons and there are only minor instances of culture shock on 
Lala's part as she grows up and learns of the world outside her extended family, inter-
and intra-generational dynamics of the family, la familia, are stripped to their basic 
units - parents and children - and entwined with those of gender. 
Speaking of gender, men of Caramelo do not strike one as particularly strong, let 
alone threatening characters, as Cisneros makes painstaking note of obligatory chivalrous 
upringing that forms them "feo, fuerte y formal", but the women are no apparent pillars 
of feminist empowerment either. The idea of family seems to have two rules - 'respect 
your elders' and 'do the right thing' -and everything else has to bend to accomodate 
them, causing repeated suffering, mostly on the part of women as they are through the 
biological fact of childbearing forced to stay inside families regardless of their quality, 
while the pressure on men seems to be mostly sociological: "No somas perros", "we 
are not dogs" is repeated to every generation of Reyes men as they prepare to abandon 
girls they got into trouble. The girls, now wives and mothers, are in turn bitter, especially 
as their husbands continue to pursu6-exotic women,-all resulting in ''stories that are not 
told".15 Silence is the dangerous lie which Lala exorcises despite promises to stay silent, 
not ask questions (but to write is to ask questions, Cisneros notes), or tell stories the way 
their protagonists wish to be told, most notably grandmother Soledad. 
The story of Soledad is the most prominent one in the book, overshadowing even 
that of Lala, and her life story is the story of her love for Narciso, the "first man who 
pays her a compliment" but who marries her out of obligation while his true passion 
lies in a wild independent woman unimpressed by his background. This Soledad knows 
but in the turn-of-the-century Mexico City she has noone else to turn to or bind with 
until her first son- Lala's father- is born and whom she becomes obsessively protec-
tive about. Her relationship with Narciso is based on silence, the dangerous lie, which 
Lala refuses to give in to as she narrates Narciso's persistent immaturity. The story of 
Soledad and Narciso mirrors in this loaded silence those of their parents, down to the 
need to remind one that men are not dogs. Soledad is damaged and goes on to perpetu-
ate or foster damage in her children's nuptial lives, going as far as to ignore the fateful 
line when it comes to lnocencio's adolescent mistake and advising him to keep contact 
with his illegitimate family long after he has established a lawful and numerous one. 
Her pain caused by tolerance for erring men finds an outlet in torturing other women 
of her family- making Inocencio's wife Zoila suffer the way she did by telling her of 
his other family (noted by Zoila as "she didn't make it up this time!"),16 or telling her 
own daughter that she hates her because she, unlike Soledad, "always did what she 
wanted with her life"P This exchange is later mirrored between Zoila and her daughter, 
Lala, but there a fundamental change between the ways in which Soledad and Zoila 
15 Cisneros, 17. 
16 Cisneros, 159. 
17 Cisneros, 377. 
113 
deal with their unfaithful husbands: Zoila - who I would believe was not insensitive 
to achievements of the Movimiento- confronts Inocencio in public (with success: "It 
was you I chose, over my own mother!" he says, "No Mexican man would choose 
his wife over his own mother!"),l8 and tells the story openly to Lala, while Inocencio 
pretends it never happened and even dares threaten Lala with the same old line about 
dogs when she merely suggests living outside a traditionally structured family of her 
own. Zoila also gets something of a revenge to Soledad but they manage to reconcile 
in their own way before the grandmother passes away; but this is not where Soledad's 
story resolves. 
Caramelo 's final chapters are devoted to Lala as her own person, not just Inocen-
cio's daughter or Soledad and Narciso's granddaughter. Lala is not what one would 
traditionally expect of a girl: tall, tomboyish, and an absolute disaster in the kitchen, 
she, like Esperanza of the House on Mango Street discovers her sense of self in story-
telling.19 She is also a modern adolescent full of ideas and impressions gathered from 
friends, no longer influenced by or confined to family alone, as Soledad and to a great 
degree Zoila had been, and has outgrown Esperanza's desire for a house; Lala needs 
more: "Already the house feels too small", she says, "like Alice after she ate the 'Eat 
Me' cookie".20 That she is no longer drawing references from Mexican and Mexican-
American culture alone is telling, as the observation is followed by a fight with her 
fath~r who insists she follow- the same route women before her had done; marriage or 
nothing; with the family or against it. "How will you live without your father and broth-
ers to protect you?" he asks,21 comparing her stubbornness to that of her mother's, but 
Inocencio's sister is also implied. 
But Lala is wise, and she can learn from all, past and present. Her failed escape 
with the first boy who came along but whose Catholic upbringing gave him cold feet and 
ultimately drove him into yet another marriage by circumstance makes her believe that 
her father may have a point, but after hearing of his own cowardice, and later yet after a 
spiritual, possibly imaginary but certainly essential confrontation with her grandmother, 
Lala is transformed. She strikes a deal with her grandmother's spirit who promises to 
expel the rigid, possessive mindset from the family if her story is told, and Lala does so 
uncompromisingly. In doing so she becomes the heir and owner of her ancestors' slowly 
acquired experience and weaves it, like the novel's titular shawl, into a single story with 
all its ups and downs, truths and lies; and like the shawl's many uses, she can choose 
what knowledge to employ or what identity to assume, because, as her best friend Viva 
succintly puts it, "You're the author of the telenovela of your life."22 
As for the family - which is everything, as Lala is often told - it only works if it is 
open. Caramelo is optimistic; not only do the Reyes grow into a multiethnic family, but 
Inocencio also learns how to accept: "Then his old friend does the funky raza handshake 
with Father, like Chicano power, and ... the same Father who calls Chicanos exagerados, 
18 Cisneros, 312. 
19 Sally M. Giles, "Sandra Cisneros as Chicana Storyteller: Fictional Family (hi)stories in Caramelo", 
Master's thesis, Brigham Young University, August 2005, 45-48 
20 Cisneros, 390. 
21 Cisneros, 324. 
22 Cisneros, 331. 
114 
vulgarones, zoot-suiting ... forgot-they-were-Mexican Mexicans, surprises us all. Father 
shakes the funky handshake back."23 
University of Rijeka, Croatia 
23 Cisneros, 412. 
115