SANDRA CISNEROS: TITLE COMMENTARY

The House on Mango Street

ELLEN MCCRACKEN (ESSAY DATE 1989)

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FROM THE AUTHOR

CISNEROS ON THE EPISODIC, SHORT-STORY FORM OF THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET

I didn't know what I was writing when I wrote House on Mango Street, but I knew what I wanted. I didn't know what to call it, but I knew what I was after. It wasn't a naive thing, it wasn't an accident. I wanted to write a series of stories that you could open up at any point. You didn't have to know anything before or after and you would understand each story like a little pearl, or you could look at the whole thing like a necklace.

Cisneros, Sandra. Excerpt from Writing Women's Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Narratives by Twentieth-Century American Women Writers. New York: Harper Perennial, (1994): 467.

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Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories

SUSAN E. GRIFFIN (ESSAY DATE 1997)

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Caramelo

CAROL A. CUJEC (REVIEW DATE MARCH 2003)

SOURCE: Cujec, Carol A. "Caramel-Coated Truths and Telenovela Lives: Sandra Cisneros Returns with an Ambitious Novel about the Latino Community." World &I 18, no. 3 (March 2003): 228.

In the following review, Cujec compliments Cisneros's storytelling in Caramelo and studies the novel's portrayal of the choices available to Chicana women past and present, illustrating the importance of decision-making on women's self-determination.

In her new novel Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros bathes our senses in Latino culture as we accompany her characters walking the scorched sands of Acapulco, buying shoes at Chicago's Maxwell Street flea market, listening to a grandmother complain about the mangoes, and eventually finding their destinies and their destinations. Caramelo loops and spirals among four generations, traveling from Mexico City to Chicago to Texas and back in eighty-six chapters. Cisneros admits that this is her most ambitious and challenging work, which is why it took her eight years to complete.

Cisneros was the first Chicana writer to emerge on the mainstream literary scene in the 1980s. Her first novel, The House on Mango Street, is now a staple of countless high school and college literature classes. Critical praise as well as several prestigious awards, including the Before Columbus American Book Award and a MacArthur "genius" grant, have established her literary prominence. No wonder she faced so much pressure to complete this long-awaited work. As Cisneros explained in a phone interview, "In the past, when I wrote other books, most of the time people had no idea what I was doing, nor did they care. What I felt this time was the pressure of the public waiting for this book. Even my family, this time they were waiting for this book as well."

Mementos, memories

Caramelo, a fictionalized autobiography, is not heavily plot-driven but more a series of vignettes similar to Cisneros' other works of prose. The novel begins with a memento—a photograph taken in Acapulco during a tumultuous family vacation nearly ending in divorce. The Reyes family stands in the photo: Inocencio, his wife, Zoila, and his six sons, along with Inocencio's mother, called "the Awful Grandmother" by the narrator. The only one missing, curiously, is the narrator herself, Inocencio's youngest child and only daughter Celaya (called Lala), who was five at the time. "They've forgotten about me," complains Lala, adding, "It's as if I'm the photographer walking along the beach with the tripod camera on my shoulder asking,—Un recuerdo? A souvenir? A memory?"

In fact, by writing these memories Lala is the photographer, with her vivid words creating snapshots of everyday life and significant moments that make up a true family portrait. In the end, her words become the most enduring memento: "Remembering is the hand of God. I remember you, therefore I make you immortal." Lala brings her images into sharp focus with sensory details that transform a collection of static photos into fragrant, sweaty, mouthwatering slices of life. She records a trip across the border into Mexico, for example, as an explosion of the senses: "Churches the color of flan,…the smell of diesel exhaust, the smell of somebody roasting coffee, the smell of hot corn tortillas along with the pat-pat of the women's hands making them, the sting of roasting chiles in your throat and in your eyes."

Like the intricate caramel-colored shawl, the caramelo rebozo, given to the Awful Grandmother by her own mother, the story is an intricate and incomplete tapestry. The theme of weaving, with the caramelo rebozo as its symbol, is clearly feminine. The rebozo was used at every significant moment in a woman's life, explains Lala. It could be used as a dowry, a burial shroud, to carry or breast-feed a child, cover one's head in church, even communicate silent vows of love. The caramelo rebozo, coming from the mother, is specifically a maternal symbol; the characters find themselves suckling its fringe or draping it around themselves like arms in moments of despair.

The word caramelo, meaning caramel, also evokes a sweet, thick syrup running down the throat and the warm brown color of skin, Candelaria's skin. Candelaria, whom Lala calls Cande (candy), is the daughter of her grandmother's washerwoman. Immediately, young Lala is entranced by her color: "Smooth as peanut butter, deep as burnt-milk candy … A color so sweet, it hurts to even look at her." Lala sees Candelaria as beautiful, although others look down on her for her indigenous roots and poverty. "How can you let that Indian play with you … she's dirty. She doesn't even wear underwear," complains Aunty Light-Skin. At her young age, Lala isn't aware that dark skin is considered ugly. Through this snapshot and numerous other references to skin color, Cisneros shows the cruel and absurd racial and class discrimination that dark-skinned Latinos face from those with lighter skins. In the end, Lala learns that this girl she met in her youth was actually her half sister.

Soledad

How the Awful Grandmother earned her nickname is no mystery. In the first part of the novel, when the family visits her in Mexico City, she treats everyone like dirt—except for her first son, Inocencio, her only passion. She makes life miserable for Zoila, a Chicana and therefore beneath her son. She considers her grandchildren barbarians who can't even speak proper Spanish. Her most vicious act: revealing Inocencio's illegitimate daughter Candelaria to his wife in an attempt to break up the marriage. "You're better off without her kind," she tells her son. "Wives come and go, but mothers, you have only one!"

Though this portrait is as flat as an old photograph, Cisneros takes us back in time to tell the Awful Grandmother's girlhood story in part 2 of the novel, adding dimension and humanity to this woman. Before becoming powerful, she was powerless. Before becoming intolerable, she was invisible. Before becoming the Awful Grandmother, she was Soledad. Like Cinderella without the fairy godmother, Soledad lost her mother at an early age, and her father remarried a woman who cared little for her. Her only memento of her mother, famous for her intricate weaving of rebozo fringe, was the unfinished caramelo rebozo: "No soft hair across her cheek, only the soft fringe of the unfinished shawl."

Soledad's father sent her away to live with his cousin, who couldn't even keep track of how many children she had, and an uncle who would try to lift Soledad's skirt while she slept. Soledad—her name means loneliness—toiled for several years in this filthy household that smelled of "the scorched-potato-skin scent of starched cloth," "the sour circles of cottage cheese stains on the shoulder from burping babies," "the foggy seaside tang of urine."

FROM THE AUTHOR

CISNEROS ON THE POWER OF LANGUAGE

There are ways to be a revolutionary without guns or violence. You can be a pacifist revolutionary. My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers or bridges.

Cisneros, Sandra. Excerpt from "An Interview with Sandra Cisneros," in Missouri Review 25, no. 1 (2002): 105.

With fairy-tale notions of being saved by love, at one decisive moment she declared that she would marry the next man who walked down the street. This person was Narcisco Reyes. Draped in her caramelo rebozo, Soledad sobbed out her story to him; taking pity, Narcisco asked his parents to hire her as a servant. Narcisco provided her a means of escape and even seemed to be a protective, fatherly figure. Yet naively, Soledad continued to romanticize this meeting as a romance of destiny, envisioning herself as a star-crossed character in a telenovela, a Mexican soap opera.

So starved was Soledad for affection that she welcomed Narcisco's lustful advances, even confusing them with parental love ("She had not felt this well loved except perhaps when she was still inside her mother's belly, or had sat on her father's lap"). In contrast, Narcisco selfishly regarded her compliance as just another household duty: "was it not part of her job to serve the young man of the house?" Even after becoming pregnant and marrying Narcisco, Soledad remained emotionally isolated, especially after his potent affair with the bewitching Exaltacion Henestrosa, from which he would never recover. Soledad suffered from this discovery because she loved fiercely, "the way Mexicans love." "We love like we hate," describes Cisneros. Turning to a wisewoman selling tamales outside the church, Soledad asked for advice to end her pain. The only cure was to fall in love again, which is exactly what happened the day that Inocencio was born. This one satisfying bond of love, a mother's love, filled a great canyon in her heart. For the rest of her life, her love for Inocencio was strong enough to fill the void of lost parental and romantic love.

Destiny and destination

Before Lala becomes the insightful, impassioned narrator of her family story, she is a confused adolescent struggling to create an identity in the face of conflicting cultural and gender expectations. Cisneros herself, who has proudly stated that she is "nobody's wife, nobody's mother," struggled with stepping out of the traditional roles expected of a Latina. "I think that growing up Mexican and feminist is almost a contradiction in terms," she explained. "Your culture tells you that if you step out of line, if you break these norms, you are becoming anglicized, you're becoming the malinche," she told one interviewer. Thus, much of her work deals with straddling two cultures in an attempt to redefine what it means to be Latina. This is Lala's struggle in the final part of the novel.

Lala finds herself depressed, yet unsure of what she wants: "A bathroom where I can soak in the tub and not have to come out when some-body's banging on the door. A lock on my door. A door. A room … Somebody to tell my troubles to … To be in love." She contemplates both a liberated and traditional life for herself. She's not training for the traditional Latina role of housewife. At the same time, she faces cultural restrictions. "If you leave your father's house without a husband you are worse than a dog … If you leave alone you leave … como una prostituta," warns her father. When her brother Toto enlists, her father boasts that it will make a man out of him. "But what's available to make a woman a woman?" wonders Lala.

Sharing the naive, fairy-tale notions held by Soledad, she dreams of being rescued by true love. When she finds her first boyfriend, Ernesto, she pushes him toward marriage, despite the warnings of the Awful Grandmother's spirit. "It's you, Celaya, who's haunting me," the spirit insists. "Why do you insist on repeating my life?… 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." Lala finally realizes that she can take charge of her destiny: "You're the author of the telenovela of your life. Comedy or tragedy? Choose." Playing on the double meaning of destino, Lala declares, "Ernesto. He was my destiny, but not my destination."

The spirit of the Awful Grandmother, trapped in limbo as penance for her unkindness, begs Lala to tell her story so that she may be understood and finally forgiven. Weaving stories and in the process healing old family wounds becomes Lala's new destiny: "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." Cisneros has also declared this her own mission as a writer—to be a voice to the voiceless.

Healthy lies

Cisneros begins Caramelo with this disclaimer: "The truth, these stories are nothing but story.… I have invented what I do not know and exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy lies." Yet this is the most autobiographical work Cisneros has written. She began it when her father was ill, and it is dedicated to him. Caramelo chronicles the history of his family, describes her own struggles within the family, and portrays her father's unending devotion to her with the sentimentality of a daughter looking back fondly rather than a young girl struggling to be free from his overprotectiveness.

Cisneros begins with these kernels of truth, weaving them with fiction to create a work that is as authentic as it is fantastic. In this way, she is examining the very nature of storytelling. What is a storyteller? "Liar/Gossip/Troublemaker, Big-Mouth," she writes in one chapter title. The fictional author Lala freely admits having to make up details to fill in gaps. Cisneros uses an inventive and humorous technique to elucidate the creative process; in part 2, the spirit of the Awful Grandmother repeatedly interrupts the narrator to interject or condemn her for exaggerating, lying, or (more likely) telling too much of the ugly truth. "I have to exaggerate," insists Lala. "I need details. You never tell me anything." At other times, Lala defends the truth of her story, reminding her listeners that life is more outrageous than any telenovela: "I know this sounds as if I am making it up, but the facts are so unbelievable they can only be true." Cisneros even purposely tells different versions of the same stories to show the fluidity of memory and how the truth changes according to the storyteller.

Cisneros compares the art of storytelling to weaving. Like life, the novel is not neat and complete; it is complex and sometimes tangled, with many loose threads. "Because a life contains a multitude of stories and not a single strand explains precisely the who of who one is, we have to examine the complicated loops," explains the narrator. The effect borders on overwhelming at times, as we are introduced to numerous minor characters in footnotes and even footnotes to footnotes. This gives a sense of the vastness of experience connected to one family. We are not told a complete story; rather, we are allowed to examine the various interlocking threads of a small patch: "Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone." Cisneros admits that at first she did not know how all these stories would fit together: "As a reader, you will think that I planned all of the loops and the double backs and the repetition, but I didn't. It was something that just occurred and gave me a confirmation in the idea of divine providence because I really was writing this just by following my heart."

Caramelo contains not only a personal, emotional tale but, as in her other works, a clear political message as well. "I was writing it on behalf of the immigrant community and hoping to get to people like President Bush, policy makers, citizens that might feel frightened of people unlike themselves, communities in Germany, Finland, Japan," says Cisneros. "I really was thinking by the time the book ended that maybe this was something I was writing for the state that the globe is in right now." Her goal: to create empathy for all those considered "other." This goal is best accomplished through her vibrant, authentic characterization.

An element of nonfiction has been added to the novel by incorporating numerous footnotes and a chronology intended to educate readers on Latino history and culture. Cisneros explains that these notes are intended for everyone—even readers within the Latino community: "I feel as if so many children who are of Mexican descent don't know their own history. I'm especially talking about Mexicans on this side of the border. I saw those footnotes being for the sake of everyone." The cultural footnotes are light: descriptions of music, movies, well-known Latino entertainers. The historical footnotes are more overtly political; for example, a biting list of U.S. anti-immigrant policies is contrasted with examples of the honorable role Latinos have played in American wars. Given the complexity of the story, these educational tidbits weigh down the text at times and give the impression that perhaps the author wants to accomplish too much.

All in all, this is a stunning, creative novel that shows sparks of genius in its use of language: poetic, authentic, and deliciously spiced with Spanish. Should you look for Caramelo at a theater near you anytime soon? Realizing its cinematic quality, Cisneros has thought about adapting it for the big screen; however, she worries about what would have to be eliminated from this complex family album by changing the medium. "I realized the book was huge with so many stories, and the idea of what would be left out bothered me," she explained. Her solution—to turn it into a telenovela. "I finally realized that the form that could contain so many stories wouldn't be a two-hour film but something like a telenovela. That's what I think would be perfect for this book."

As for her next project, Cisneros plans on writing vignettes, which she describes as "small and jewel-like and very beautiful." The subject: erotica. The title: Infinito. Let us hope that another eight years do not pass before she once again cloaks us in her colorful tapestry of words.