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Caramelo is a long-anticipated novel that is an all-embracing epic of family history, Mexican history, the Mexican-American immigrant experience, and a young Mexican-American woman's road to adulthood. This vibrant boisterous novel is telling the story of a big modern Mexican family travelling each summer to Mexico City, uncovering the stories and memories of their family's past during the tumultuous years of Mexican revolution and nation building. The true nourishment from this book comes with the final caramelo. Although basically nonlinear in construction, Caramelo is a story of growth. Tumbling through adolescence in a boisterous, imperfect Mexican American family, the narrator, Lala, tells her story with all the exaggeration and drama of a good tele novela.
Only at the end does she realize the deep significance underlying the hyperbole and chaos. Born the seventh child and only daughter to Zoila and Inocencio Reyes, Celaya Reyes (nicknamed Lala) spent her childhood traveling back and forth between her family's home in Chicago to her father's birth home in Mexico City, Mexico. Lala's intimidating paternal grandmother, adored and revered by her father, dominates these visits, and Celaya dubs her the Awful Grandmother. Celaya's story begins one summer in Mexico when she was just a little girl, but soon her girlhood experiences segue back in time before Celaya was born her grandparents' history.
In Mexico City they come under the roof of the kindly, self-effacing Little Grandfather and the much more formidable Awful Grandmother. The latter is one of the great creations of the book. A domineering harridan, she dotes on her eldest son and is fond of announcing how "wives come and go, but mothers, you have only one. " Such sentiments only aggravate her conflict with Zoila, who's already smoldering over the cards she's been dealt. Lala traces the Awful Grandmother's lonely and unhappy childhood in a Mexico ravaged by the Mexican revolution of 1911, her meeting and ultimate union with Celaya's grandfather, Narciso Reyes (the Little Grandfather), and the birth of their first and favorite son, Celaya's father, Inocencio. Awful Grandmother thinks her grandchildren are barbarians, picking up terrible habits in the United States. She looks down her nose at her social inferiors (at the bus station: "Get me out of this inferno of Indians, it smells worse than a pigsty...
I said let's get out of here before we catch fleas!" ). Those inferiors include her dark-skinned servant-girl Candelaria, who disappears relatively early in the novel but will end up figuring meaningfully. After the Little Grandfather's death, the family moves the Awful Grandmother up to the United States with them, first to Chicago, then to San Antonio. Soon afterward, the Awful Grandmother dies, leaving her teenage granddaughter to struggle with her unresolved relationship with her late grandmother. Through her grandmother's history, Lala discovers her own Mexican-American heritage, enabling her ultimately to carve out an identity of her own in the two countries she inhabits and that inhabit her Mexico and America. As the family's self-appointed historian, or storyteller, Lala's tale weaves Mexican social, political, and military history around intimate family secrets and the stormy and often mysterious relationships among multiple generations of family members.
The marvelous, often riotous cast of characters that march through time and across the North American continent ranges from close family members to Mexican-American icons of popular culture that have random encounters with the Reyes family. The spirited, likeable characters, while at times mythological in their characteristics, are always intensely human in their flaws and emotions. While each character can claim equal footing in the Reyes web of family and history, each holds a role of differing significance in Celaya's personal odyssey of connecting to her roots and carving her future. The middle third of the novel is taken up first with the courtship, marriage and early life of Narciso and Soledad, then with the story of the next generation, Inocencio and Zoila, Lala's parents, and how they met and married in the United States. Inocencio Reyes moves to the United States as a young man, and soon meets Zoila, a Mexican-American woman, with her own colorful mixed-Mexican parentage. Lala develops the portrait of her parents' love-based, but volatile, marriage and the growth of their own Mexican-American family.
Among the themes Cisneros weaves into this narrative are the betrayals that bind and separate married partners, emigration, conflicts of class and culture. And all these things really influence Lala, developing of her own ideas, and her awareness of the family's social and economic status. The latter part of the novel has Lala grappling with the usual problems of adolescence, including sex. She runs off with a boy to Mexico City, but by chance more than smarts her ill-advised fling doesn't morph into the kind of life-altering experience it might have been for Mexican girls of an earlier generation. Here and throughout the book Lala is engaging in her vulnerability and feistiness. The final pages are a sort of paean to the daughter-father bond, as Lala comes to admit that her attachment to Inocencio is every bit as fierce as that of the now departed Awful Grandmother.
Not to give anything away, but Inocencio proves no innocent, as Lala learns to her confusion. Nevertheless, the affectionate portrait Cisneros draws is of a large-hearted man who has worked hard and relished the roller coaster ride of his life. This story depicts Lala's growth and how she gets more mature and becomes a teenager. Lala endures the usual miserable adolescence, and Cisneros captures her petulant voice right down to the apostrophes: "The two guys in suits think we " ve stolen something. I mean, how do you like that? 'Cause we " re teenagers, 'cause we " re brown, 'cause we " re not rich enough, right?" It is vivid that family fills Lala's life, leaving no room for anyone else. Family comes first, but some members have priority over others.
Awful Grandmother lets three tenants go so she can house her sons, and then drives most of them away so she can be alone with her favorite, the whitest. As Lala matures, she learns that family living and loving involve accepting the contradictions and vagaries of fathers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles and self. This realization brings closure to her tumultuous adolescence. When Lala gets to know about her past and what country she really belongs to, she is not ashamed of it. Celaya says, "I'm not ashamed of my past. It's the story of my life I'm sorry about. " (p. 410).
Celaya says, "Life was cruel. And hilarious all at once" (p. 27). And when things seem to have reached a low point in her life, she proclaims, "Celaya. I'm still myself. Still Celaya. Still alive.
Sentenced to my life for however long God feels like laughing" (p. 365). Lala has a song character and strong believes in her own life and she is keeping going no matter what her past is. Bibliography 1. web
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Research essay sample on Mexican Revolution Mexican American
