75 pages • 2 hours read
Sandra CisnerosCaramelo
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Fotonovelas and Telenovelas
Cisneros repeatedly illustrates the ways in which family drama often mimics the performative dramas of fotonovelas and telenovelas (and vice versa). Candelaria shows Lala how she is practicing the art of crying in front of a camera—hoping to become a telenovela actress—only to later end up on TV crying “telenovela tears” onscreen because she is lost (69). In Part 2, Lala reveals that her grandmother and grandfather are both members of the same Reyes family, though neither of them know this, “just like a good fotonovela or telenovela” (105). In Chapter 83 of Part 3, Lala confronts her father in his hospital bed in a chapter aptly titled, “A Scene in a Hospital That Resembles a Telenovela When in Actuality It’s the Telenovelas That Resemble This Scene.” Lala’s name itself is approved by her grandmother (and thereby, her father) only because she deems it “pretty enough for a telenovela” (232).
As Viva explains to Lala, the characters of Caramelo are “author[s] of the telenovela[s] of [their] li[ves]” (345). Their lives so often replicate the absurdity of telenovelas because desires, dreams, and emotions are inherently absurd (and are frequently passed down from one generation to the next).
The Caramelo Rebozo
The titular caramelo rebozo of Cisneros’s novel is a complex and fluid symbol, gesturing at turns to Mexican identity, multigenerational legacy, feminine communication, and the complex sensation of familial inheritance.
Coming from a family of rebozo makers, Soledad deeply appreciates the many ways this shawl is used in Mexico (and the ways its many uses connect her to her national heritage). As Lala explains in Part 2, the rebozo defined the culture of Mexico in Soledad’s generation. It weaved itself into the fabric of everyday life, regardless of class or age.
Soledad’s story also introduces the many ways the rebozo is used as a form of communication unique to females and feminine experience. Chapter 23 explains
how to speak with [a] rebozo […] How, for example, if a woman dips the fringe of her rebozo at the fountain when fetching water, this means—I am thinking of you. Or, how if she gathers her rebozo like a basket, and walks in front of the one she loves and accidentally lets the contents fall, if an orange and a piece of sugarcane tumble out, that means, —Yes, I accept you as my novio (105).
In other words, the rebozo is a receptacle of women’s thoughts, dreams, and desires, and a tool for making those thoughts, dreams, and desires known to others.
Thus, the beautiful caramelo rebozo—left behind unfinished by Soledad’s mother—becomes a receptacle not only of her own desires, but those of her absent mother. It also becomes a vehicle for communing with future generations of women, such as Lala. When Lala puts on the caramelo rebozo for her parent’s 30th reunion celebration, she symbolically signals that she is now a woman, and she is carrying on the story of her grandmother.
Chuchulucos and Sweetness
Throughout Caramelo, chuchulucos (or candies) are used as symbolic stand-ins for the elusive sweetness of human connection, and the strange pain of trying to recapture human connection. In addition to referencing literal candies and sweets, Caramelo’s complex, ever-changing sweetness is embodied by Narciso’s candy-striped suit, Soledad’s candy-striped caramelo rebozo, sweet nothings (and incantations) spoken by lovers, and the color of Candelaria’s skin.
When Lala first meets Candelaria—the girl who is later revealed to be her sister—she repeatedly remarks on the sweetness of her caramelo-colored skin. Lala is confused when this very skin color is used as a racially prejudiced justification for separating them, wondering how anyone can be unkind toward someone with skin “so sweet, it hurts even to look at her” (37).
Similarly, Narciso experiences sweetness and pain in conjunction as he attempts to recapture the sensation of being with the woman he loves, Exaltacion. Specifically, he tries to conjure his memory of a day when he bought copious amounts of chuchulucos at the circus for the sweet-loving Exaltacion by wandering through the streets of Mexico City buying candies, which he then eats, miserably, with a dog on the street. As he consumes these sweets: “Sadness [gathers] where it always gathered, first in the top of the nose, and then in the eyes and throat, and in the twilight sky running like a ruined cloth, not all the sugared sweets in the world could stop it. He chew[s] softly the last bits of caramelo, carefully, the molars grinding, the jaw working, great gobs of saliva washing down his throat. […] Exaltacion Henestrosa […] A deep root of pain. The little wall he had built against her memory crumbling like sugar” (204).
The caramelo rebozo is perhaps the most loaded symbol of sweetness in Caramelo. When Lala puts the fringe of the rebozo in her mouth after Ernesto leaves her—echoing the earlier moment where Soledad chews on the rebozo’s fringe when meeting Narciso—she notes that it is comfortingly sweet. This sweetness seems to bring Lala back to her own body and to her sensation of family (la familia), even within the sadness of this transitional moment. The complicated—even painful—comfort of this sweetness is beautifully summarized when Soledad packs her Mexican belongings while considering the photo of Narciso (in his candy-striped suit) alongside the caramelo rebozo. In this moment, Soledad reflects that the past, “swir[ls] together like the stripes of a chuchuluco” (254), suggesting that memories—and experiences—cannot be separated from one another.
Home
In keeping with Caramelo’s multi-layered, multi-generational, and bilingual narrative atmosphere, the concept of home is fluid and complex. As a child, Lala feels divided between her two homes: her nuclear family’s home in Chicago (on the US side of the border), and her grandmother’s home in Mexico City (on the Mexico side of the border). The notion of home becomes even more complicated when Lala’s grandmother moves out of her Mexico City home, and the family then moves to San Antonio.
Much of the novel’s activity—especially Zoila’s—revolves around the process of claiming spaces as homes by renovating them and filling them with personal belongings (often hunted down and purchased at the Maxwell Street Flea Market). In exacting detail, Lala documents the exteriors and interiors of her own various abodes and the different homes of her family members. In San Antonio especially, the family goes through a long, grueling process of cleaning, refurbishing, and refurnishing (which never fully lives up to their original lofty expectations). It is also significant that for much of the novel, Lala’s family rents (and is therefore excited and overeager to own the house in San Antonio). By the end of the novel, however, Lala’s family not only owns their own home, but rents out to other tenants (other temporary residents moving between different liminal spaces, just as the Reyes family moved between Chicago and Mexico).
Throughout Caramelo, however, the resounding theme is that home is not a physical place so much as a state of mind one feels with family. As Lala’s father says, “Home. I want to go home already […] All I want is my kids […] That’s the only country I need” (380).
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By Sandra Cisneros
