Recuerdos of the past, present, and future

A whiff of dried saliva around the rim of a bottle of milk, a Menudo tune, grade schoolers counting off by ten with every jump their playmates make “ten, twenty, thirty…”, that threatening look from my mom when I said too much, too loud… things that bring a flood of memories on my childhood. Relieving memories has been a favorite past time of mine. They make an ordinary day seem eventful. I can cry when I feel like it. I can laugh when I like to.

As it always is, there are some experiences we want to forget but nevertheless continue to hunt us. There are also some instances we want to enact in our minds over and over again, that one wonderful moment, that moment of realization that we keep on going back to, to have a good laugh or a good cry. We have memories of our friends, of our family members, of people we encountered at some point in our lives, and if we tie them all up together, we, in a way, make a story of our life based on how we perceived other people, based on what we remember or choose to.

But memories are not just all that we remember from our past. It also constitutes events that happened even before we had memories of them. Memories that were shared to us by our professors, books, media. These are points of intersections. We have our own recollections based on actual happenings.

No experience is not worth talking about. No experience is not worth sharing with. We all have our stories to tell, no matter how mundane and trivial it may seem, or obscure and alien to other people. The basic principle underlying minority literature. Listen. Remember. Share.

My paper aims to draw on the memories relieved by Celaya or Lala and the other characters in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo. The novel shows how different persons can have different memories of each other. Since the story was like a narrative, not linear though, as it is with reality interspersed by recollections, of Lala’s memories of her childhood, of growing up, of the society she grew up in, of the family and people she had been associated with, it was like a novel of remembering. But she wasn’t the only one who was recalling. Even her father, her mother, and most especially her grandmother have memories of their own. Memories within a memory. The approach might appear to be a bit simplistic, but memories are more complex than they may seem. They form a bridge between reality and imagination. The Chicana has a rich heritage, one replete with struggles, myths, displacements, and the formation of new consciousness. It is because of this rich past, one that is characterized by defeats and triumphs, that Chicana, as reflected by their literature, like to dwell in the past, to learn from them and to move forward.

Chicanas are complex. They are made up of a long history of colonization, border crossings, and identity struggles. They constantly go back to images of the eagle and the serpent, the story of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, and La Virgen Guadalupe to make sense of their experiences, constantly going back to their indigenous roots for support or strength.

CHICANA (que?)
Let me first define terms. Chicana is that self-label used by the Mexican-Americans when they resisted the term imposed on them by the dominant culture. Mexican-American. Why should they be called as such when they are Americans albeit also Mexicans, having born in the United States, but are still annexed, hyphenated, alienated, treated as inferiors to Anglos and even “Anti-American”? (Macias 1969). Prior to the late 1960’s, Mexicans preferred to dissociate themselves from their ancestry, calling themselves rather “Greeks, Italians, Spanish, etc…” (Macias 1969) However, beginning 1966, during the Civil Rights Movement which continued through the late 1970’s, the Mexican-Americans, mostly the youths, chose to adopt the term Chicana. Some believe that the term was actually a revival of the label used by the people from Chihuahua, a city and state of northern Mexico during the 1930’s. It is postulated that the Chi was taken from the name of the place and the Cano from Mexicano. (Macias 1969) The term implies one is neither a full Mexican or a full American, but a mixture, a mestizo.

“Salient aspects of Chicano include a self-awareness or self-respect and a personal commitment to Chicano communities.” (Macias 1969)

Sandra Cisneros is a Chicana although sometimes she likes to call herself “Latina, Mexican-American or American-Mexican depending on whether my audience understands the term or not.” (Cisneros 2000) But Cisneros is a true-blooded Chicana. One who recognizes her responsibility to her community and to every cultural minority who longs to be heard. “Women like my mama and Emily Dickinson’s housekeeper who must be recorded so that their stories can finally be heard,” said Cisneros during her lecture on the Second Annual Hispanic Achievement Festival in La Cumbre Santa Barbara Junior High School on October 22, 1986.

Sandra y Celaya
I would like to believe that Cisneros drew a lot from her personal experiences in writing Caramelo. This is because Celaya’s story has a lot of similarities with Cisneros’ own story. The recollections of Celaya were anchored in her lonely childhood, being the youngest and only girl in a family of six sons. All she had on her side was her father who considered her “Mi cielo”. In real life, Cisneros grew up being the only daughter in a family of six sons, although not the youngest but third oldest. She had for parents a Mexican Father and a Mexican-American mother. The same as that of in the story. In fact, even in her other works like the short story Tepeyac which is included in the Women Hollering Creek and other Short Stories, the narrator described her childhood in their house in La Fortuna 12 which is actually the real house address where Cisneros grew up in. Truth is, all of Cisneros’ works including the House on Mango Street, Loose Woman: Poems, and My Wicked Wicked Ways are reflections or narrations of the experiences of Chicanas or Mexican-Americans. Cisneros draws from her personal experiences and from the experiences shared by people around her, feelings of powerlessness, of being treated as inferiors, of the collective and unique experiences of Chicanas. This she was able to do after finding her voice. In an article entitled “Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession” (1995), Cisneros narrated how she found her voice during a seminar on “Memory and Imagination” when they were having a heated discussion on Gustav Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. Prior to this seminar, she was trying to emulate other “big, male writers like James Wright and Richard Hugo” (Cisneros 1995, 48). They were talking about the metaphor of a house. And then it hit her. She cannot write in the same way as that of those big, male authors because she had a different experience of a “house”, of a neighborhood. She always longed to have a peaceful home where she would have a space all to herself and not sleep in lazy boys (the same with Celaya) but this dream was elusive to her. After coming into terms with her mixed identity, she fled home although she never escaped from it. And it was in fact when she left home that she came to understand what home is, it is in her blood and as having come from two different races, she learned to speak in different voices and be in two places at the same time or neither, a result of living in the borderlands, the Mexico City, the U.S. Southwest.

“Memory and Imagination”
As my paper will look into the construction of memory in Caramelo, let me first discuss the article of Robert A. Lee in Memory & Culture Politics entitled “Chicanismo as Memory: The Fictions of Rudolfo Anaya, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, and Ron Arias.”

According to Lee, “chicanismo invites a play of memory coevally personal and collective.” “For it is the memory that serves as solvent for each generation’s telling of la raza (which more aptly means ethnicity rather than race) and nowhere more so than in the ongoing body of fiction of what rightly has become known as chicanismo’s literary renaissance.” (Lee in Singh 1996) He further said that in the works of Anaya, Candelaria, Cisneros, and Arias, there is a constant going back to the past however different their styles are and reinventing this past by looking at it from “now”. He noted that “the Chicano tradition can virtually be said to have thrived on the shaping energies of remembrance, a present told and reinvented in the mirrors of the past.” Chicano writers employ memory construction to make sense of their present situation, to understand their people as having stories distinct from those of the dominant class.

In glorifying the past, we tend to intersperse it with an imagined past or dreams mixed with experience. This is what makes the work provoking, fiction. In Rodolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, he enraveled his Chicano childhood in actual events, but also mixing it with a “drama of fantasy and imagining.” As with Nash Canderia’s trilogy Memories of the Alhambra (1977), Not by The Sword (1985), and Inheritance of Strangers (1985), Lee points out how Candelaria “invoked a distinct phase in the evolution of Chicano history while at the same time building into the larger, more encompassing memory.” Candelaria made a “meditation on history” in narrating the journey of Jose and his family from Albuquerque to California in 1920s and from California to Mexico and then to Spain, the experience during the Mexican-American war in 1846-1848, and the land wars that characterized the colonization of Mexico by the U.S.

In Lee’s discussion of Ron Arias’ The Road to Tamazunchale (1975), he showed another aspect of Chicana fiction which is magic realism. Memories as catalysts of metamorphosis, using wizardy or magic to shape and reshape memories. Chicana has a rich reservoir of mythic stories/ legends which are almost always alluded in remembering the past in the works of its writers.

In Cisneros’ Caramelo, there is also this allusion to the Chicana mythic past or even to magic realism with Cisneros treating her past as ghost that continues to hunt her, the ghost of her grandmother Soledad.

Another important article is Feathering the Serpent: Chicano Mythic “Memory” by Rafael Perez Torres. It begun by first invoking the memory of the Delano strike in 1965 where a group organized by Cesar Chavez gathered to demand “basic, God-given rights as human beings” which were deprived from them like “fair wages, legal protection, and decent working conditions.” This event triggered a series of movements known as el Movimiento, Mexican workers trying to reclaim their land, their heritage, their roots, the Aztlan, the land “that was home prior to invasion.” And “like a persistent dream that return vaguely during daytime, the notion of an ancestral memory has haunted contemporary Chicano cultural production.” Torres further says that the “connection to a Mexican political past resonates with a spirituality invoked by the beneficent presence of the Virgin. The Virgin of Guadalupe also evokes a more distant spirituality, since the image of the Virgin represents a postconquest confluence of pre-Cortesian and European religious imagery. Ancestral memory thus merges with mythic memory, and a central trope in the articulation of Chicana culture emerges.”

In Caramelo, you would find the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the bedroom of the Grandmother and in the house of Lala even when they moved out and transferred to Texas. A family not religious at the very least, showing no statue of Sto. Nino, a family who do not hear mass on Sundays, or cross themselves “twice and kiss” their thumbs when passing a Church, a family where the Children go to a Catholic school to get good education and not turn religious, but still has a frame of the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the master’s bedroom, at the head of the bed where the Father and the Mother sleep. The picture courtesy of the Awful Grandmother who insisted on having it hand delivered to them in memory of her. The Virgin of Guadalupe as a symbol of the Mother’s undying love for her son.

Another mythic story that was mentioned in the novel was the legend of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, the twin volcanoes of Mexico where the lovers were engaged in a secret love affair because their families were enemies. Just like Romeo and Juliet. However unlike Shakespeare’s story where Romeo and Juliet killed themselves, Popo killed Izta for some reason but upon seeing his beautiful partner die, he knelt down and cried his heart out, overcome by love and beauty. Both turned into volcanoes. “But if he loved her so much, why did he kill her?” asked Lala to her Grandfather who was narrating the story during Inocencio’s birthday celebration. “I don’t know… Suppose that’s how Mexicans love, I suppose,” answered the Grandfather. Sometimes we couldn’t help but kill the ones we love, either by loving them too much or too little, I suppose.

This story of Izta and Popo is very symbolic in the story of Cisneros who talked about different kinds of love, the love of a mother for her son, the love for one’s roots, the love for self-identity, the love for a father and a mother, familial love and romantic love. Each one varying in degrees.

“Memory in other words, in all its overlapping and coalescing kinds, also yields mixed emotional fare for the narrator-memoirist, pain and warmth, breakage as well as love.” (Lee in Singh 1996)

Recuerdos in Sweet Caramelo

“We’re all little in the photograph above Father’s bed. We were little in Acapulco. We will always be little. For him we are just as we were then.” This is the opening statement of the novel, an image, a recuerdo.

A photograph which served as a recuerdo on that day where they all went to the ocean to get out from the house, all of them including the Grandmother and Candelaria, the daughter of the housemaid. A still picture which seemed to say stop, let’s stop moving and getting nowhere. The need to put a still in the movements, so many, which characterized the novel from the very start. That trip to Mexico to the house of the Awful Grandmother at the Destiny Steet, number 12 (the address of Cisneros’ grandmother is actually La Fortuna, numero 12), the trip to a new house in Texas and back to Chicago, the constant displacements and anxieties over getting acquainted to new people and place. But more than this, the statement showed the connection of Lala and the father and the impression of the father for his sons and daughter.

Here, let me point out how Sandra said in the article “Only Daughter” published in the book Women’s Voices from the Borderlands showed her affection for her daughter and how she was constantly trying to get his attention and approval. She admitted that “in a sense, everything I have written has been for him, to win his approval” even when she knows her Father can’t read English words. She even shared her experience when at one time, one of her stories were translated in Spanish and her Father for some reason took notice of her and read the story she was offering him and commented “where can we get more copies of this for our relatives”, and her inexplicable joy upon hearing those words. Finally, her Father realized what she can do, what she is worth.

On that same day, the day that still photograph was taken, was a day of revelation. Zoila, Lala’s mother, found out from her mother-in-law, no less than the Awful Grandmother, the truth behind Candelaria’s roots. On that same day, without having been told, Lala also knew. She knew that Cande is her half-sister. But this truth was never confirmed by the Father. Not even in the end, when he already seemed repentant, almost invalid after suffering from a stroke, during the celebration of their almost, but not quite thirtieth anniversary. Lala was waiting expectantly for him to ask for forgiveness, to admit the truth, but he never did. Instead, he just told her the story of her grandmother, how her grandfather almost did not take responsibility for Inocencio whom she was carrying at that time until the great-grandfather Eleuterio Reyes said to him that “we are not dogs!” Eleuterio Reyes who could barely speak at that time and yet managed to utter those words. And that’s what Inocencio told Lala, not to bring shame to the family. But Lala longed to ask but “Why weren’t you a gentleman? I thought we weren’t dogs. I thought we were kings and meant to act like kings, Father. And why didn’t the Little Grandfather remind you of your responsibility if he was feo, fuerte, y formal?” “All my life, you’ve said I was ‘the only girl’ Father.. Why would you tell a lie?” And then Lala tries to understand her Father, his silence to the truth. “ Maybe Father has his own questions. Maybe he wants to hear, or doesn’t want to hear about me and Ernesto (the boyfriend Lala ran away with but things didn’t work out), but he doesn’t ask. We’re so Mexican. So much left unsaid.”

In real life, Sandra Cisneros had a sister, but she died when they were so young and she hardly remembers her. Candelaria may be the personification of that lost sister, that friend she was supposed to have had if she had not passed away. They may have been able to share experiences, secrets, Cisneros’s childhood may not have been as lonely as it had been. But Sandra also said that had it not been for that loneliness, she may have not turned to books as her consolation. In a way, she may not be as good a writer as she is now. That’s how she makes sense of her lonely childhood. In the same manner, Lala made sense of the reason why her Father deprived her of a sister.

“We were all little in that photograph… We will always be little for him. We are just as we were before.”

El Rebozo is a symbol of the Chicana culture’s “protection” of women. (Anzaldua 1999). The Awful Grandmother or Soledad’s parents were reboceros. They manufacture the best silk shawls. They were the famed reboceros from Santa Maria del Rio. Wrapped in the finest rebozo, Soledad was born. She was wrapped in this delicate weaving until her mother Guillermina died so soon, long before Soledad was able to marvel in her mother’s care. She left the Caramelo rebozo, the one she had been working on before she died, unfinished. And that became Soledad’s sole possession from then on, after her father remarried and she was sent to a cousin in Mexico City. She, who used to be her Father’s chuchuluco suddenly became unwanted enough to be discarded.

At one point in the novel, Lala’s Father Inocencio offered to buy her a rebozo which the Awful Grandmother contested saying that she is the one deserving of something as expensive as such. In the end, the gift did not materialize, Lala had to steal away that Caramelo rebozo from the walnut-armoire of her grandmother after she passed away. And on that day of the celebration of her parents nearly thirtieth anniversary, she chew on that rebozo which she has around herself as she ponders over the silence of her Father.

“The rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere.” (Caramelo) Rebozo is a symbol of the culture’s protection of women (Anzaldua 1999), of Lala’s Father protecting her from the truth not knowing she knows the truth, that she can protect herself. He doesn’t have to do it for her. That Caramelo rebozo not being a gift to her, but a stolen prize, that same Caramelo rebozo not being a gift of anybody to Soledad, but a stolen prize. They both stole it from the dead, the past which should have been left there but was instead nurtured, to protect them from the future. The ghost of Soledad chose to materialize to Lala because in a way they have similarities. A lonely childhood, not having a mother to provide comfort, Lala’s mother being alive yet so distant, both clinging to Inocencio, as a son and as a father, but are in a way letting go of that desperate hold. Soledad finally letting go of his one son whom she felt pure love and adoration. Lala standing on her own, attempting to break away, but going back to their home not because he dictated it, but because she misses them.

But Lala understands why her Father wants to protect her from the harsh realities. She understands because she knows he has also felt alienation. She has after all the same face as his, that face that lived in the borderlands.

The ending of the novel signifies Lala’s or Celaya’s arrival at understanding, at the reason for his Father’s silence, at the reason for the silence of most Mexicans, she finally understands that she is not alone, the she is not just the odd one out, she has arrived into a certain degree of consciousness where she has to make a sound and break away from the hands that gag her mouth, the mestiza consciousness.

One cannot achieve this mestiza consciousness without going back to the roots, without historicizing, and that’s what Sandra Cisneros’ did. She told the story of her roots, her story which may find some points of intersection with the stories of other Chicanas. She did this by weaving facts with fiction, with events and dreams, before she arrived in a level of consciousness and found herself.

The novel spanned four generations. A glimpse on the story of Soledad’s parents Guillermina and Ambrocio Reyes, an anecdote on the story of Narcisso’s (the Little Grandfather) parents Regina and Euleterio, and the whole second part of the novel entitled “When I was Dirt” narrating the story of Soledad and Narcisso and the coming of Inocencio and his finding Zoila in the dancefloor. And then Celaya’s story, the story of the six sons and one daughter.

As the love stories of Soledad and Narcisso and Zoila and Incocencio unfolded, so did the Mexican-American history. Both were characterized by battles to be won and defeats to be faced. During the Mexican – American war in 1916, Narcisso found himself booted out from the safe confines of his home and dumped right in the middle of the crossfire. The same happened to Toto or Alberto, fifty years or so later. He was drafted during the Vietnam War in 1969. His birthdate was among the top 200 picked up during the draft lottery which determined the civilians who will be sent to war with the Vietnams. The revolution against the American invaders began in 1911, and has continued from then on. “Then as now, people voted for peace, and then as now, nobody believed their votes made a bit of difference.”

The novel is not blind to the injuries done by Chicanas or Mexicans to each other. Inocencio when asked to narrate the monstrosities of war he witnessed during the U.S. war against the Japanese, the only action he was able to share was between two Mexicans who killed each other in a knife fight in a bar in Tokyo. Inoncencio had his share of Mexicans turning their backs from fellow Mexicans when his friend Marcelino Ordonez appears to have sold out their friendship and turned him over to the INS officer as an alien suspect. Good thing Inocencio had papers to show. But that incident brought his once steadfast friendship with Mars to an end.

Even in the Mexican Society, especially with its patriarchal order, women do not feel safe to roam around by herself. Once, when Celaya attempted to go to the town to buy herself a balloon, she felt scared, she felt the prying eyes of the man around her. A child like her was not even safe in her supposed hometown. Sandra Cisneros shared her personal experience in Barcelona, Spain where she went to a restaurant to eat all by herself and she was refused food. During her short stay in the country, she never again attempted to eat by herself in a restaurant, especially if the night is closing in. (Cisneros 2000)

Celaya couldn’t escape home, just like Incocencio, and all the others. Because home is in the way they talk. It is in their skin. It is in the food they eat. It is their destiny. Cisneros’ is a feminist, she admits this herself, but she does not believe in revenge or bequeathing power or supremacy over males. Her novel demonstrates a different level of consciousness, a responsibility to one’s la raza.

“At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes.” (Anzaldua 1999). The eagle and the serpent in the Mexican flag which Celaya thought to be Mexica and America fighting, and on other times, her mother and father. “The eagle symbolizes the spirit (as the sun, the father); the serpent symbolizes the soul (as the earth, the mother.) Together, they symbolize the struggle between the spiritual/celestial/male and the underworld/earth/feminine.”

But to see through the serpent and eagle eyes, to see through the eyes of the Anglos and the Mexicans, through the eyes of men and women is not the only way to consciousness. We have the freedom to choose whatever path we wish to take. The point is, as Anzaldua said, is to act, not just react.

“We are not dried leaves that go with the ebb of the river, blindly accepting wherever destiny takes us. We can shape and reshape our lives just as soon as we open our minds and recognize the past. There is no one Chicana experience as there is no one Chicana destiny. But telling our stories unique from each other or similar can influence how we face the present and the future, and treat our fellow Chicanas, those of whom we inadvertently silence or gag because even if we belong to the same race, we are women nonetheless.”

The memories of Celaya of her past, her present, and the future that awaits her on that day of realization are all part of the bigger picture, the historias of their ethnicity which she carries with her like a mountain and ammunition. I like the way Anzaldua said in Borderlands: La Frontera how she is like a turtle, she carries home wherever she goes. And that’s how it is with Celaya and Cisneros and in fact anybody who has a past. Today will be a memory tomorrow. What is important is that we don’t forget but we also dream.

References:

Books

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt
Lute, 1987, 1999.

Castillo-Speed, Lillian, ed. Women’s Voices from the Borderlands. Simon and Schuster,
1995.

Cortina, Rodolfo. Hispanic American Literature: An Anthology. U of Houston: NTC
Publishing Group, 1998.

De Jesus Hernandez- Gutierrez, Manuel and David William Foster, ed. Literatura
Chicana: An Anthology in Spanish, English and Calo. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997.

Kanellos, Nicolas. Hispanic American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology.
Longman: U of California Berkeley, 1995.

Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldua, ed. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color. New York: Women of Color P, 1981, 1983.

Singh, Amritjit, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogam, ed. Memory and Cultural
Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Boston: Northeastern U P, 1996.

Web

Dasenbrock, Reed. “Interview with Sandra Cisneros”. Interviews with Writers of the
Post-Colonial World. Jackson: U of Mississippi Press. 18 July 2003. <http://acunix-wheatonma.edu/vpearce/multiC_Web/Authors/Sandra%20Cisneros/body_sandra_cisneros.html>.


Oliver, Rotger, Maria-Antonia. “An Interview with Sandra Cisneros” Voice from the
Gaps. U of Minnesota. 18 July 2003. <http://voices.cla.umu.edu/SOUNDINGS/%20ROTGERSoundings.html>.


Sandra Cisneros: Coveying the Riches of the Latin America Culture is the Author’s
Literary Goal. 18 July 2003 <http://www.lasmujeres.com/sandra%20cisneros/cisnerosgoal.shtml>.