![]() ![]() Lala’s father works himself to the bone for his family. After six days, he comes home and can't untie his own shoes” (358). His hands calloused from tugging the twine hard and taut. Cisneros writes “Father’s hands are numb from working on a set of lounge chairs for the Saint Anthony Hotel. The brothers Reyes––Celaya’s father and uncles––run an upholstery business. Textiles as a symbol of familial interconnectedness is also present in the work life of the family members. Seeing a woman who has an Indigenous heritage in such a position indicates to Lala that she should not be ashamed of any part of who she is, no matter how her family views the Indigenous and her own illegitimate half-sister Candelaria. ![]() ![]() The tilma also provides Lala with insight to her own family’s history, showing her the image of La Virgen––who is both Spanish and Indigenous––as a revered and holy figure. While Lala takes little stock in religion, she sees much in the tilma itself, the woven threads of which provide her epiphany and show her everyone is in need and everyone is connected in the tapestry of humanity. But I didn’t realize about the strength and power of la fe. I mixed up the Pope with all this, this light, this energy, this love. After viewing the tilma of Juan Diego, emblazoned with the image of the Virgen of Guadalupe, she narrates, “I didn’t expect this. The most obvious use of textiles as a symbol for the protagonist’s, Celaya’s, family history occurs in the latter part of the novel, when she goes to the basilica in Mexico City and describes seeing “the wretched of the earth, and among them” before she comments on her experience of la fe. In Caramelo, Cisneros illustrates this process by transcribing her protagonist’s family history onto tangible objects––especially textiles––which serve to suggest the interconnectedness of the family history itself, while also leaving room for incompleteness and alterations. Ĭaramelo is the word for “caramel” in the Spanish language and provides the title to Sandra Cisneros’s 2002 novel about a young girl (Celaya, nicknamed Lala) discovering her relationship to her family history and thereafter finding herself. Sandra Cisneros and Junot Díaz disrupted the conventions of la familia to look at histories of racism and sexism as well as dictatorship in their respective novels, Caramelo and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Many tend to subvert la familia into this mass of labels and signposts, yet there are counterculturalist creators whose purpose is to critique these notions and use the Latinx family as a framework to challenge ideals put upon them by oppressors. ![]() But, while being close to family is an admirable trait, it has become so ingrained in the thoughts of Americans that it has become a stereotype. Flores wrote in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, “Family stands as the grounding institution for social life among Latinas/os it serves as the main paradigm for all social relationships in these communities… Latina/o personal and family identity is transformed by building family-like relationships with other families” (58). Often, when people think of the Latinx community, the first thing they think of is family. ![]()
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