She knows well how their frustration finds an echo in the simultaneous frustrations of being immigrants, working class, the wrong colour and poor. Cisneros is preoccupied with traditional Mexican femininity, in which girls are invisible until they become women, marry and procreate, whereupon they return to invisibility, and how this is especially difficult for Mexican women in contemporary America.
These have varying degrees of factual accuracy, as we are told a few too many times, but they're meant to reveal a different sort of truth. Caramelo - a rich golden colour, the generic word for sweets, a candy-striped heirloom shawl or rebozo - begins: "Cuéntame algo, aunque sea una mentira" ("Tell me a story, even if it's a lie") and Celaya is the conduit for story upon story. Cisneros is aware of her position and its responsibilities, and Caramelo occasionally feels as though she's trying to articulate an entire century of Mexican-American relations.Ĭaramelo is a densely worked generational saga structured as a triptych linked by the voice of Celaya: as a child observing her riotous, fractious, loving family in the first part, set in Mexico an adult writer wrangling tales from her Awful Grandmother's ghost in the second and as a streetwise and vulnerable American adoles cent in the third. There are 39 million Latinos in the US, but only a handful of Latino authors - others are Julia Alvarez, Oscar Hijuelos and Junot Diaz - are recognised in mainstream America. With her short-story collection Woman Hollering Creek (1991), she also became the first Chicana writer to be published by a major New York house.
A spare and beautiful near-prose-poem about a working-class Latina adolescent, it slowly became a phenomenon: it's now taught all over America and has sold about two million copies in 11 languages, making Cisneros (who began as and still is a poet) the bestselling Latino author in the US.
Cisneros's first novel, The House on Mango Street, was brought out by a small Houston publisher 18 years ago.
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