24 Points on Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros, the award-winning author of the highly acclaimed The House on Mango Street and several other esteemed works, has produced a stunning new novel, Caramelo. This long-anticipated novel is an all-embracing epic of family history, Mexican history, the immigrant experience, and a young Mexican-American woman's road to adulthood. We hope the following introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography enhance your group's reading of this captivating and masterful literary work.

1. From the novel's opening epigraph--"Tell me a story, even it it's a lie"--to its end, the relationship between truth, lies, history, and storytelling is an important theme. Posits Celaya, "Did I dream it or did someone tell me the story? I can't remember where the truth ends and the talk begins" [p. 20]. And while she is assuring us, "I wish I could tell you about this episode in my family's history, but nobody talks about it, and I refuse to invent what I don't know" [p. 134], she also acknowledges, "The same story becomes a different story depending on who is telling it" [p. 156]. For example, clearly the Awful Grandmother is sugarcoating the truth about her marriage to Narciso [p. 171]. What other aspects of the novel are evidently "untruthful"? Is the reader to believe that Caramelo is just a "different kind of lie" [p. 246]?

2. Celaya says,"I'm not ashamed of my past. It's the story of my life I'm sorry about" [p. 399]. What's the difference?

3. The narrative transitions from one storyteller's point of view, or voice, to another's in different parts of the story. For example, in Chapter 22, Celaya as the storyteller engages in a dialogue with the Awful Grandmother about the way the grandmother's story is being told [pp. 91-123]. Then, in Chapter 29, Narciso begins to tell his own story of when he lived in Chicago [p. 137]. And later, in Chapters 37-45, the dialogue between Celaya and the Awful Grandmother returns. Celaya seems to find her own voice and point of view in Chapter 59. What does the author achieve by shifting the viewpoint from character to character? How does the tone change to reflect the voices of a poor Mexican orphan, a young officer in the Mexican army, an American teenage girl, and others? How does this narrative device affect the reader's ability to sympathize or empathize with the characters?

4. Often elements of one person's life are echoed later in the story, in either the same character's life or in another character's. For example, Cisneros uses the same sentence--"And it was good and joyous and blessed"--to describe Grandmother's first sexual encounter with Narciso [p. 154] and later her death [p. 348]. And the argument between Mother and Celaya [p. 359] echoes the earlier argument between Aunty Light-Skin and the Awful Grandmother [p. 262]. Where are there other examples of this repetition within the novel? What themes does this structural repetition help convey?

5. The family history that forms the central story line of Caramelo is structured in part chronologically and in part by the relationships formed by different family members. As our narrator informs us: "Because a life contains a multitude of stories and not a single strand explains precisely the who of who one is, we have to examine the complicated loops that allowed Regina to become la Seсora Reyes" [p. 115]. Does this nonlinear plot structure support the assertion that family and history are without beginning, middle, or end, but are, rather, a "pattern" [p. 399]?

6. How does the historical chronology at the end of the novel edify the Reyes family events that take place within the body of the narrative--and vice versa? In other words, since the reader probably read the story before the chronology, how do the fictional family events illuminate the factual chronology of United States and Mexican history? Is Caramelo like or different from other historical fictions, such as Alex Haley's Roots, with which the reader might be familiar?

7. The theme expressed in the following statement is reemphasized throughout the novel: "We are all born with our destiny. But sometimes we have to help our destiny a little" [p. 106]. For example, Viva tells Celaya: "I believe in destiny as much as you do, but sometimes you've gotta help your destiny along" [p. 345]. What exactly is the nature or power of the "destiny" that the characters seem to revere? Who or what is really in control of the lives and histories portrayed? How is destiny different for Celaya, her grandmother, her parents, and her friend Viva? Celaya says of Ernesto: "He was my destiny, but not my destination" [p. 399]. What is the difference?

8. How does the oft-repeated phrase "just enough, but not too much" [e.g., p. 29] describe the kind of person the Awful Grandmother is? What aspects, if any, of the Awful Grandmother's life story parallel Celaya's life story? Are the Awful Grandmother and Celaya alike in character, and if so, in what ways? How does Celaya, who upon her grandmother's death "can't think of anything to say for my grandmother who is simply my father's mother and nothing to me" [p. 350], ultimately come to feel that she's "turned into her. And [can] see inside her heart" [p. 424]? What does the Awful Grandmother teach Celaya about herself?

9. Celaya writes, "On Sunday mornings other families go to church. We go to Maxwell Street" [p. 294]. Does she relate this cynically or humorously, or both? What religious beliefs does Celaya hold? How is her faith or religion different from Zoila's, who is portrayed as having no faith at all [Chapter 62], or from the faith or religion of the Awful Grandmother [see, for example, p. 191]?

10. What is the role played in the novel by the various Mexican or Mexican-American figures of popular culture who have encounters with members of the Reyes family? How does Cisneros use these characters to convey both the individuality as well as the universality of the Mexican-American immigrant experience?

11. The characters in Caramelo make frequent observations about Mexicans. For example, Zoila asserts that "all people from Mexico City are liars" [p. 353], and Celaya comments "We're so Mexican. So much left unsaid" [p. 428]. With what tone do the characters deliver these types of generalizations, and how are they to be interpreted? Why might these characters portray their native countrymen in this way? Do people of other cultures