Narrative Coyotes: Migration and Narrative Voice in Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo

And I realize with all the noise called "talking" in my house, that talking that is nothing but talking, that is so much a part of my house and my past and myself you can't hear it as several conversations, but as one roar like the roar inside a shell, I realize then that this is my life, with its dragon arabesques of voices and lives intertwined, rushing like a Ganges, irrevocable and wild . . .

—Sandra Cisneros (424)

We discover toward the end of Sandra Cisneros's novel Caramelo (2002) that Celaya "Lala" Reyes, the novel's female adolescent narrator, tells the poignant, intricate, and at times hilarious history of her grandmother and the Reyes clan in order to help her grandmother's ghost "cross over." As Lala stands in a hospital room over her father's unconscious body after he has suffered a massive heart attack, she and her grandmother's ghost argue about his "destiny."¹ They eventually strike a deal: if Lala will tell her grandmother's story, one that is inextricably tied to the family's entire history, the Awful Grandmother—whose real name is Soledad—will allow her son Inocencio to live. Soledad explains to Lala that her inability to speak clearly about her own experiences, whether alive or dead, literally traps her "in the middle of nowhere":

[I]t's so lonely being like this, neither dead nor alive, but somewhere halfway, like an elevator between floors. You have no idea. What a barbarity! I'm in the middle of nowhere. I can't cross over to the other side till I'm forgiven. And who will forgive me with all the knots I've made out of my tangled life? Help me, Celaya, you'll help me cross over, won't you?

—Like a coyote who smuggles you over the border?

—Well . . . in a manner of speaking, I suppose.

—Can't you get somebody else to carry you across?

—But who? You are the only one who can see me. . . . You'll tell my story, won't you, Celaya?

(408)

In this crucial conversation, Lala notes that her ability to become her grandmother's narrative surrogate depends on her understanding of the storyteller as a type of narrative coyote.

A coyote is a controversial figure who violates boundaries by smuggling individuals across the US-Mexico border. Cisneros's figurative use of the term "coyote" illuminates and links two of the primary concerns of the novel: migration and storytelling. Time and time again, Cisneros shows that the Reyes family's decades of migration bequeath to Lala, the family's narrator, a "tangled mess" (188) of family history even as she also draws attention to Lala's ability to talk: "How can I explain? Talk is all I've got going for me" (353).² Cisneros's use of "coyote" also underscores the illicit, transgressive, and "wild" properties of Lala's narrative voice. Because Lala's Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicano/a family members cross many geographical—and in the case of her grandmother, supernatural—boundaries, their stories of migration demand a narrative voice that likewise has the ability to transgress boundaries. Thus, like a coyote, Lala smuggles her grandmother's story and her own family history from the past to the present, from Mexico to the US, from the dead to the living, and from one person to another. Cisneros deploys the narrative coyote explicitly in this moment and implicitly throughout the novel to represent the relationship between migration stories and narrative structure; consequently, Caramelo exemplifies Edward Said's claim that "exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can therefore provide us with new narrative forms" (225). In her construction of Lala as a narrative coyote, Cisneros creates a migratory narrative voice that has the ability to cross supernatural, spatial, and narrative boundaries as a means to redress the "tangled mess"—the partial loss of identity, knowledge, and ethnic connection—that actual physical migration enacts in the Reyes family. Cisneros's use of Lala's "talk," then, translates Said's vision into a new narrative practice.

The Spatial Creation of the Narrative Coyote

To create Lala's migratory narrative voice, Cisneros expands the definition of what it means to be a migrant. Caramelo clearly embodies Salman Rushdie's impulse to think of migration metaphorically as a means of "bearing across" (278). In a 1984 essay on Günter Grass, Rushdie defines a "full migrant" as one who "suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption" from place, language, and social environment (277-78). According to Rushdie, Grass is a representative figure because like most of us, he is only "a half-migrant . . . a maybe-only-one-third-migrant"; his estrangement is not from place or language but "from his past" (277, 279). Through his ruminations on Grass, Rushdie expands his definition of migration beyond "literalistic discussions" of it and writes:

Migration across national frontiers is by no means the only form of the phenomenon. . . . I want to go further than such literalistic discussions; because migration also offers us one of the richest metaphors of our age. The very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek word for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images. Migrants—borne-across humans—are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us.

(278-79)

Although Rushdie acknowledges the more orthodox definition of migration as a movement across geographical borders, he is clearly more interested in it as a metaphor. Here, Rushdie draws an analogy between movement across space and language; language use is a "sort of migration" because we all use language to translate our experiences into intelligibility so that others can understand them.

Cisneros's sophisticated treatment of space facilitates her creation of a narrator who, like Rushdie's Grass, is a migrant—"a borne-across human" and a "metaphorical being"—even if she is never an immigrant to one country from another like her father and grandmother. To phrase this another way, Cisneros uses space to create Lala's migratory narrative desire and ability, which in turn enables Lala to "bear across" her family's bilingual and bicultural stories. In Cisneros's writing, place and space constantly interpenetrate. Whereas place is a concrete location, space represents how individuals enact and experience place in everyday life: materially, psychologically, socially, culturally, discursively, and ideologically. Cisneros represents place as natural and built environments such as the regions and houses the Reyes clan inhabits over the course of the novel; through her use of space, she investigates how these lived environments enact different types of identities.

Space in Caramelo is not merely reflective of the society and culture that exist in the places Cisneros's novel documents, for it is also, and more importantly, productive. As a means to articulate how space is productive, I follow Mary Pat Brady's assertion that space, although distinct from discourse, is nevertheless similar to discourse in that both share the performative ability to call into being subjectivity and sociocultural identity. Brady writes:

Literature thrives on the intersections between the shaping powers of language and the productive powers of space. . . . If the production of space is a highly social process, then it is a process that has an effect on the formation of subjectivity, identity, sociality, and physicality in myriad ways. Taking the performativity of space seriously also means understanding that categories such as gender, race, and sexuality are not only discursively constructed, but spatially enacted and created as well.

(8)

In a novel obsessed with spatial crossings, it is no accident that Cisneros uses multiple spaces—ranging from liminal spaces such as geographical borders, buildings, and houses to Lala's lack of private space—to produce Lala's migratory narrative ability.

Cisneros's focus on space and place as crucial aspects of the narration challenges more traditional definitions of narrative structure. Gérard Genette declares that "the temporal determinations of the narrating instance are manifestly more important than its spatial determinations" and "the narrating place is very rarely specified, and is almost never relevant" (215-16). In contrast to Genette's claims, Cisneros's novel emphatically demonstrates that "spatial determinations" are profoundly relevant to stories about migration because Lala's "talk" documents and negotiates the gains and losses caused by spatial movements. As a result, we almost always know where Lala is as both narrator and a character.

Images of physical crossings of borders abound in Caramelo and depict the Reyes family as a clan of "borne-across humans." In the first short chapter of the book, Lala paints the picture of her extended family "racing" from Chicago "to the Little Grandfather's and Awful Grandmother's house in Mexico City" in separate cars that together evoke the colors of the Mexican flag: "Uncle Fat-Face's brand-new used white Cadillac, Uncle Baby's green Impala, Father's red Chevrolet station wagon bought that summer on credit" (5). The fact that these cars—Cadillac, Impala, and Chevrolet—are "typical" American models reinforces the connection between the US and Mexico that Cisneros consistently underscores. The Reyes brothers' and their families' annual returns to Mexico represent only a small portion of the multiple migrations the members of the family make. Eleuterio Reyes, Lala's great-grandfather, first emigrated from Spain to Mexico upon fleeing both Seville and his first wife after witnessing a murder in a bar where he worked as a piano player. Narciso Reyes, Lala's grandfather, was shipped off to the US by his mother, Regina, during the Mexican Revolution, and upon his return to Mexico, he migrated across Oaxaca as a bookkeeper for the Mexican National Roads Commission. Inocencio Reyes, Lala's father, "chose to take the road and join his brother Fat-Face [in the US] hitching trains and picking up women. At least this is how Inocencio imagined it" (207). Soledad—Lala's Awful Grandmother, Narciso's long-suffering wife, and Inocencio's adoring mother—moved to Mexico City from San Luis Potosí after her mother's death and her father's subsequent abandonment of her; after Narciso's death, she joins her sons in the US. Lala's immediate family moves from Chicago to San Antonio and back to Chicago.

Cisneros uses metonymy to link Lala's identity to space; space is then linked to narrative desire and ability. More specifically, Cisneros employs architectural metaphors to construct Lala's racial, ethnic, and class identity in the United States. As Lala's immediate family and the Awful Grandmother plan to move to San Antonio with the hope of moving "up," she contemplates the apartments that her family occupied while living in Chicago. The architectural signifiers of these apartments construct Lala's identity as a poor, urban, migratory, and ethnically and racially marked "other." Cisneros's implicit comparison of these apartments to the disembodied standard of the American suburban home they clearly fail to fulfill reinforces Lala's "otherness":

When I was a kid I slept in the living room on the orange Naugahyde La-Z-Boy, but I got too big to sleep there comfortably. . . . I can remember every flat we've ever rented, especially the ones I want to forget. Their hallways and their hallway smell, dank and dusty or reeking of Pine-Sol. . . . Voices behind the apartment doors. People downstairs who talk too loud, or people upstairs who walk too much. . . . Floorboards thumping to Mexican country music early in the morning, even on the weekends when you're trying to sleep, for crying out loud.

(301)

Despite Father's claim that the family is not poor, the dilapidated conditions of their residence—the absence of a yard, the darkness in the hallways, and the eroding paint—attest to their poverty.³ In addition, their lack of privacy within the individual flats and throughout the apartment buildings and their lack of money to improve their built environment underscore the Reyes family's socioeconomic status. The door, "blunted with kicks, carved initials, and the scars of locks like appendectomies" (301), represents a liminal space between public and private that is marked by the previous tenants and as such functions as a palimpsest. The door documents not only the urban migratory status of the Reyes's and other families' moves from apartment to apartment in the US, but also the phenomenon of Mexican migration to the United States, one that the three Reyes brothers' migrations from Mexico City to Chicago most clearly embody. As well as being marked by the histories of previous tenants, the apartments are both ethnically and racially marked, as can be seen by the constant presence of Mexican music, the ethnic names of the inhabitants, and the darkness that permeates throughout and that cannot be erased by whitewashing with Pine-Sol.

Lala's lack of privacy creates a desire for her own space, and before the family moves to San Antonio, she notes:

Father promised me the next address I'd have a room of my own, because even he admits I'm "una señorita" now, and he's making good on that promise, I guess. There's never anywhere we've lived that's had enough bedrooms for all of us. . . . All this traffic, never any privacy, and noise all the time, and having to dress and undress in the bathroom, the only room with a lock on the door except for the exit doors.

(301)

Father's promise, however, is one he cannot keep, for when the family moves to San Antonio, the Awful Grandmother claims Lala's room as her own, and there are simply not enough rooms for everyone. Throughout the novel, Lala's hopes for a room of her own are thwarted. In San Antonio, Lala continues to sleep in the middle of the living room and has nowhere to escape the sound of the multiple televisions (one in her grandmother's room, one in her parents' room, and one in the living room), her grandmother's and father's screams to one another over the sound of their televisions, and her brothers' stomping up and down the stairs "like a football team in training" (333).

Despite Lala's lamentations, her lack of privacy and longing for her own room in the apartments in Chicago and the house in San Antonio paradoxically create her migratory narrative ability. By evoking Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Cisneros engages and revises this spatial metaphor.⁴ Woolf imagines this room as a space that both symbolizes and produces female independence. She represents this independence not only as socioeconomic, but also as narrative. In other words, Woolf links the female socioeconomic right to a private space to the female ability to write, or put more abstractly, to the female ability to tell stories. Cisneros "[preserves] Woolf's feminist architecture" in Lala's desire for a private space within her home (Doyle 26).⁵ Lala excavates what little space she can in this domestic cacophony by reading:

I've pushed two chairs next to the space heater in the dining room, and this is where I'm trying to read a book on Cleopatra. I've got no privacy to hear my own thoughts in this stupid house, but I can hear everyone else's. . . . My Cleopatra book is a fat one, which is all I ask from a book these days. A cheap ticket out of here. Biographies are the best, the thicker, the better. Joan of Arc. Jean Harlow. Marie Antoinette. Their lives like the white crosses on the side of the road. Watch out! Don't go there! You'll be sorry!

(332)

Like Woolf, Cisneros defines as female the need for private space, since she presents Lala's gender identity as the reason she should have her own space (after all, even Father "admits I'm 'una señorita' now") as well as the reason she does not (the boys have a room at least, because they are boys and because they are older). In addition, again like Woolf, Cisneros represents this as a narrative need, as Lala uses her self-created pseudo-private space to read.

However, Cisneros revises Woolf's metaphor; she defines Lala's storytelling ability not only by her desire for a physical-intellectual space of her own, but also by her inability to attain it. As a matter of fact, the lack of a room of her own does not inhibit Lala's migratory narrative ability, but rather produces it. In the little privacy Lala carves out in her family's home, she does not write; instead, she reads. Cisneros presents the creation of Lala's narrative ability here as consumptive; Lala literally and figuratively consumes the biographies of other women as an imaginative "cheap ticket out of here." The physical reality of her lived environment accordingly produces her ability to appreciate other women's "biographies . . . the thicker the better." In a circular manner, the lack of private space in which she can write her own history produces her desire to consume other females' histories. In keeping with this moment in the text, we see that Lala's storytelling ability emerges out of the tension between consumption and production: she consumes her grandmother's story as a means to tell her own. Lala's ability to "hear everyone else's" thoughts in conjunction with her own is a crucial characteristic of her role as a narrative coyote. Her ability to tell her story accordingly depends upon her ultimate understanding that it exists in a dialogical relationship to others' stories.⁶ Cisneros's revision of Woolf's architectural metaphor articulates a mode of female storytelling that is more communal and public than private.

The Narrative Coyote and Rascuache: How to Tell a Communal Tale

Lala's co-narration of her grandmother's history in Part Two, "When I Was Dirt," most obviously manifests the communal nature of her migratory narrative voice—her ability to consume and renarrate others' stories and the resulting unique form that her narration assumes. In the epigraph to Part Two, Cisneros introduces the idea that the stories Lala will tell are not solely her own: "'When I was dirt' . . . is how we begin a story that was before our time. Before we were born" (89). Cisneros's pronominal decisions are very telling here, for Lala's use of the pronoun "we" before she repeats a similar line with the singular pronoun "my"—"before my time"—reiterates her narrative's preoccupation with the concept of communally told stories. The Chicano word and concept rascuache, which is a word Lala uses to define her family's house in San Antonio, helps illuminate the communal aspect of her narration.⁷ In his assessment of Oscar Zeta Acosta, Ilan Stavans cites the Chicano critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto's definition of rascuache:

"To be rascuache is to posit a bawdy, spunky consciousness, to seek to subvert and turn ruling paradigms upside down. It is a witty, irreverent, and impertinent posture that recodes and moves outside established boundaries. . . . rascuachismo is an underdog perspective—a view from los de abajo, an attitude rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability, yet mindful of stance and style."

(qtd. in Stavans 6)

Cisneros's narrator fully elaborates the aspects of rascuache that Ybarra-Frausto asserts make it subversive within the US cultural context; consequently, the term is useful for our investigation of the illicit and transgressive properties of the narrative coyote.

In Caramelo, Lala's migratory narrative voice assumes an "impertinent posture" to "subvert and turn ruling paradigms upside down." Lala's narrative overturns the typical form of the bildungsroman by rejecting a single narrative language as well as a single narrative voice; in turn, both of these aspects contribute to the communal character of Lala's narration. Lourdes Torres evaluates Cisneros's and other Latino/a writers' use of code-switching, which is "the alternation of two languages in a verbal or written text" (76) such as the use of Spanish words and "creative English renditions of Spanish words and phrases" called "calques" (78). Torres would call Cisneros's rejection of a single narrative language a subversive "artistic choice with political ramifications" (76).⁸ Torres writes:

In the United States, the presence of large and small Latino/a communities across the country, increasing numbers of Latino/a immigrants, and the US/ Mexican border means that code-switching in literature is not only metaphorical, but represents a reality where segments of the population are living between cultures and languages; literary language actualizes the discourse of the border and bilingual/bicultural communities.

(76)

Cisneros's code-switching crafts Lala's migratory narrative voice as one that necessarily crosses linguistic boundaries in order to represent the reality of her bilingual and multicultural family.

Cisneros fashions Soledad's and Lala's different uses of Spanish not only to construct their co-narration in Part Two, but also to express their unique subject positions and voices. Cisneros frequently does not translate many of the Spanish words and phrases Soledad uses to describe herself or her culture when she shares her story with Lala, such as "so this part of the story if it were a fotonovela or telenovela could be called Solamente Soledad or Sola en el mundo" (95), "chaparrita," "Like nosotros, los pobres" (98), "atole con pan" (111), and "qué microwave oven, ni qué nada" (121). Soledad's Spanish, which is her beloved first language, represents her identity as a Mexican born in Mexico, and although multiple ethnicities and two nationalities inform her identity—she is Mexic-Amerindian and permanently moves to the US before her death—Spanish is the language she most fervently associates with her ethnic identity. In contrast, Cisneros translates almost all of Lala's Spanish. This represents Lala's Chicana identity, a hybridized identity that is the direct creation of US/Mexican relations and that, as the concept rascuache indicates, self consciously inhabits the two cultures that inform it.

Although the two women's Spanish is distinct, the names Lala frequently utilizes to label herself and her grandmother reveal the shared rascuache nature of their bilingual narrative as well as their similarities as storytellers: "Metiche, Mirona, Mitotera, Hocicona—en Otras Palabras, Cuentista—Busybody, Ogler, Liar/Gossip/Troublemaker, Big-Mouth—in Other Words, Storyteller" (351). As is typical in Lala's narration, Cisneros first italicizes the Spanish words and then translates them directly to explicitly communicate what she wants a monolingual reader to understand. Still, Torres asserts that in Cisneros's other work, her "use of both languages doubly rewards the bilingual, bicultural reader" (84) because, as Cisneros posits, Chicanos are the readers who can "'catch all of the subtexts and subtleties'" in her texts (qtd. in Torres 84-85).

Indeed, one has to be a bilingual reader to catch the "subtleties" of Cisneros's translation. Although words such as "troublemaker" and "big-mouth" that describe the storytellers are gender neutral in English, in Spanish, all adjectives are gender specific. Thus, Lala and Soledad are not simply "troublemakers," but rather female troublemakers, and as the Spanish words additionally indicate, ethnic female "mitotera[s]." Soledad's and Lala's Spanish enables their rascuache narrative to speak to different communities in different ways, and as a result, their conarration irreverently redefines the form of a typically monolingual bildungsroman.

Cisneros's employment of two voices in Part Two likewise represents a subversive "artistic choice with political ramifications" (Torres 76). Jacqueline Stefanko asserts in an article on Latina narratives that "[d]ue to the shifting, unstable terrain they inhabit, Latin American (migrant) women writers question and reject the assumption that a unitary, synthesizing narrator is capable of telling the stories they have to disclose, instead opting for a narrative stance that includes multiple voicings" (51). Lala's narration fulfills Stefanko's claims about Latina narratives because it is bivocal; in turn, the "multiple voices" in Part Two also make the narrative communal. The bivocal narrative assumes two forms, and the first and more prominent occurs when Lala is the main speaker and Soledad provides uncanny interruptions:

[Lala] Is there anyone alive who remembers the Awful Grandmother when she was a child? Is there anyone left in the world who once heard her call out "Mamá?" It was such a long, long time ago.

[Grandmother] ¡Qué exagerada eres! It wasn't that long ago!

[Lala] I have to exaggerate. It's just for the sake of the story. I need details. You never tell me anything.

[Grandmother] And if I told you everything, what would there be for you to do, eh? I tell you just enough . . .

[Lala] But not too much. Well, let me go on with the story, then.

[Grandmother] And who's stopping you?

(91-92)

Although Lala is the primary speaker, Soledad's voice is nevertheless important, for Lala would not have a story to tell without the details her grandmother provides. As elsewhere in the novel, Lala's role here as a narrative coyote is to translate her grandmother's experiences both literally (responding to the Spanish adjective "exagerada" with the English verb "exaggerate") and figuratively (changing the form of her Grandmother's story from a private, solitary narration to one that is public and communal). In Chapter 25, "God Squeezes," Soledad tells an abridged story of her life to her granddaughter in order to justify her actions—"Because I wasn't bad, understand?" (119)—and Lala interrupts. In both cases, the listener provides narrative direction, clarification, and commentary on the primary speaker's narration, reinforcing the importance of both figures in the communal retelling. In Part Two, Lala's and Soledad's rascuache "multiple voicings" constantly interrogate and complete one another's narrative perspectives; thus, they both function as narrative coyotes. As they exchange details about Soledad's past, they "smuggle" them over in two languages from the dead to the living, from the past to the present, and from the individual to the communal. In doing so, they violate supernatural and narrative borders.

Their communal narration in Part Two can also be understood in terms of what Said labels "disruptive articulations." For Said, the "historical problem of modernism" was the moment when "the subaltern and the constitutively different suddenly achieved disruptive articulation exactly where in European culture silence and compliance could previously be depended on to quiet them down" (223). Although Said focuses on the relationship between the colonizer and the subaltern and the concomitant voice and silence this hierarchy attempts to achieve, his discussion about "disruptive articulations" can be applied to other "ruling paradigms" and the "established boundaries" these paradigms create (Ybarra-Frausto, qtd. in Stavans 6). Cisneros employs Lala's migratory narrative voice to subvert and disrupt a number of hierarchies such as those based on language, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality as a means to assert the right of the voiceless to speak. For example, both Soledad and Lala repeatedly emphasize Soledad's isolation and demonstrate that her isolation silences her. Soledad tells Lala, "You have no idea what it was like to be so alone, to be left like the saying 'without a mother; without a father, without even a dog to bark at me'" (102), and Lala informs the reader that "there was no one, you see, to guide her" (106). A number of circumstances contribute to Soledad's isolation: for most of her life, Soledad is an abandoned racial and ethnic other, and until her marriage to Narciso, she is gut-wrenchingly poor. Because of Soledad's subject position, her story is one that should have remained silent but nevertheless finds articulation when both women act as narrative coyotes. When both Soledad and Lala finally "talk" about Soledad's history and Lala's heritage, their female voices represent "disruptive articulations" about how migration narratives should be told.

The Narrative Coyote's Roles: Excavation, Reclamation, and Preservation

Cisneros uses Lala's and Soledad's "disruptive articulations" to unravel the grandmother's story as one of los de abajo; consequently, the narrative is rascuache not only in the form it assumes, but also in the content it excavates and documents. Literally translated as "those from below," this phrase embodies how Lala's narrative consistently gives voice to those places and people that do not have one, ranging from her grandmother to her father, to Chicanos/as in the US, and to forgotten Mexican icons.⁹ Lala's migratory narrative voice is rascuache precisely because it excavates, reclaims, and preserves the concealed and forgotten memories of her grandmother, the Reyes clan, and los de abajo in general. As a consequence of this impulse to give "the underdog perspective" (Ybarra-Frausto, qtd. in Stavans 6), one of the primary concerns of the novel is how migration can erode personal, familial, and historical knowledge. As a narrator, Lala is always aware of how spatial and temporal migrations—in other words, movement across place/space and the teleological progression of time—have the capacity to affect her memory; for example, she notes during one border crossing: "But the light [in Mexico]. That I don't remember forgetting until I remember it" (16). The spatial migrations Lala and her family make complicate her individual memory of her own experiences and mask much of the family's history. As a means to redress this phenomenon, Cisneros uses the "shaping powers" of Lala's "language" to unearth the knowledge that her family's spatial migrations and willful silences have suppressed (Brady 8).

Ellen McCracken concurs that "the story of the Reyes clan, loosely based on Cisneros' own family history, is the excavation project of Celaya Reyes, who attempts to uncover the repressed secrets of both her family and the larger historical master narrative" (par. 15).¹⁰ In the introduction to Part One, Cisneros uses Lala's interpretation of a family photograph to symbolically inaugurate Lala's "excavation project." As Lala looks at a picture of her family on vacation in Acapulco, she notes that she is the only one missing from the photograph, although she was there: "[I]t's as if I'm the photographer walking along the beach asking, . . . —¿Un recuerdo? A souvenir? A memory?" (4). When Lala aligns herself with the photographer, she explicitly defines herself as one who documents and preserves "recuerdos." In this introductory moment, Cisneros illuminates Lala's ability to cross temporal boundaries in order to tell her family's buried memories; as a narrator, she figuratively travels to her family's past in order to remember someone else's memories and to summon a past moment to the present.¹¹ Her ability to bear her family's experiences across time enables what Said calls the "painstaking recovery of implicit or internalized histories" that mark all "ethnographic quests" (213). Lala's "ethnographic quest" to uncover and co-narrate her grandmother's story additionally exemplifies Rushdie's expanded understanding of migration in terms of how language translates experiences (the Reyes familial history and Soledad's tortured past in particular) into something more concrete and intelligible (Lala's actual narration and co-narration).

Lala's rascuache "excavation project" and "ethnographic quest" directly dictate the thematic and narrative specificities of the text. For a number of reasons, Soledad's life history is central to Lala's "excavation project." First, Lala becomes a narrative coyote to help the Awful Grandmother "cross over"; thus, co-narrating Soledad's personal history provides the opportunity and impetus for Lala's narration. Second, Cisneros repeatedly draws parallels between Lala and Soledad, and in Part Three, Lala unwittingly repeats many aspects of Soledad's past in uncanny ways. Cisneros shows that Soledad's and Lala's migrations inhibit their formation of a strong sense of ethnic female identity; as a consequence, they are vulnerable and are both seduced by men who leave them empty and abandoned in different ways. Lala needs the knowledge that spatial and temporal migrations have erased to know and to tell her own story. Her ability to know the past comes not only from her own experiences, but also from the past her grandmother shares with her. Finally, Lala and Soledad's relationship has structural implications throughout the novel. Through Lala's excavation, reclamation, and preservation of Soledad's story in conjunction with Lala's own, Cisneros ties together the narrative coyote's roles and the structure of the text. In particular, the narrative direction Soledad gives Lala directly dictates the novel's plot structure.

In Chapter 21, "So Here My History Begins for Your Good Understanding and My Poor Telling," which is the first chapter in Part Two, Lala begins to retell her grandmother's story. As stated earlier, her grandmother repeatedly interrupts Lala with specific narrative directions. Soledad commands her to be "careful" and to tell "[j]ust enough but not too much" (92). The title of the chapter emphasizes the relationship between the co-narrators and the importance of Soledad's story to Lala, especially since the reader is not immediately sure if "my" refers to Lala's story, Soledad's story, or both. This pronominal ambiguity once again underscores the communal nature of the story and of the migratory narrative voice. To further demonstrate their narrative relationship, Cisneros deploys Lala's self-conscious adoption of her grandmother's narrative direction to "tell you just enough . . . but not too much" as the plot structure of the novel (92). The novel does not follow chronological order, nor does it use a consistent verb tense. Both of these aspects reinforce Lala's narrative ability to cross spatial and temporal boundaries in the act of excavation. Lala tells Parts One and Two in the past tense; in Part One, she recounts the Reyes family's extended return to Mexico when Lala was a child, whereas in Part Two, she reveals her grandmother's and father's personal histories, with some surprising and important omissions (such as the fact that her father has an illegitimate child with the washer woman). In Part Three, the section of the novel Lala narrates in the present tense, Lala addresses the Awful Grandmother's move to the US, the grandmother's subsequent death, and her own family's move from Chicago to San Antonio and back.

This plot structure allows Cisneros's migratory narrator to violate temporal boundaries as a means to uncover and reveal the complexity of the Awful Grandmother's character. Accordingly, Lala first introduces Soledad to the readers in Part One as the Awful Grandmother who is "like the witch in that story of Hansel and Gretel. She likes to eat boys and girls. She'll swallow us whole, if you let her" (23). Verbally abusive to all but her eldest son, Inocencio, the Awful Grandmother of Parts One and Three is anything but a sympathetic character. In Part Two—the section of the novel Lala tells after the Awful Grandmother's death, which is narrated in Part Three—Lala narrates the transformation of Soledad into the Awful Grandmother: "[T]his story is from the time of before. Before my Awful Grandmother became awful, before she became my father's mother. Once she had been a young woman who men looked at and women listened to" (91). Structurally, to get to the present tense of the text in Part Three, the reader must read Soledad's past first. The plot forces the reader to reckon with Lala's humanization of her grandmother and sets up the patterns of behavior that Soledad inaugurates and Lala repeats. Lala tells "just enough, but not too much" to make her reader understand Soledad's identity.

In Part Two, Cisneros uses Lala's poignant and humorous co-narration of Soledad's painful life to document an individual history of loss, betrayal, and strength as emblematic of migratory Latina experience. This section of the novel is the most meta-narrative; Cisneros constantly reminds us that Lala is the predominant, but not sole, narrator of Soledad's story and consistently highlights the importance of language to granddaughter and grandmother alike. When Lala asks her grandmother's ghost, "Who's telling this story, you or me?" Soledad responds, "You" (97). Because of the rascuache bivocal narrative, we also know that Lala would not be able to retell Soledad's story without the knowledge Soledad imparts, and Lala wisely asserts that "it's the stories you never talk about that you have the most to say" (109). We learn from Lala that multiple migrations affect Soledad's life, and a double migration in particular defines her youth: her mother's death, which is a crossing over of sorts, and her subsequent move to Mexico City. After her mother's death, Soledad does not learn the complex craft of shawl making that made the women in her family revered and unique: "It is only right, then, that she should have been a knotter of fringe as well, but when Soledad was still too little to braid her own hair, her mother died and left her without the language of knots and rosettes" (94). Her mother's death and her father's abandonment of her leave Soledad without a "language" for self-expression. Lala explains: "Oh, if only her mother were alive. She could have told her how to speak with her rebozo [shawl]" (105). To underscore Soledad's inability to "speak" about the things her mother would have taught her—the family and ethnic history the rebozo embodies and the artistic and intellectual creativity the craft of shawl making requires—Cisneros figures Soledad as mute time and time again in Lala's retelling: "Poor Soledad. She understood Eleuterio because she was as mute as he was, perhaps more so because she had no piano" (151). Soledad's muteness about her own painful past traps her "in the middle of nowhere" (408) and necessitates the formation of Lala's migratory narrative voice.

Lala's narration reveals that as a result of the multiple absences in Soledad's life and the lack of a language of self-expression, Soledad models her behavior after Regina Reyes, her employer, her future mother-in-law, and her pseudo-surrogate mother. Cisneros draws striking similarities between Regina and Soledad, just as she does between Soledad and Lala. Regina was the daughter of a "mecapalero, a man whose job it was to be a beast of burden, an ambulatory porter carrying on his back objects ten times his weight—chifforobes, barrels, other humans." In addition, she was of Mexic-Amerindian descent, "was as dark as cajeta and as humble as a tortilla of nixtamal" (116), and sold "papaya slices . . . with lemon and a dash of chile" (117). Her marriage to the lighter-skinned, better-educated Spaniard Eleuterio Reyes (after he impregnates her with Narciso) inaugurates the Reyes familial history in the "new world." Like Regina, Soledad has an Indian background that ethnically and racially marks her: "It must be remembered that Soledad was a Reyes too, although of that backward Indian variety that reminded Regina too much of her own humble roots" (113). Also like Regina, Soledad comes from a lower class than the Reyes men, of which fact Regina constantly reminds her: "The clothes, the gifts of things la Señora Regina didn't want anymore made Soledad feel worse for having to accept and wear them. —Now, Soledad, you'll see. There's no need to thank me. You can't help it if you were raised wiping your ass with corn shucks and wandering about without shoes" (115). Lala's narration not only underscores the similarities between her grandmother and great-grandmother, but also reveals Soledad's influence in Lala's assessment of Regina: Lala only knows who Regina is because of Soledad, and Soledad's opinion of her harsh, critical mother-in-law is anything but sympathetic. Lala's excavation of her grandmother's history is indebted to Soledad for both the content it excavates and the structure and language it utilizes to describe the details of Soledad's past.

One of the most important similarities Lala reveals between the two women is their relationship to the Reyes men. Soledad's relationship with Narciso transforms her from the "sweet" girl who adores Narciso (151) to the Awful Grandmother. In comparison to the men they marry, both women are of a lower class and, due to their Mexic-Amerindian background, are racial and ethnic others whose appearance attracts the Reyes men. Regina "was like the papaya slices she sold with lemon and a dash of chile; you could not help but want to take a little taste" (117), and Soledad had "those funny Charlie Chaplin eyebrows and the dark little eyes beneath them" (151). Both women are also preyed upon sexually by the Reyes men, impregnated by them, and subsequently married to them due to the men's obligation to be "gentlemen." However, whereas Regina is able to use her shrewd business acumen during the Mexican Revolution to enrich the family and to transform her identity from colonized to colonizer, Soledad is never successful at acquiring an individual sense of self.¹² We see additionally through Lala's co-narration of her grandmother's story that Soledad learns from Regina an alternate language of self-expression: she learns to be ashamed. Regina essentially transfers her embarrassment regarding her own background onto Soledad as a means to distance herself from it, and in the process she teaches Soledad to be ashamed of her own ethnic, racial, and class identity; this, in turn, leaves her open to seduction by Narciso. Ultimately, as a result of Regina's teachings and Narciso's semi-abandonment of her through his affair with another woman, Soledad internalizes Regina's shame and repeats the strategies her mother-in-law used to deflect it by blindly loving and idolizing her eldest son while ridiculing the inadequacies of her domestic help, her daughters-in-law, and her grandchildren. Instead of "remembering" her dead mother's creativity, Soledad adopts the venomous posture that alienates her from her family.

In the parts of the story Lala narrates in the present tense, Lala does not know her grandmother's history, and until their fateful conversation over Inocencio's hospital bed, she understands Soledad only as the Awful Grandmother. Accordingly, Lala repeats her grandmother's history because she does not know it. Lala's blundering repetition of her grandmother's mistakes occasions the need for her excavation project in the first place. Her family's repeated movements across the US-Mexico border and within the United States also leave Lala confused about her identity. Cisneros uses Lala's gender, ethnic, and racial difference to show that, like Soledad, she does not fully belong anywhere until she learns and recounts her grandmother's story (356). Lala summarizes her difference in her usual succinct and humorous manner: "No wonder I'm always depressed." According to her grandmother, she is not sufficiently feminine. The Awful Grandmother tells her before she dies, "You look like a sheep dog. The last time I saw you, you were a normal little girl. And now look. You're as big as a Russian. Don't you think you should exercise and try to look more feminine?" (258). In Mexico, Lala is not quite Mexican enough because she does not speak Spanish like her father and because she was born in the US, despite the fact that she feels "Mexican on Both Sides" (351). Of course, Soledad thinks it is a "barbarity" that only one of her grandchildren, Lala's brother, speaks fluent Spanish. In Chicago, she is a poor, racial, and ethnic other. In San Antonio, deep in the heart of Aztlán, her Chicana peers call her a gabacha, a white girl, with unintentional irony because her Spanish is better than theirs and because her grandfather emigrated from Spain to Mexico. Lala's response to this name-calling is typically amusing: "Who wants to be called a white girl? I mean, not even white girls want to be called white girls" (354).

As with her grandmother before her, Lala's migrations cause her to feel alienated and unable to define her identity in a consistently viable way. Not surprisingly, Cisneros represents Lala's identity crisis and sense of confusion spatially. After the Chicana "perras," dogs, as Lala calls them, attack her one day after school, she runs:

first back toward the school, then along the access road north, thinking I can cross over on the next overpass. But before I even get there, I can see some girls waiting there for me too. . . . There's no choice but to scramble over the chain-link fence and make a run for it through the interstate. . . . A pickup honks and changes lanes to avoid me, I don't care, I don't care. . . . I don't care, I never belonged here. I don't know where I belong anymore.

(356)

This moment figures her crisis and search for self as a series of "crossings." Her movement (in the form of running) paradoxically saves her even as another movement (crossing over the interstate) puts her at risk. The paradox here is a symbol for the formation of her identity: the migrations with her family put her sense of self at risk even as those very migrations define who she is as a Mexican American female and as a storyteller. Lala finally finds temporary respite in the guardrail in the "middle" of the interstate, where for the first time since her grandmother's death she hears Soledad call her full name: "Celaya" (357). Soledad's willingness to speak in order to save her granddaughter inaugurates the existence of the narrative coyote. Her voice carries Lala over to the other side of the highway.

Still, Lala continues to repeat her grandmother's story precisely because at first she refuses to listen to her grandmother's voice. Whereas Cisneros represents Soledad as partially mute, she represents Lala as partially deaf. As a result, when her family decides to move back to Chicago, Lala elopes to Mexico City with her first love, Ernie Calderón, "a good Catholic Mexican Texican boy" (365) who, like Lala, is simultaneously masculine and feminine and who has a "heart like a soft-boiled egg" (369). Like Soledad, Lala is abandoned by her love, albeit in a more literal fashion. Whereas Narciso gives his heart to another even as he remains married to Soledad, Ernie makes love to Lala the night before their "wedding" and then leaves her alone in Mexico City because of a spiritual crisis. After Ernie abandons her, Lala puts on the grandmother's caramelo rebozo (caramel-colored shawl) for comfort: "I get dressed, tie the Grandmother's caramelo rebozo on my head like a gypsy, and start sucking the fringe. It has a familiar sweet taste to it, like carrots, like camote, that calms me" (388). She acknowledges: "[E]ach and every person [is] connected to me, and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo" (389). The cara-melo rebozo—the shawl that Lala inherited from Soledad, who inherited it from her own mother, who made it—makes explicit the connection between Lala's and Soledad's stories, which is a connection even Lala begins to recognize and appreciate in this moment.

The Strands that Connect: The Narrative Coyote and the Caramelo Rebozo

McCracken argues that the rebozo is the "central motif" of the novel as it simultaneously represents "ethnic identity," "family history," and, I add, migration and female artistic creation (par. 2).¹³ As Lala begins to suck the strands of her grandmother's shawl, another moment of consumption, she slowly begins to recognize the various strands the shawl connects. These are clues that Lala's narrative has given us all along through its "just enough, but not too much" structure. In one of the novel's multiple footnotes, Cisneros asserts that the rebozo represents the various Amerindian and imperial cultures that have historically comprised Mexican ethnic identity:

[T]he rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere. It evolved from the cloths Indian women used to carry their babies, borrowed its knotted fringe from Spanish shawls, and was influenced by the silk embroideries from the imperial course of China exported to Manila, then Acapulco, via the Spanish galleons.

(96)

Lala's family likewise embodies the mixture of the Amerindian (her grandmother and great-grandmother) and the Spanish (her great-grandfather and his male descendents) that make up the rebozo's heritage; in addition, her Chicana mother adds another knot to the Reyes family history and expands Lala's mestizo heritage. The rebozo also represents both spatial and temporal migrations. In Part Two, Lala explains that the "art of las empuntadoras is so old no one remembers whether it arrived from the east, from the macramé of Arabia through Spain, or from the west from the blue-sky bay of Acapulco. . . . Perhaps, as is often the case with things Mexican, it came from neither and both" (92-93). Here, Lala underscores multiple possible origins of the rebozo—Arabia, Spain, and Acapulco—that mimic the migration of the Spanish conquistadors out of southern Spain (the land of the Moors), across the globe, and ultimately into the "new world." She also notes that "no one remembers" its exact origin, calling attention once again to time's ability to erode cultural memory.

The caramelo rebozo's most important symbolic role is to represent ethnic female artistic production and innovation; consequently, it functions as an analog to storytelling. Lala and Soledad both figure the art of las empuntadoras, of the rebozo makers, as a creative act that is passed down in a matrilineal fashion, from mother to daughter to granddaughter, and is reinforced by a female community of shawl makers. Soledad's mother, Guillermina, learned the art from her own mother and practiced with the women in her community of Santa María del Río:

Guillermina's mother had taught her the empuntadora's art of counting and dividing the silk strands, of braiding and knotting them into fastidious rosettes, arcs, stars, diamonds, names, dates, and even dedications, and before her, her mother taught her as her own mother had learned it, so it was as if all the mothers and daughters were at work, all one thread interlocking and double-looping, each woman learning from the woman before, but adding a flourish that became her signature, then passing it on.

(93)

This artistic practice includes individual artistic innovation, which Cisneros figures here as the "flourish" that each woman adds as her own act of artistic self-naming, and connects one woman to another, one culture to another, and one strand to another. In other words, like Lala's migratory narrative voice, the art of rebozo making is more communal than private. Because the art of shawl making dies with Guillermina, Lala's migratory narrative voice, her "talk," replaces her great-grandmother's art. This explains why Cisneros figures the art of las empuntadoras and the art of la cuentista (the female storyteller) in stunningly similar terms. Lala understands that "a life contains a multitude of stories and not a single strand explains precisely the who of who one is" (115), just as her great-grandmother understood how to link the silk strands of the rebozo.¹⁴

By retelling her grandmother's past, Lala links her personal history to her familial history, and thus "It hits me at once, the terrible truth of it. I am the Awful Grandmother" (424). Like the knots that connect the rebozo, the story comes full circle: after Inocencio travels to Mexico City to retrieve Lala, the family moves back to Chicago, and Inocencio has his fateful heart attack; only then do Lala and Soledad's ghost finally meet and begin to "talk." As Soledad pleads with Lala to tell her story, part of her rationale is that her story will save Lala: "I can't bear it. Why do you insist on repeating my life? Is that what you want? To live as I did? There's no sin in falling in love with your heart and with your body, but wait till you're old enough to love yourself first. How do you know what love is? You're still just a child" (406). When Soledad shares her history with Lala to redress the absence of knowledge their various migrations enact, Lala finally becomes aware of the power of the storyteller as a border crosser who excavates, reclaims, and preserves histories. Lala not only comes to believe that "You're the author of the telenovela of your life," but also recognizes that the story of her own life is deeply indebted to those of her family (345):

And I realize with all the noise called "talking" in my house, that talking that is nothing but talking, that is so much a part of my house and my past and myself you can't hear it as several conversations, but as one roar like the roar inside a shell, I realize then that this is my life, with its dragon arabesques of voices and lives intertwined, rushing like a Ganges, irrevocable and wild, carrying away everything in reach, whole villages, pigs, shoes, coffeepots . . .

(424)

Cisneros shows here that the "talk" that "intertwines" is a multivocal expression of "several conversations" at once; the "talk" of storytelling ultimately crosses the borders between the self and the other.

Cisneros's voluminous and at times encyclopedic experiment with migration and narrative voice underscores the importance of aesthetics to the reclamation of suppressed and forgotten histories. If, as Said claims, "exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can . . . provide us with new narrative forms" (225), then Cisneros's narrator illuminates exactly what that narrative form looks like. Cisneros treats migration in Caramelo not only as a theme, but also as a narrative opportunity and strategy. As a result, her use of migration as a constitutive narrative category in and of itself forces us to rethink other hierarchies with which we are so familiar: citizen and migrant, margin and center, colonizer and colonized, and subject and object of narration. Cisneros deploys the illicit properties of the narrative coyote to excavate and preserve various marginalized or misrepresented histories—ranging from the history of the Reyes clan (loosely based on Cisneros's own family), to a retelling of US-Mexico border relations, to the documentation of a constellation of American, Chicano, and Mexican cultural artifacts and icons. Yet she also uses the narrative coyote to reveal how storytelling shapes the communal and personal histories it documents. Cisneros invites her readers likewise to cross borders; any reader of Caramelo has to be willing to traverse linguistic, cultural, and epistemological boundaries in order to fully reckon with the complexity of her migratory narrative.