In the Corazón of the Capital: Globalization and Urban Design in Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo

This essay examines Sandra Cisneros's depiction of Mexico City's built environment, with emphasis on the historical construction of the transnational city. Focusing on the successive stages of building and rebuilding following different waves of globalization, beginning with colonization and extending to more recent transnational impulses, Cisneros portrays the nation's capital as a space that continually makes and remakes itself as it absorbs outside influences and new social regimes. She does so by employing the dual perspectives of Soledad and her granddaughter Celaya, whose narratives, like the city itself, have a patchwork design. These two points of view evoke spatial memories that encompass the capital's pre-Cortesian roots as the Aztec city Tenochtitlán and extend to its emergence as a world city after World War II. The representation of the city as a palimpsest where the past is never altogether erased, questions nationalist assumptions and stresses the difference within homogenizing constructs.