SUMMARY:

The novel Caramelo or puro cuento (2002) by the Chicana author Sandra Cisneros rescues the silenced life of
four generations of the Reyes family, all of them marked by the continuous comings and goings between Spain,
Mexico and the United States. The main objective of this article is the analysis of the strategies used by the
protagonist and narrator of the story to displace the hegemonic discourses about their cultural identity and that
of their family. For this, we will analyze how the narrator of the novel is situated in a third space, an uncertain
and uncomfortable terrain, but from which the protagonist manages to resignify the binary logic of cultural
difference.
We will also study the possibilities of hybrid narration, characteristic of the novel, to dismantle authority, both
from the political and strictly narrative points of view.

ABSTRACT: Sandra Cisneros’s novel Caramelo or puro cuento (2002) reveals the unspoken history of four
generations of the Reyes family, all of them influenced by their continuous comings and goings between Spain,
Mexico and the USA. The investigation aims to examining the strategies that the protagonist and narrator uses
to question hegemonic discourses about her cultural identity. To this end, we will analyze the way the narrator
places herself in a third space, an uncertain and uncomfortable territory, but from which she can resignificate
the binary system that regulates the notion of cultural difference. We will also study the possibilities that the
hybrid narration of the novel offers to question authority, not only from a political, but also from a narrative
point of view.
1. INTRODUCCIÓN

Culture, Homi Bhabha explains in his postcolonial critical theory, becomes occasions in a survival strategy
(2002: 172). In this sense, some contemporary literary texts have critically reformulated colonial discourse
of cultural difference. After the hegemonic narratives that until not so long ago organized their story around
original and initial subjectivities, different authors have bet from the periphery of power for a resignification
and redefinition of traditional stories. In the current scenario, globalized and transnational, literary texts are
emerging as an ideal means of represent the paradoxes related to identity (Müller - Funk, 2012: 11). To
dominate the art of storytelling, and especially, its ability to create and sustain identities, is for some
authors, as Bhabha argues, a strategy of survival. In the specific case of Chicano authors, whose identities
are they find themselves halfway between the Mexican culture to which their ancestors and the new cultural
space of the host country, United States, the act of narrating becomes an imperative necessity. After the
experience of social exclusion, the writing allows the authors to raise a voice that is hardly heard in the
American society.
 The writer Sandra Cisneros, born in Chicago and daughter of a Mexican father and Mexican-American
mother, is one of the voices of Chicano literature that in Recent years have been heard in a particular way.
With his novels The House on Mango Street (1984), Caramelo (2002) and Have you seen Marie? (2012),
he stories published in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), as well as her collections of
poetry My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987) or Loose Woman (1994), the author has achieved a strong editorial
success. Her stories, centered on the most in the problematic of Chicano culture, recover the voices for the
public silenced by the official discourse and thus offer the reverse to the great stories Hegemonic.
The narrative as a survival strategy manifests itself twice in Caramelo, a novel that narrates the experiences
of a Mexican-American family as long four generations. On the one hand, at the authorial level, and as we
have already pointed, Sandra Cisneros manages to rescue with his text a different point of view from the
"great narratives" and challenge traditional discourses. On the other hand, in the plane of the characters, it is
Celaya (or Lala) Reyes, the protagonist and narrator of the story, who manages to overcome her conflicts of
identity thanks to her narrative skills. As he organizes the story of his own story, Celaya overcomes his
continued frustrations and doubts, derived during his childhood and adolescence in much of his Chicano
status. Along with the story of his life, Celaya also tells the story of several members of his family, whose
experiences are, as recognized by the character at the end of the novel, irremediably linked to his. The
comings and goings from the past to the present, from Chicago to Mexico City, to Acapulco or San
Antonio, so close to the border between the two countries, draw a story with which Lala manages to
question the binary divisions related to Mexican identities. and American The loss or lack of an own
language, which characterizes not a few relatives of the protagonist of the novel, contrasts with the
discursive capacity of Lala, with her absolute command of words, with which she plays and weaves stories.

2. THE HYBRID SPACE: THE NATIONAL IDENTITY BEYOND THE KEY PARADIGNS

With the multiple histories, own and familiar, that Lala reconstructs and organizes, the protagonist goes
through the experiences of four generations of the family Reyes, a family marked by the continuous
comings and goings of its members, always riding between countries and different cultures. Celaya
therefore adopts the role of narrator of the family saga, aware of her good know-how with words. his
narration is not chronological, then, in the same way that it moves us to different spaces of Mexico and the
United States, the jumps in time are constants: from the sixties to the convulsed twenties and then again
to the seventies.
In this spatial and chronological transit, the voice of the narrative, linked always the same character,
evolves. In each of the three parts that make up the novel, the narrative voice gives an account of different
moments of her life or that of other members of her family, so that the features of the voice in one or
another part they are different. Thus, in the first part, Celaya that narrates is a naive girl who relives the
summer visits from Chicago to the house of the paternal grandparents in Mexico D. F. However, the
simplicity and the children's images of the chapters of the first block give way, already in the second part, to
a syntax and a lexicon a lot more careful, as befits the voice of a mature woman (Salvucci, 2006-2007: 168).
In these chapters Celaya, already an adult, tells the story of her grandmother Soledad. The narrative, which
ranges from the birth of the grandmother in Mexico to the same birth of Celaya in the United States, does
not have a single voice. While Celaya is the one that reconstructs and recounts the key moments of her
grandmother's life, like other members of the family, Soledad participates in the narrative as well.
She establishes a dialogue between grandmother and granddaughter, a narration with two voices, as the
grandmother Soledad does not stop interrupting her granddaughter to specify the story and, all, to show his
disagreement with Celaya's narrative: "How you exaggerate! Where you get these ridiculous ideas from is
beyond me "(Cisneros, 2002: 98).
Between the two voices, therefore, an irremediable conflict is produced, since, such and as Celaya affirms
before one of the complaints of her grandmother, each narrator has a different version of the facts: "It
depends on whose truth you are talking about. The same story becomes a different story depending on
who is telling it "(Cisneros,2002: 166).
In the third part chapters, finally, the protagonist narrator narates another time of her life, her adolescence,
marked by new trips, new transits between borders. A new trip to Mexico, this time to pick up the
grandmother Soledad after the death of grandfather Narciso, the move of the whole family from Chicago to
San Antonio and, finally, the frustrated escape of Celaya with her boyfriend to Mexico D. F. realize the
liminal space inhabited by the adolescent Celaya. Following the family tradition, Celaya forges its identity
between spaces, which will allow it to elaborate a discourse of his own with which to finally assume the
multiculturalism of her family and accept yourself as a young Chicana The story that Celaya tells begins at
a border, at a traffic light that It marks the boundaries between two countries, Mexico and the United States.
The speaker protagonist, along with the rest of his family, composed of parents, brothers, uncles and
cousins, is ready to visit Mexico City, where the paternal grandparents live.
For this the family moves in three cars: a white Cadillac, a green Impalma and a red Chevrolet truck. The
three colors of the Mexican flag charge presence in these three cars, all of them well-known American
models. In this interstitial place that is the border, the protagonists of the story put I show how they
articulate both cultures. While in his speeches emphasize the differences of living on one side or the other,
their appearance at the beginning of the Novel announces, however, how this family of immigrants of
Mexican origin incorporates and combines elements of the two countries. On his trip between the two
countries, the Reyes family is presented as an intermediate terrain in which both cultures, in one way or
another, have a presence.
As Maya Socolovsky explains, in this first part the narrator describes a idealized Mexico, which occupies a
privileged position with respect to the United States (2013: 84). Although he never really emigrated from
there, Celaya feels the arrival to Mexico DF. as a return to the home, which is emotional and exciting at the
same time: "The rising in the chest, in the heart, finally. The road suddenly dipping and surprising us as
always. There it is! Mexico City! The capital. The DF. The capirucha. The center of the universe! (Cisneros,
2002: 25) However, this image of Mexico that the protagonist presents at the beginning of the novel does
not remain unchanged. When Celaya, already in the third part, returns to Mexico as a teenager and she
ventures alone through the streets of the capital, she perceives a space different from the one remembered.
Now that she is no longer a girl, the city presents a different image: "Men in the street, alone and in groups,
look at me and say things to me. - Where are you going, my queen? [...] I walk fast like I'm late, and keep
my eyes on the sidewalk "(Cisneros, 2002: 261). Finally, the vision of a drunk man that shows her genitals
shakes Lala suddenly and makes her forget the protagonist everything that this one had associated to
Mexico during childhood: Oh, it's his thing. [...] Come on, run! Run, run! My heart racing several
steps ahead of me. Oh, how ugly, ugly, ugly. A little shudder goes through me when I make my way around
the corner and turn back to the Grandmother's house on Destiny Street. I forget about the balloons, the milk
gelatins, the cookie vendors in front of the church, the pumpkin-flower quesadillas, the sandwich of cotton
wadded between my legs (Cisneros, 2002: 262). The text questions an essentialist conception of Mexico
City. The idealized image of the city and the country gives way to new experiences and new images. As a
result, the protagonist feels disconcerted. The new experiences displace their childhood memories and
reveal the traps hidden behind the speech that describes an idealized Mexico, about which the narrator
intends to articulate her story at the beginning of the novel. The perception of Mexico is not, then,
something fixed or unalterable. On the contrary, and as it happens to the protagonist, this varies with time.
Precisely at the end of the book, in the "pylon" (Cisneros, 2002: 433), an appendix added after the end of
the novel, it is discovered how the idealized image of Mexico responds to a reality, but to the narrative
construction of the one that imagines and tells the story: "And I do not know how it is with anyone else, but
for me these things, that song, that time, that place, are all bound together in a country I am homesick, that
does not exist anymore. That never existed. A country I invented. Like all emigrants caught between here
and there "(Cisneros, 2002: 434).
Lala acts in the same way at the beginning of the text, that is, creating a refined image of the country from
her perspective as the daughter of immigrants. Although she also knows Mexico thanks to the summer
visits, much of the information about the country is received from other narrations, those of her relatives,
who, from the United States, bring the Mexican culture closer to the protagonist. The Mexico that Celaya
presents at the beginning of the novel has, therefore, a great debt to fiction and narrative construction.
Celaya's knowledge of the country, as well as of culture and language, is, however, limited and confusing.
As her grandmother reminds her, Celaya is a girl from the other side who speaks Spanish with an accent.
This ambivalent relationship of the Celaya family with the Mexican culture is clearly manifested during the
trip to Acapulco. There Celaya and her family behave like foreign visitors, who cross the beaches of the
country protected under the classic tourist hats: "Except for Candelaria [...] everyone gets a silly hat. [...]
Straw hats with ACAPULCO stitched in orange yarn, two palm trees on either side, or maguey stitched in
green on one side and on the other, a Mexican man asleep under a hat "(Cisneros, 2002: 74). With their
attitude, they reproduce the dominant image of tourist and exotic Mexico, but in doing so, the repetition is
parodic and caricatural. Neither are the prototypical American tourists nor are the native Mexican
inhabitants. Or they are both and at the same time none. His behavior illustrates what Bhabha
conceptualizes as the "ambivalence of mimicry" (2002: 86), which sabotages the authority of dominant
discourses. The partial and incomplete imitation, as Bhabha indicates in his study of colonial politics, blurs
precisely the difference on which the imitated authority is based. As the repetition is not identical to the
original, he continues, the mimicry displaces the identity and questions the differences between one culture
and another. By dressing up and acting like an American family visiting an unknown and exotic Mexico,
Celaya and her family show that their behavior responds to a practice based on repetition and imitation. The
text thus destabilizes the conception of cultural difference as an essential feature.
The space that Celaya and his family inhabit is not a unique space; Unlike, it is an "in-between" space,
which results from the continuous crossing of borders. Precisely with this constant movement between
countries, the family of Lala problematizes the idea of border as stable separation between nations. Border
boundaries, so real in the maps of the atlas, are blurred in Celaya's narrative.
In front of what the maps reflect, to which a color change suffices to delimit the end of one country and the
beginning of another, the reality that reflects the story of Celaya is much more complex: "Not like in the
Triple A atlas from orange to pink, but at a stoplight in a rippled heat and dizzy gasoline stink, the United
States ends all at eleven "(Cisneros, 2002: 17).
At the beginning of the novel, when the girl Celaya narrates the first trips to Mexico, the border is perceived
as a solid barrier that delimits two worlds different Therefore, when crossing it, silence prevails. Lala and
her brothers, who have sung songs during the trip, stop doing it and get ready to Check the changes that the
new country has: We've crossed Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas singing all the songs we know [...]
But crossing the border, nobody feels like singing. [...] As soon as we cross the bridge everything switches
to another language. Toc, says the light switch in this country, at home it says click. Hink, say the cars at
home, here they say tán-tán-tán. [...] Sweet sweeter, colors brighter, the bitter more bitter (Cisneros, 2002:
16). However, later the limit is imperceptible, because it does not mean no obstacle during the trips of the
Reyes family: Chicago, Route 66 - Ogden Avenue past the giant Turtle Wax turtle – all the way to St.
Louis, Missouri, which Father calls by its Spanish name, San Luis. San Luis to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa,
Oklahoma, to Dallas. Dallas to San Antonio to Laredo on 81 till we are on the other side. Monterrey Saltillo
Matehuala San Luis Potosi. Querétaro Mexico City (Cisneros, 2002: 5).
Especially as the novel progresses, the border between the two countries loses rigidity and becomes a
porous space, which allows both sides elements of the two cultures converge (Socolovsky, 2013: 87). In the
third part, then, the differences between the United States and Mexico fade with greater force, because a
hybrid space is imposed, in which cultural references are intermingled diverse San Antonio, the city of
Texas to which Celaya moves during his adolescence, reflects the space "between-middle" inhabited by the
protagonist: We get to San Antonio in the early afternoon [...]. We drive past streets named Picoso, Hot and
Spicy Street; Skull, Skeleton Street; and Chuparrosa, Hummingbird Street. It's odd to see the names in
Spanish. Almost like being on the other side, but not exactly (Cisneros, 2002: 304).
The text highlights the importance of the place where they converge and find the cultures. These are not
isolated and opposed elements, which are used only to one or the other side of the border, but systems that
go beyond the limits border and can interact and combine with each other.
From this perspective, the city of San Antonio makes visible the space that Lala inhabits since childhood, a
space in which double cultural references coexist.
While at the beginning of the novel Celaya insists on presenting Mexico and the United States
United as two separate and differentiated worlds, guided, in part, as we have
seen, by the narrations about Mexico that he listens to his father and his grandmother, in the last part of the
novel, during the adolescence of the protagonist, she develops a growing awareness of her Chicano
condition, which articulates and combines elements of the two cultures present in his life.3 The combination
of two different cultural references makes him situate himself in an uncertain terrain, a third space. This
place is not a comfortable space, but from it the protagonist manages to recode and renegotiate the
meanings related to her identity and that of her family. In this third space, or space "between-middle", Lala
becomes aware of the hybrid character of his identity. Faced with the idea of a unique culture and a race
"Pure", the protagonist challenges the dominant binary logic and claims the possibility of an intermediate
terrain that combines and articulates the two cultural and linguistic systems that she knows. This uncertain
territory in which it is located does not grant it, as we have already indicated, a comfortable or privileged
position. Her Chicano status causes discomfort to both Mexicans and her grandmother, who criticize her for
having adopted the culture and language of the Americans, as well as white Americans, who feel threatened
by the presence of another culture and another language. The Chicano identity thus presents a significant
destabilizing feature, since it questions the notions of unity and exclusivity.
In these circumstances, Lala has to face not only the racism of white Americans, but also to the hostility of
other Chicana compañeras, who accuse Lala of believing herself superior to the rest and of speaking as a
"white girl": "Think you're so smart because you talk like a white girl" (Cisneros, 2002: 356). What bothers
some as much as others is the hybrid character of the protagonist narrator, who does not fit into the binary
logic that regulates the identities of difference. The mestizo features of Lala thus disconcert her white
classmates, because they do not recognize in Lala the stereotypical image of the Mexican: "Hey, hippie girl,
you Mexican? On both sides? / - Front and back, I say. / - You sure do not look Mexican "(Cisneros, 2002:
252). Lala's ironic response is disconcerting, because it displaces the logic that insists on classifying
individuals according to their place of origin and that of their families. Given the conception of a unique
and stable national identity, Lala claims the plural and hybrid nature of Mexicans:
There are the green-eyed Mexicans. The rich blond Mexicans. TheMexicans with the faces of Arab
sheiks. The Jewish Mexicans The big-footedas-a-German Mexicans The leftover-French Mexicans. The
compact short Mexicans The Tarahumara tall-as-desert-saguaro Mexicans. The Mediterranean
Mexicans The Mexicans withTunisian eyebrows. The negrito Mexicans of the double coast The Chinese
Mexicans. The curly-haired, freckled-faced, redheaded Mexicans The jaguar-lipped Mexicans. The
wide-as-a-Tula-tree ZapotecMexicans The Lebanese Mexicans. Look, I do not know what you're talking
about when you say I do not look Mexican (Cisneros, 2002: 353).
This hybrid conception of identity also confronts Lala with the others chicanas girls from San Antonio:
After repeated insults and scorn, Lala suffers a day the physical violence of her classmates, who beat her
and chase her with stones up the highway. In these moments the young protagonist suffers one of her major
identity crises, fed up with the incomprehension that has to be faced there where is it going: "I do not care, I
do not care. Get me a tie. Take me, dangle me from the bumper. I do not care, I never belonged here. I do
not know where I belonged anymore And the sting from the beating like nothing compared to how much I
hurt inside "(Cisneros, 2002: 256). However, in his escape from harassment and violence, Lala goes to the
highway. Although this contains an obvious danger, the protagonist also presents as his particular way of
salvation: "There's no choice but to scramble over the chain-link fence and make a run for it through the
interstate " (Cisneros, 2002: 256). Like the immigrants that arrive from Mexico, Lala traspass a limit, the
wire fence, to reach the highway, that is, a space intermediate, located between two edges or worlds, that
serves to connect some spaces with others. It is in this space, in principle dangerous and hostile, where Lala
hears a strange voice that pronounces its name: "Celaya. Somebody or something said my yam. Not 'Lala',
not 'La'. My real name "(Cisneros, 2002: 357) After hearing the voice, Lala overcomes the fear that leaves
her paralyzed and starts to run. The suffering experienced during the experience, materialized in wounds
and bruises, is part of the process of Lala's maturation, which little by little shapes and articulates his
personal identity: "When I got home, I lock myself in the bathroom, undress, and assess the damage,
examining all the parts of myself that are bruised, or skinned, or throbbing. Celaya I'm still myself. Still
Celaya. Still alive (Cisneros, 2002: 357). The traces of the beating they record in this way how difficult and
painful is the road that Celaya goes through.
Their situation in San Antonio, that "inter-media" space, is not easy, but it is in this uncomfortable terrain
where Celaya manages to pronounce his name and find, in short,a definition for itself.
In this definition, Celaya opposes those that to date had granted, the hybrid character of the Chicano identity
is fundamental. At the end of the novel, at her parents' anniversary party, Lala discovers that everything and
everyone who surround her in her life are connected. The present would not be what it is without the passed
 and this does not have a single origin, but several. Mexican culture has a important presence in his life, as
attested by the caramel shawl he inherited from his grandmother, who, in turn, inherited it from her mother:
I'm afraid, but there is nothing I can do but stare it in the eye. I bring the
tips of the candy rebozo up to my lips, and, without even knowing it, I'm
chewing on its fringe, its taste of cooked pumpkin familiar and comforting and
good, reminding me I'm connected to so many people, so many (Cisneros,
2002: 428).
The two cultural systems that you know can not be separated, but intertwined, like the threads of a rebozo.
This is how Lala describes her life, "with its dragon arabesques of voices and lives intertwined "(Cisneros,
2002: 424). Since this point of view, Lala manages to destabilize the insults and disdain received by have
diverse cultural references. The narrator claims its hybrid nature as something positive, that brings together
diverse elements. A little earlier, in Mexico, after being abandoned by her boyfriend, with whom she had
escaped to marry, Lala already announces her particular conception of humanity: "I look up, and the Virgin
looks down at me, and, honest to God, this sounds like a lie, but it's true. The universe a cloth, and all
humanity interwoven. Each and every person connected to me, and I connected to them, like the strands of a
rebozo "(Cisneros, 2002: 389). In the basilica of the city of Mexico D.F., the protagonist glimpses a world
without borders that separate or face. On the contrary, his world is described as a collective space, in which
harmonious form intertwines humanity in its entirety.

3. THE HYBRID VOICE: METATEXTUAL REFLECTIONS ON THE STORY

In the process of rewriting and resignification that the protagonist undertakes narrator, this destabilizes, as
we have seen, the fictions related to "identity cultural "established by official discourses. The radicality of
the critical procedure of the novel lies, however, in the questioning of the very concept of story, which is
characterized on several occasions as an illusion. On several occasions Lala puts into question her own
credibility as a narrator and underlines the importance of fantasy and invention: "I have to exaggerate. It's
just for the sake of the story. I need details Cisneros, 2002: 92). The voice narrator does not hide the work
of reconstruction that hides behind the story and thus sows in the readers doubts about the veracity of the
narrated stories: "Did I dream it or did someone tell I the story? I can not remember where the truth ends
and the talk begins "(Cisneros, 2002: 20). The boundary between historical truth and fiction is diluted as
the narration advances, because Lala does not hide the poetic licenses to which she resorts in her narrative
construction: "They're not lies, they're healthy lies. So as to fill in the gaps. You're just going to have to trust
me. It will turn out pretty in the end, I promise " (Cisneros, 2002: 188).
In this metatextual game, in which the characters of the novel reflect about the very act of narrating, the
dialogical structure adopted by the narration in the second part of the novel. The story, centered on the life
of the grandmother Soledad, is released from the univocalidad, as well as the premise of a single truth. The
The cultural hybridity of the world of Celaya and her family converges with another type of hybridity, that
is, the hybridity of the statements. The dialogue established by Celaya and her grandmother he clearly
visualizes the concept of dialogicity of the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin.
For Bakhtin, hybridity, always present in the language, discovers the capacity of one of the voices to
ironicize and unmask the other voice (Bakhtin, 1990). Versus the idea of a story with a single pretense of
value and truth, the story of Soledad and his family is narrated from a dialogical, polyphonic space, in
which they "sound" different positions of meaning. The narrative of Soledad's life thus illustrates what
Bakhtin conceptualized as "intentional hybridity", which deliberately results self-reflexive and capable of
dismantling authority. In this second part of the novel, the narrative is organized from the discussion and the
discrepancies between the two characters, which reveals the complexity of the production processes of
sense, that they have to be continuously negotiated.
As we discovered almost at the end of the novel, Lala tells the story of her grandmother and the rest of his
family to help Soledad to cross definitively "to the other side". After the attack to the heart of Inocencio, the
father of the protagonist, the grandmother, already dead, she appears again before Lala. So that Soledad
does not take with her Inocencio, Celaya makes a deal with his grandmother: he will have to tell his story,
Otherwise, Soledad will remain, as it has done until then, in a place Intermediate between life and death:
"I'm in the middle of nowhere. I can not 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? "(Cisneros, 2002: 408). Grandma Soledad has been
trapped somewhere between life and death because of the mistakes made and, Above all, his inability to
narrate his life and thus articulate an explanation. Lala, without However, it does have the ability to tell
stories and this is how you can help your grandmother, assuming the role of "narrative coyote":
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’re the only one who can see me (Cisneros, 2002: 408).
The coyote is a person who receives money for transporting in secret to irregular immigrants across the
border between Mexico and the United States. In this sense, as Heather Alumbaugh points out in her
analysis of the narrative voice in Caramelo, the characterization of Lala's narrative practice as coyote
announces the transgressive character of the narrative of the protagonist (Alumbaugh, 2010: 54). Of the
same way as the continuous trips that the Reyes family makes between Mexico and The United States
questions the conception of the border as a rigid separation and difficult to cross, the narrative voice
acquires a subversive character in the novel, it is capable of transgressing boundaries, both spatial and
temporal. As if it about an illegal or contraband activity, Lala recovers the story of her grandmother and
organizes it narratively. For this, the transit between borders is constant: between Mexico and the United
States, but also between life and death, as well as between past and present.
In telling the story of his family, Celaya discovers that, beyond the events occurred, it is the narrative
instance that organizes the story and produces a certain direction. As his father has taught him, so inclined
to lies pious, the truth plays a little significant role, because what really important it is the story that is told,
the way in which the facts are presented. In this sense, when grandmother Soledad demands that Celaya tell
the truth, the narrator He argues that the facts are not enough to create a story:
- Why do you constantly have to impose your filthy politics? Can not you just tell
the facts?
- And what kind of story would be this with just facts?
- The truth!
- It depends on whose truth you're talking about (Cisneros, 2002: 156).
Lala thus denies the possibility of an objective narration about the facts. On the contrary, the narration is
always conditioned by the narrator voice, which has the ability Performative to build a certain truth. This
reflection on the same act of narrating is not only applicable to the narrative exercise that Lala does about
the life of her Grandma and the rest of the family. With the metatextual reflections enunciated, the text not
only reveals the fictitious framework of it, but also discovers the process that governs any narrative practice
The narratives that both Mexico and the United States have built on the own country and the own history
are discovered, then, as such in the text. In this way, the novel not only creates a third space for the
protagonist, in which it finds alternatives to the dominant definitions about its identity, but also analyzes the
existing totalizing narratives, whose authority is continuously questioned.
In telling the story of his grandmother and the rest of the family, Celaya destabilizes the fictions articulated
from the idea of a fixed and stable national identity. In numerous occasions, and with its characteristic
irony, Celaya refers to the origin Spanish of his Mexican family: "Say what they say, their blood was
Spanish, something to remember when extolling their racial superiority over their mixed-blood neighbors
"(Cisneros, 2002: 163). The myth of the purity of Spanish blood is, without However, ridiculed shortly
after, when the narrator emphasizes the fictional character of the history of the family: "Like all the chronic
mitoteros, the Reyes invented a past [...] It was a pretty story and told with such fine attention to detail,
neighbors who knew better said nothing, charmed by the rococo embroidery that came to be a Kings talent
"(Cisneros, 2002: 163). The text makes clear how the identity of the Reyes family is a construct, the result
of a narrative process. In the same way, the identity of a country is also written from the repetition of
fictions, which they share a larger number of people On the other hand, the text also questions the narrated
stories about States United, above all, those who give an account of their relationship with Mexico. In front
of the version official, the narrator's voice refers to certain little-known episodes of the Mexican and North
American history. At the end of the novel, in addition, Cisneros presents a chronology that traces the
historical relationship between Mexico and United from 1519 until the date of publication of the novel. As
it is presented in the chronological table, the migratory flows between Mexico and the States are constant,
despite official attempts to determine the limits between one and another country. The border is presented
as an arbitrary limit, which varies as throughout history and whose limits are protected through violent
practices. From similarly, in the numerous footnotes contained in the novel, the narrator's voice gives an
account of certain little-known episodes in the history of Mexico, focusing on many of the cases in the
conflictive border crossing:
In 1915 more than half of the Mexican-American population emigrated from the Valley of Texas into the
war-torn Mexico fleeing the Texas Rangers, rural police ordered to suppress an armed rebellion of
Mexican-Americans protesting AngloAmerican authority in South Texas. Supported by U.S. cavalry,
their bullying led to the death to hundreds, some say thousands, of Mexicans and Mexican Americans,
who were executed without a trial. […] So often were Mexicans killed at the hands of “Rinches”, that the
San Antonio Express- News said it “has become so commonplace” that “it created little or no interest.”
Little or no interest unless you were Mexican (Cisneros, 2002: 142).
In this version, the narrator combines historical data, newspaper headlines and popular beliefs. While the
text emphasizes the historical - and not fictional - nature of the data, this is presented in turn as something
interpretable, as susceptible to be narrated in different ways. With the last sentence the author shows, In
addition, how much history changes according to the perspective from which it is narrated. His will is
precisely to tell the story from the perspective of Mexicans, silenced to date by official media.
In telling the story of his grandmother Soledad and the rest of his family, Lala not only acts as a coyote,
helping his grandmother to cross "to the other side"; he also gets Give voice to your grandmother, your
father and all those who are not usually heard. The Lala's ease of speech contrasts with that of other
members of her family, unable to find a language to tell their story. This is what happens to grandmother
Soledad, who, after the death of her mother and the abandonment of her father, he manages to acquire his
own language: "Poor Soledad. She understood Eleuterio because she was as mute as she was, maybe more
because she had not piano " (Cisneros, 2002: 151). Thanks to Lala, however, Grandma Soledad gets build
the story of his life, that even the story of his granddaughter had been repressed and silenced.
The secrets and hidden stories of the Reyes family are organized, then, by the only narrator voice capable of
bringing them to light. With a language that alternates English and Spanish, Lala configures her narrative
voice, which not only renounces being the only organizing voice of history, but also to use a single
language. It is with this voice with which Lala recovers the stories of her family and, with them, that of all
the community of Mexicans and Chicanos who have transformed for years the American landscape. Her
hybrid identity allows her to recover the stories silenced by official narratives and renegotiate fictions and
narrated stories about their family and other Mexican immigrants. In this process, however, Lala does not
presents as a unique and stable narrative voice. In this way, the protagonist It manages to redefine not only
the fictions related to American identities and Mexican, but also, and above all, the very concept of story.

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