The Inextricable Weaving of Chicana Identity in Sandra Cisneros\u27s Caramelo

As a form of resistance to the centuries-long systemic discrimination against and marginalization of Mexican Americans by the dominant Anglo-American structures of power, Chicana/o authors have been striving to revise grand narratives, concepts of borders and borderlands between Mexico and the United States. Due to deeply rooted gender discrimination, Chicana writers had to counter also the traditional patriarchal cultural notions and practices of their own community, reflected in the fiction of Sandra Cisneros. Her novel Caramelo, published in 2002, presents the necessity of straddling borders between truth and the imaginary, history and fiction, myths and new interpretations of Chicana identity formation processes. With complex and multiple genres and meanings, Cisneros\u27s novel Caramelo offers a host of personal, autobiographical experiences and recollections imbricated with historiographic aspects and myths that are key to Mexican American identity construction. Tracing the fates of the novel\u27s protagonist and her family, Cisneros rewrites the past of those whose histories were neglected or forgotten in hegemonic narratives and illuminates the consequences of Mexican dislocation, liminality and language barriers. Thanks to the interweaving of revised traditional Chicano/a cultural symbols, including the pre-Columbian legacy, with Gloria Anzaldúa\u27s concepts of Borderlands and the new mestiza, the novel exemplifies criticism and revision of borders in the construction of multi-layered Chicana identity through feminist optics