Family Inheritance in latinx literature: a comparison of caramelo and the wondrous life of oscar wao
By Alyssa Cook
Often, when people think of the Latinx community, the first thing they think of is family. As Nichole M. Flores wrote in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, “Family stands as the grounding institution for social life among Latinas/os; it serves as the main paradigm for all social relationships in these communities… Latina/o personal and family identity is transformed by building family-like relationships with other families” (58). But, while being close to family is an admirable trait, it has become so ingrained in the thoughts of Americans that it has become a stereotype. Many tend to subvert la familia into this mass of labels and signposts, yet there are counterculturalist creators whose purpose is to critique these notions and use the Latinx family as a framework to challenge ideals put upon them by oppressors. Sandra Cisneros and Junot Díaz disrupted the conventions of la familia to look at histories of racism and sexism as well as dictatorship in their respective novels, Caramelo and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Inherited History in Caramelo
Caramelo is the word for “caramel” in the Spanish language and provides the title to Sandra Cisneros’s 2002 novel about a young girl (Celaya, nicknamed Lala) discovering her relationship to her family history and thereafter finding herself. In Caramelo, Cisneros illustrates this process by transcribing her protagonist’s family history onto tangible objects––especially textiles––which serve to suggest the interconnectedness of the family history itself, while also leaving room for incompleteness and alterations.
The most obvious use of textiles as a symbol for the protagonist’s, Celaya’s, family history occurs in the latter part of the novel, when she goes to the basilica in Mexico City and describes seeing “the wretched of the earth, and [she] among them” before she comments on her experience of la fe. After viewing the tilma of Juan Diego, emblazoned with the image of the Virgen of Guadalupe, she narrates, “I didn’t expect this. I mean the faith. I mixed up the Pope with all this, this light, this energy, this love. The religion part can go out the window. But I didn’t realize about the strength and power of la fe. . . . Everybody needs a lot. The whole world needs a lot” (388-389). While Lala takes little stock in religion, she sees much in the tilma itself, the woven threads of which provide her epiphany and show her everyone is in need and everyone is connected in the tapestry of humanity. The tilma also provides Lala with insight to her own family’s history, showing her the image of La Virgen––who is both Spanish and Indigenous––as a revered and holy figure. Seeing a woman who has an Indigenous heritage in such a position indicates to Lala that she should not be ashamed of any part of who she is, no matter how her family views the Indigenous and her own illegitimate half-sister Candelaria.
Textiles as a symbol of familial interconnectedness is also present in the work life of the family members. The brothers Reyes––Celaya’s father and uncles––run an upholstery business. Cisneros writes “Father’s hands are numb from working on a set of lounge chairs for the Saint Anthony Hotel. Leather is rough on the hands. His hands calloused from tugging the twine hard and taut. After six days, he comes home and can't untie his own shoes” (358). Lala’s father works himself to the bone for his family. He is desperate to have a concrete provision to honor the people before him as well as his children, but Inocencio fails to recognize he does not appreciate or even acknowledge the contribution of women to his family and, in some cases, does not even recognize them as being a part of his family at all, like he does with Candelaria. Even though Cisneros is making a statement about the connection of family, she is also addressing the lack of respect of women in the Reyes family.
While there are not typically physical gaps in the textiles Cisneros describes in the text (rebozos, for example, have a tight weave, and the the Reyes brothers often use leather in their furniture projects), there is a rawness in their hand-woven nature. Indeed, some of the textiles featured in Cisneros’s novels are still works-in-progress—they were paused during their making. As a symbol of the family history, the textile as a work-in-progress allows for silences and invention to fill in the gaps. An example of this is the Awful Grandmother’s rebozo. The narrator describes the incompleteness of this heirloom, describing it and stating, “Even with half its fringe hanging unbraided like mermaid’s hair it was an exquisite rebozo with five tiras, the cloth a beautiful blend of toffee, licorice, and vanilla stripes flecked with black and white. . . . The shawl was . . . completely unsellable because of the unfinished rapacejo. Eventually it was forgotten, and Soledad was allowed to claim it as a plaything” (94). The rawness and incompleteness in the textile is a symbol for the family history and the stories it tells. A beautiful blend of white, black, and browns create an intricate and unfinished piece of art that adorns the neck of the Awful Grandmother and later the head of Lala. The colors of the rebozo are meaningful; they represent the different racial configurations in Mexican and Mexican American life. The nature of the rebozo being unfinished demonstrates that some strands are not as recognized as others and people, like Candelaria, who have “less palatable” skin tones or identities are not suitable for la familia at all.
The rebozo is also a way to understand the narrative itself. Cisneros begins her novel with a disclaimer: “The truth, these stories are nothing but story. . . . I have invented what I do not know and exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy lies. If, in the course of my inventing, I have inadvertently stumbled on the truth, perdónenme.” This idea of “healthy lies” explains the efforts to correct the incompleteness of the family history, which was previously filled with silences––like the unfinished rebozo––due to race, gender, and power. When the Awful Grandmother speaks to Lala about her role as narrator of her past, she asks, “Why did I think I could expect any understanding from you? You have the sensitivity of an ax murderer. You’re killing me with these lies you’re telling. . . . Don’t you have any self-respect? I’m never going to tell you anything again.” Celaya responds, “The less you tell me, the more I have to imagine, the easier it is for me to understand you. Nobody wants to hear your invented happinesses. It’s your troubles that make a good story. Who wants to hear about a nice person? The more terrible you are, the better the story” (205). Lala wants to tell a good story, but that does not necessarily mean it will be an accurate one. She wants her family’s history, and therefore her history, to be one people cannot ignore. Celaya is afraid her history will be forgettable and insignificant so she invents details to make it better. “Better” here doesn’t just mean more interesting, but more accurate; “better” is the infidelity, poverty, sexual objectification, indigenous roots, and intersectionality Lala focuses on in the novel. In doing so, the narrative style fills in what was previously left unsaid––it finishes the rebozo.
The details that Lala recalls hinge on vivid imagery tied to cloth and textiles. Indeed, as during Lala’s viewing of Juan Diego’s tilma, textiles are featured prominently whenever Lala has an important transformation regarding how race, gender, and power play into her family history. For example, when Candelaria tries to play mata rile rile ron with Celaya and her cousins, Lala recalls:
Candelaria smiling her big corn teeth smile, skinny legs drawn beneath her. [She is not wearing] underpants. Not exactly. Not little flowers and elastic, not lace and smooth cotton, but a coarse pleat of cloth between her legs, homemade shorts wrinkled and dim as dish towels. . . . The game ends as suddenly as it began. . . . When [Candelaria] gets up finally and comes toward me I don’t know why, I run. (36)
Although Lala is at first infatuated with Candelaria, begging to hold her hand in a game, at this moment she realizes the differences between her and the other girl. Candelaria’s homemade, sullied undergarments are a symbol of the differences between her and Celaya based on race, class, and nation: Candelaria is Indigenous, while Celaya is mestizo(of both Spanish and Indigenous descent); Candelaria is poor, while Celaya is more privileged; Candelaria is Mexican, while Celaya is American. When Lala is confronted with Candelaria’s intimate garments, the bunched fabric around her legs, she reacts with disgust and shame. This is both at their difference––but perhaps, although at the time the narrative does not make this clear, at their sameness.
The next alteration happens in the relationship between Lala and the Awful Grandmother. At first, Celaya hated her grandmother, but after detailing her story and learning all she had been through, the Awful Grandmother became Soledad. Soledad was not hated, just pitied and loved. This juncture comes to the readers when Cisneros writes, “That’s why I think the Awful Grandmother, who couldn't let go of everyone else’s life when she was living, can't let go of this life now that she's dead. But what does this have to do with me?” (363) The protagonist reaches an understanding of her elder and gains a new respect for the Awful Grandmother. She comes to an understanding that Soledad was not awful, just in pain and dealing with the trauma she had experienced.
In Caramelo, images of textiles became a way to pass down lessons learned and stories told so the next generation could make something of them. That is what Cisneros wanted to do for her character Lala and for her readers: give her something to attach to. A family history, a piece of furniture, a rebozo: all of these things play a part in creating a narrative of inherited histories in this novel, and they must be recognized and appreciated for the skill and craftsmanship Cisneros had in order to create it.
Inherited Trauma in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The definition of trauma from the DSM-5 includes the aftereffects of “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence,” but researchers have lately suggested it can be passed from generation to generation through “epigenetic inheritance.” They assert the children of people who have experienced trauma may actually have physiological alterations due to the trauma their parents experienced. According to Amy Lehrner and Rachel Yehuda, “A body of research has grown showing that offspring of trauma survivors and combat veterans, even offspring without PTSD, have HPA axis alterations similar to those observed in samples with PTSD” (1767). Trauma, then, may be inherited individually––and possibly culturally––affecting generation after generation of a family line. In the 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, author Junot Díaz makes a similar suggestion, asserting that Cabral-De León family’s history is defined not by descent alone, but by trauma.
As Dominicans, the Cabral-De León family have been deeply affected by the Trujillo dictatorship and its human rights abuses––this is the source of their collective trauma. The novel describes how Beli, Oscar’s mother, is at one point beaten so badly for being associated with the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic that she loses her pregnancy. Here, it appears trauma will sever the family line rather than inform it. Yet before he describes Beli’s beating, Díaz’s narrator states, “Dominicans are Caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena. How else could we have survived what we have survived?” (149). This rhetorical question serves several functions. First, it is a comment on Beli’s individual, strong personality. Second, it positions the history of the Dominican Republic within the broader history of the Caribbean: a history defined in large part by European colonization, Indigenous genocide, Black enslavement, and U.S. imperialism. In doing so, Díaz connects Beli’s beating not only to the Trujillo dictatorship, but to this longer and broader history of traumatic events. The personal and the historical, then, become deeply intertwined with each other via trauma. Beli would not be herself if she were not Dominican, and to be Dominican is to be embedded in a history of trauma she could pass along to her children, although the trauma itself prevents that inheritance this time.
The novel, however, knows this inheritance is possible, and insists Beli has inherited trauma through the abuse she and her loved ones suffered when she was younger. Indeed, if trauma is not inherited epigenetically by her, she certainly passes abuse on to her children through physical means. Beli is a very abusive mother. She inflicts the same trauma onto her children that she herself experienced. There are several moments in the novel where she hits or berates her children, but one of the most impactful descriptions of Beli as a mother comes from her daughter, Lola. In one of the only sections of the book Lola narrates, she articulates, “You don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams” (56). This callous and uncaring attitude is paired with moments of true love, like when Beli professes she would die for Lola on a telephone call. While one might characterize the experiences of the De Leóns as unstable, Díaz reveals what remains constant both in the family history and the history of the Dominican Republic: trauma. He showcases throughout his novel that trauma can in fact be inherited, or replicated, through genetics and generations.
Symbols of trauma also recur for family members across generations. Visions and/or hallucinations appear for all the family members––often the same ones. This is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Beli and Oscar have similar hallucinations; both see a man with no face. Beli is the first to see these visions, saying, “[She] didn’t know if it was the heat or the two beers she drank. . . but our girl could have sworn that a man sitting in a rocking chair in front of one of the hovels had no face and he waved at her as she passed” (135). Oscar has a similar experience later in the novel, when he saw “a lone man sitting in his rocking chair,” and “for a moment Oscar could have sworn the dude had no face” (298). Oscar sees the man without a face again later in the novel when he is getting beaten by two men. He notes that he was “sure that he was being beaten by three men, not two, that the faceless man from in front of the colmado was joining them” (299). This faceless man is not only a manifestation of past trauma, but an active participant in accelerating and participating in present trauma. There is something to be said about the mother and son seeing the same hallucination. Díaz is trying to show that trauma is the defining characteristic of their family, almost like a dominant physical trait or a sacred family heirloom handed down from generation to generation. This figure shows the ongoing and ever-present role of trauma in this family history.
The man without a face is not the only symbol of trauma handed down from Beli to Oscar. There is another figure, a sort of holy creature that appears to them in times of need. When Beli had been beaten within an inch of her life for undermining the Trujillo regime and lost her unborn child “there appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt” (149). By shocking her out of her stupor, the mongoose ensured she would survive. It gave her hope and told her if she did not pick herself up and save herself, her future children would not exist. While, due to her miscarriage, it at first appears as thought this trauma will not be inherited, the mongoose is a harbinger of her children, securing a future for both Beli and them, even if a future dogged by traumatic experience and remembrance. The mongoose does something similar for Oscar during his suicide attempt. Díaz writes, “Later, when he would describe it, he would call it the Golden Mongoose, but even he knew that wasn’t what it was. It was very placid, very beautiful. Gold-limned eyes that reached through you, not so much in judgement or reproach but for something far scarier” (190). This vision distracted Oscar long enough that he was unsuccessful in ending his life. Though he was gravely injured, he was alive. The mongoose––a shared hallucination––breeds hope where there previously was none for both mother and son, yet in doing so, in ensuring their survival, also demonstrates trauma is shared within the De León family.
Like a characteristic facial feature, physiological expressions of trauma are also inherited in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. They are expressed, for example, in embodied ways, such as Oscar’s diets and Lola’s athletic achievements, both of which seem to be efforts––no matter how unsuccessful––to purge or to run from the traumatic past. Oscar was overweight and desperately wanted to be the type of Dominican man he was supposed to be (which is to say macho, dominating, and masculinist). Because of this, “He tried a couple of times to exercise, leg life, sit-ups, walks around the block in the early morning, that sort of thing, but he would notice how everybody else had a girl but him and he would despair, plunging right back into eating, Penthouses, designing dungeons, and self-pity” (25). Because he did not fulfill the hypermasculine cultural ideas embraced by other Dominican men, his ineptitude left a lasting imprint on his psyche and he suffered for it. Oscar constantly yearned for women he could never have, constantly thinking about sex and being macho, but as Yunior stated, “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock” (11). He was not a “real Dominican man” as legitimized and embodied by the Trujillato. Indeed, the Trujillo regime maintained a strict, thorough control over the people of the Dominican Republic through the use of violence, sexual and physical. When Oscar fails to adhere to the standards set forth by his history and country of origin, he is repeatedly traumatizing himself. Oscar’s diets are an attempt to rid himself of this trauma through the recovery of control the Trujillato held for so long.
Oscar was not the only one compensating because he was not living up to cultural standards, though. After refusing to be the “perfect Dominican daughter” or “perfect Dominican slave” for her mother, Lola took up track in Santo Domingo (56). She said her friend “[Rosío] must have known something [Lola] didn’t because [Lola’s] now [their] school’s top runner in the 400 meters and under. That [Lola has] talent at this simple thing never ceases to amaze [her]. . . . [She’s] got like no fat left on [her], and the musculature of [her] legs impresses everyone, even [her]” (71). Lola’s skill as a runner is nearly as advanced as her skill at running away from her problems. It is her coping mechanism to survive her family's Dominican past and the unknowable future. Lola may be able to outrun her classmates, but she is not able to outrun her inheritance.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz tells the story of the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo regime, the story of a teenage boy adjusting to life, and the story of powerful women all at the same time. His biggest success, however, is how he managed to anchor the Cabral-De León family history around the inheritance of trauma. From the near-death experiences of Beli to the actual death of Oscar, Díaz tells a story which detailed several facets of trauma and let his characters grow in opposition to and with guidance from them.
Conclusion
The novels themselves are treasures in their own right, full of Chicanx and Dominican history and pride, but what do the common themes of family and inheritance say about Latinx culture and writing? Though they approached these themes in different ways, Cisneros and Díaz created worlds in which their characters discovered something that was more than themselves: heritage. It was this heritage which allowed the respective protagonists to reunite their families and become, in a sense, whole again. It can be argued that the inheritances in Caramelo and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are representative of a larger theme in the lives of Latinx people around the world, that acceptance of oneself, culture, family, and the communion between the three are necessary for happiness. I, however, argue Cisneros and Díaz did not lean into the stereotypes of the Latinx family, but instead used those stereotypes to legitimize the traumatic and negative things inflicted upon them by oppressors, who are often the character’s family. Celaya and Oscar met very different ends, but their stories accept that families––even Latinx ones––are not without fault.
Works Cited
Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo: a Novel. New York : Vintage Books, 2002.
Díaz, Junot, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York : Riverhead Books, 2007.
Flores, Nichole M. “Latina/o Families: Solidarity and the Common Good.” Journal of the
Society of Christian Ethics, vol. 33, no. 2, Sept. 2013, pp. 57–72. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=phl&AN=PHL2217011&site=ehost-live.
Yehuda, Rachel, and Amy Lehrner. “Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms.” World Psychiatry: Official Journal of the World Psychiatric Association, vol. 17(3), 2018, 243-257, doi:10.1002/wps.20568.