SOURCE: Cujec, Carol. “Caramel-Coated Truths and Telenovela Lives: Sandra Cisneros Returns with an Ambitious Novel about the Latino Community.” World and I 18, no. 3 (March 2003): 228.

In the following essay, Cujec discusses the dominant themes and influences of Caramelo.

In her new novel Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros bathes our senses in Latino culture as we accompany her characters walking the scorched sands of Acapulco, buying shoes at Chicago's Maxwell Street flea market, listening to a grandmother complain about the mangoes, and eventually finding their destinies and their destinations. Caramelo loops and spirals among four generations, traveling from Mexico City to Chicago to Texas and back in eighty-six chapters. Cisneros admits that this is her most ambitious and challenging work, which is why it took her eight years to complete.

Cisneros was the first Chicana writer to emerge on the mainstream literary scene in the 1980s. Her first novel, The House on...