On The Construction Of The Chicano/a Community In Caramelo

Caramelo is the very representative novel written by Sandra Cisneros who is the famous Mexican-American writer. It starts from the present and traces back to the 17 thand 18th century, and explores the whole Mexican-American’s journey of root-seeking represented by the family Reyes between Mexico and the United States. All the time, Mexican-American has been in the dilemmas of multi-marginalities and described as the invisible group. However,Cisneros sets Mexican-American against the background of the violent globalism in the U.S.A, regards the border as a boundary and converging point, and takes travelling as a performative manner to demonstrate that Mexican-American holds a very long history and affluent spatial resources. The constant crossing of borderland, the multifaceted pursuit of history as well as the diverse exploration of traditional culture in Caramelo show the plurality of the spatial resource. The spatial plurality is reflected not only in the vast geological space,but also the profound historical space as well as the mixed cultural space in which marginality plays a key role. Thus, Caramelo is called as a kaleidoscopic epic novel.This thesis applies the theory of “thirdspace” advanced by Edward W. Soja, a famous American postmodern geologist, to analyzing the construction of the Chicano/a community in Caramelo, demonstrates the urgency and necessity of the present spatial construction, and gives some reference for Mexican-American to resolve the spatial crisis resulted by the longterm ignorance and invisibility and the crisis of identification with the ethnic community caused by constant lapse inward because of marginalization. The thirdspace holds dual meanings theoretically. One refers to a strategy and thinking pattern bubbled with radical openness, imagination and subversion, and the other signifies a promised sphere or space that is both imaginary and realistic. In Caramelo, the Chicano/a community is just the crystallized thirdspace in which the real and the imagined coexist, the individual experiences and the collective appeals interact, and the margin and the center transit. It is full of crossing,infiltration and inheritance.This thesis discusses the construction of the Chicano/a community, namely the thirdspace, in terms of geographical, historical and cultural space. The first part explores the crossing of the geographical borderland. It mainly includes three parts, the probing excursion in Mexico, the circulated journey between the south and the north, and the sustained expansion of body in the U.S.A. The crossing of the borderland explains that the territory of Chicano/a community is no longer the original limited one, but covers Mexico, the middlepart and the U.S.A. The second part illustrates the infiltrating of family history which carries out in the crossing course. Both the individual and the collective gain knowledge about the past, keep thinking about the history, reflect on the present and then start to construct their own history when they are picturing the dislocated family members, narrating the family stories and disclosing the imaginary family glories. The infiltrating of family history proves that the construction of the thirdspace in historicality is not isolated from but connected with the construction of the geographical space. The third part focuses on the Mexican-American’s inheriting of hybrid cultures. It is chiefly displayed in the amphibian applying of the mixed language, the multifaceted transition of mestizo identity as well as the cooperative writing of the caramelo rebozo. The course reveals that the completion of the thirdspace construction is based on the inheriting of cultural hybridity and it is under the affirmation of culture that the geological space and historical land are bestowed with meanings and significance.Through analyzing the construction of the Chicano/a community, the thesis holds that Cisneros advocates a new conception of space, and attempts to explore how for MexicanAmerican to construct a new self and to break the archaic shackles so as to search the development of Mexican-American space in a more open and initiative manner. The spatial construction in new epoch is full-urgent and pressing for Mexican-American. The construction of the Chicano/a community enables Mexican-American to raise its social statue in the United States, and provides them dependence when they confront with the hegemony of the U.S.A. and the wavy globalism in the future. Soja’s thirdspace endows MexicanAmerican immense imagination and openness which offers the spatial construction great vitality and productivity as well as inexhaustible possibilities.