the mouth of the wolf

In her novel Caramelo (Random House, Inc, 2002), Sandra Cisneros follows the life of Celaya Reyes, whose family crosses the border annually between Chicago and Mexico City; the story spans multiple timelines as well as cities, jumping back and forth between spaces and the memories they inspire. In Celaya's world, the border between the US and Mexico is rife with visceral sensations; "Sweets sweeter, colors brighter, the bitter more bitter," she explains as her family crosses into Mexico (17). Mexico becomes a country of synergy, where indigenous mythologies mesh with Catholic tradition, Spanish blood mixes with Indian, and the truth becomes conflated with lies. America (and specifically Chicago), on the other hand, is a cold place, dusty, and gray. When the Reyes family moves to San Antonio, a city closer to the Mexican border, tensions arise between Celaya, who, though she was born in the US, has frequently traveled to Mexico, and the other Mexican American girls at her school, who take pride in their Chicana identity:

Is hell Cookie Cantú and her yappy perras talking shit like, —Brown Power! Making fists and chanting, —Viva la raza. Or, —I'm Chicana and proud, wha'chu wanna do about it, pendeja? [...] When they catch me alone, —Bitch! Pretending like you're Spanish and shit. [...] They call me bolilla when they cross my path, or worse, gabacha. Who wants to be called a white girl? I mean, not even white girls want to be called white girls. (354)

The animosity between Celaya and Cookie is particularly striking in relation to Nicholas de Genova's text "Locating a Mexican Chicago in the Space of the U.S. Nation-State," in which de Genova discusses the transnational practices of Mexican migrants as well as the Chicano/a population living in Chicago. For example, de Genova discusses the contributions of a man named Felipe, who raised money in his community to send back to the family of a murdered man in his small, poor hometown; thus the presence of Mexico among the migrants in Chicago is both an abstract and tangible reality.

In his book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001), Hamid Nafici discusses three distinct forms of what he terms "accented cinema": the exilic, the diasporic, and the ethnic. To paraphrase, the exilic deals with the "then" and "there," the diasporic with the "there" and "now," and the ethnic with the "here" and "now." What they all have in common, though, is a profound understanding of "the tensions of marginality and difference [...] liminal subjectivity and interstitial location in society..." (10). In other words, "accented filmmakers," despite the vast differences in the films they create (e.g. The Joy Luck Club, El Norte, etc.), all share a specific interweaving of time and space, in which the characters pine for a lost home, or try to combine their past with their present.

Similarly, the transnational subjects of de Genova's text and Aihwa Ong's text, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (discussing Chinese, specifically Hong Kong, migrants in the US), inhabit a liminal space between nations, in which they simultaneously belong to and are foreign to two separate but interconnected nations. Ong writes, "Although citizenship is conventionally thought of as based on political rights and participation within a sovereign state, globalization has made economic calculation a major element in diasporan subjects' choice of citizenship, as well as in the ways nation-states redefine immigration laws." (112) Indeed, the relationship between economy and citizenship remains a focal point in both Ong and de Genova's texts: laborers and professionals often migrate to the US to make money, which they use to support relatives in their home country, or in some cases attempt to save to invest in real estate in their home country. (Interestingly, Cisneros' novel flips this narrative: after the Little Grandfather dies, the Awful Grandmother sells her house in Mexico City and, later, helps her family buy real estate in Texas.)

Again, gender roles are important as well. Ong writes, "the masculine subjectivity of this elite diasporan community is defined primarily in terms of the individual's role as a father or a son, that is, his role in maintaining the paternal/filial structure that both nurtures and expands family wealth." (126) De Genova: "[Felipe's] explanation of his own decision to migrate ... [is] meaningfully framed in terms of the responsibilities of the patriarchal male role as 'head of a family.'" (133) In Caramelo, it is the Awful Grandmother's three sons who migrate to Chicago to work, while her daughter stays in Mexico; the Little Grandfather and his father also at certain points in their lives lived and worked in the US as well. While women are not absent from the migrant narrative, it is the men whose labor is focal; their societal role as breadwinners in different but similar ways motivate, and perhaps even allow, them to cross borders in order to gain more money to support their families.