too many tamales. gary soto. (82)

my uncle boon used to share a joke that went like this:

q: why do mexicans have tamales on christmas?

a: so they could have something to unwrap!

no exactly pc but hilarious nonetheless and in that case the epitome of my uncle boon.

it's only been recently that i have equated christmas time with tamale time! i never realized this as a kid. though i didn't like tamales as a kid so that could be the reason for my ignorance. however now i am a tamale fanatic and look forward to christmas because it means an abundance of tamales, it means tamales for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! and seriously they are little bundles of joy.

since it is christmas time and i love tamales, i decided to check out "too many tamales". i hadn't read the book before but i think i saw it on reading rainbow.

"too many tamales" is the story of a girl maria who loses her mom's diamond ring in the mass while tamale making. she discovered the lost after the tamales were made so she and her cousins than eat the tamales trying to find it. does maria find the ring? if you want to know than you should check this book out!

so the story premise is cute but the storyline is kinda weak. first of all, the title, its blasphemous! there is no such thing as too many tamales. second, there is no way that any family would not notice that the kids were eating all of the tamales. if this happened in my house, i would have been called out for being a porker and scolded for being greedy. third, the kids ate like 6 tamales a piece and complained that it was too much. again, maybe i had a big appetite but 6 tamales would be nothing for the kid version of me. it's definitely nothing for the adult version of me.

this aside, it is a great story and especially great because it captures an important christmas tradition, tamale making. and well of course, tamale eating!

ps its things like this that make me grateful i grew up in delano.

the three little tamales. eric a. kimmel. (81)

when looking for "the chanukkah guest", i came across this book written by the author. with my love of tamales, there was no way to i could pass this up.

"the three little tamales" is a updated (and in my opinion, cuter) version of the three little pigs. the story starts off with the three little tamales running away from a taqueria after seeing a tortilla roll away. they move into three different homes and as it goes in the fairy tale world, a big bad lobo shows up waiting to eat them! luckily the third tamale is super smart (she also happens to wear glasses, which i guess makes her the dorky tamale. and yes i loved her frames) and made a cactus her house. all three tamales seek shelter there. hungry for tamales (i get him on that), the lobo decides to go down the chimney just like in the original story, but this time the tamales threaten to turn him into tamales. wolf tamales sounded very sinister to me but at the same time kind of delicious. the wolf than runs away and is never seen from again. in the end, the tamales throw a fiesta to celebrate and invite their tortilla friends.

so cute, right? this book was seriously too cute and only enhanced my love of tamales. so cute, i plan on buying a copy for my personal library. this will also be a staple in my kid's library, if i ever have kids. check in out and read it with your kids and if you don't have any, you can enjoy it by yourself! warning: have tamales on hand because you will be craving them!

also valeria docampo did a great job on the illustrations. check out how cute had tamales are:

the secret book of frida kahlo. f.g. haghenbeck (78)

this book is another example of library kismet. while amazoning for a frida kahlo doll, i came across this book and made a mental note. later that day i went to the rabobank arena in bakersfield to buy tickets to barry manilow. since we were by the beale library, i decided to visit it. and i kid you not, this book was waiting on a shelf right where i walked it. it seemed too perfect. so i checked it out.

though i dressed up as frida kahlo for halloween:

and i have seen her art at the lacma. both from their permanent collection and their recent exhibit on women surrealists, "in wonderland". i would not call myself a frida expert. in all honesty, most of what i know about her i learned from her biopic starring salma hayek. i didn't even know about her accident until the movie. i am a bit of a whimp when it comes to blood/injuries so i skipped that part of the book because it made me nauseous. the idea of her accident made me so squeamish that had to be down the book when i started reading about it. also after reading this book and the bits of her real life, i now want to read a proper biography or autobiography (i requested her diaries from the library.)

so in addition to this being a novel, it is also a cookbook. each chapter contains frida's "favorite" recipes which related to the story that was told in the chapter. we all know i can't cook but i plan on trying some of the recipes like horchata and pumpkin tamales. (so look for a post about that in the future).

and it doesn't stop there! the book also
had book club questions at the end! i think it would be cute to read this as a book club and have each person make a recipe for the meeting, maybe i can convince the PDC dance moms! we'll see.

since there are book club questions i thought i would utilize them for this blog. there are 13 but i chose my top 3. so here we go:

1. the novel begins when frida is close to the end of her life. why do you think haghenbeck chose to order the narrative this way? how does beginning the story with death affect the rest of the novel?

when i first started the novel, i thought that haghenbeck decided to start off with frida's death because it was more theatrical than starting with her birth. however, when her death did arrived at the end, i saw that he did it to give some "it's a wonderful life" flair actually more like "click" flair (yes the adam sandler movie). because you realize what you had read did not actually happen but was a peek into the future, a session with the ghost of christmases to come. and though it is very cliche (see: twilight breaking dawn part 2) in this novel it worked. i thought it was very clever, i was not expecting it. it reinforced the idea of life as suffering.

2. after the accident frida must convince her godmother to allow her to continue living. what is frida's deal with death? what would you do if you were offered a similar deal? discuss what you think about the warning frida's godmother gives before she wakes up: "you will always wish you'd died today. and i will remind you of this every day for your life." (61). at the end of her life, does frida regret living past this first death?

frida's deal with death is that she will paint a self-portrait (which explains her painting of self-portraits in real life), that will hold her place in the afterworld so she can return to life. however, death can still take her, she is not immortal. i would strike the same deal. i don't believe in an afterlife so once i die i will be worm food. since i think death is the ultimate end, i would make the same deal with death. better to be alive and suffering than dead. frida's godmother's warning just demonstrated that no one can truly cheat death because you will always be haunted by the fact that you could have died. in my opinion, death did not make frida suffer more, what magnified her suffering was that it was now filtered through a "if i died this would have never happened to me" lens. also wishing for death is not something limited to just frida (we see in this in the story with the section about dorothy hale). when times get tough most people probably do wish for death to end their suffering. death as a relief is nothing new, suicidal tendancies is more than just a band. and euthanasia does exist. frida did not regret living past this first death. if she did, she would have committed suicide earlier in the story.

9. frida is in a constant struggle to continue living her painful life. why does she choose this painful life over an easy death? think about the words "have the courage to life, because anyone can die." (7, 95, 129) how do you interept this maxim?

i think this is kind of a dumb question. why does anyone choose a painful life over death? because death is forever and life is short, so thus more valuable. she didn't chose to have a painful life, she simplt chose life. no one is exempted from pain in life, jesus, buddha, krishna, mohammad, all founded religions as a means to escape pain and suffering of their lives. why should we mere mortals be any different? and isn't that the goal of all religions, to stop the pain of life? i do believe in the maxim, anyone can die but not everyone can live. in the novel, death explains to frida that it is a true communist because regardless of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and age, death will take you, it is blind to your status. also death is easy it takes much more effort to life that it does to seize being.

sorry, just realized all of my questions were about death but those questions were the most interesting one.

one last enhance activity:

1. look up one of your favorite frida kahlo paintings and find a passage in the novel that you feel relates to the painting. discuss how the aesthetic of the painting aligns with haghenbeck's reimagining of frida's life.

one of favorite kahlo painting is "two fridas":

i saw it this summer at the lacma. and i
originally wanted to dress up as the frida in white for the halloween (bleeding heart included) but it didn't happen. what i love about this painting is the heart. it reminds me of the glowing crowned heart that is in jesus paintings. also as a gemini, i get the whole twin thing. i do feel like i have two personas, so i enjoyed seeing frida pay homage to hers.

to be honest, as i read about the godmother and frida, i had a feeling that "two fridas" would be referenced. and i was right! in the end, the veil of the godmother is removed and the painting of "two fridas" is described:

"the women removed her veil. frida the tehuana took the hand of her godmother, who was frida the death and connected the atery to her heart so that it would beat again."

i think the later half of this question is not well thought out. all and every kahlo's paintings are capable of being described as aligning with haghenbeck's reimagining, because they are art and opened to intereptation. however, i do believe that this painting does align well. since this is a favorite of mine, i was ecstatic when it received a shout out. it was interesting how he interepted one of the fridas as death especially since she did have that early brush with death. i am not sure of the actual motivation behind the painting. and though i think of the two fridas more as a discussion on how we as
individuals some contain binary options within ourselves i.e. lover/hater, virgin/whore or just different titles i.e. sister, daughter, one's occupation, etc. we are all so complex, it's like the Fiona apple song, "i'll make the most of it, i'm extraordinary machine".

there were other paintings that were alluded to and i had to google because i did not know them. though i have seen the dorthy hale painting in person it was interesting to learn the history of it via the book (wikipedia backed up the story though there was some embellishment).

the book was very enjoyable and i look forward to learning about her life in her diaries than reading it again. i feel that there are probably a bunch of inside jokes that went over my head because i am not as familiar with frida's life.

caramelo. sandra cisneros.

since i planned on attending sandra cisneros' talk at csub, i figured i should read more than just one book so i picked up her second novel "caramelo" (and for a dollar!). though i did not finish it before her talk, it helped me understand her talk and life a little more.

to be perfectly honest, i didn't like "caramelo" at first. i kept thinking to myself, this is no "house on mango street" but i realized it shouldn't be. that is always the challenge with the sophomore novel (and also the sophomore album for bands). i once read an article about the yeah yeah yeah's sophomore album in rolling stone, which discussed the challenge of the sophomore album, especially when the first is a huge success. the audience wants the band to replicate their first work but then it can't sound completely the same or they will be upset by that as well. i think it's the same with books, the sophomore novel needs to replicate the first but not be the same. and to me it felt that cisneros at first was trying to replicate "the house on mango street" but then it transform into something completely different but still very cisneros.

i always think of "house on mango street" as a collection of poems however i would describe "caramelo" as an epic. this is cisneros' "one hundred years of solitude" (which i was reminded of as i read, in addition to being one of my favorite books of all time).  "caramelo" is the tale of three generations of the reyes family, grounded in cisneros' actual family history with a hint of mythical magic like garcia marquez' work.  as i discovered at her talk, cisneros' life served as the basis for this novel, she grew up in chicago, the youngest of seven brothers and her father was a upholsterer, just like celaya in the novel.  but like her wig analogy, the novel is real life stories mixed in with fiction so it is non-fictional fiction or fictional non-fiction.

i guess it is the historian in me but i love sagas.  i always have.  i hate to admit this but as a tween (though this term was not invented back then) my favorite sweet valley high books were the sagas because i loved discovering the family histories.  i loved seeing the sequence of events that caused life to follow a certain path; how moment a lead to moment b which explains how c ever came into occurrence.  and this is what i loved about "caramelo", reading how the stars aligned to form the life that celaya led.   for me, "carmaelo" did not become an interesting read until we traveled back into time to learn her families' history so we could understand celaya as a person.  and that was the lesson of the novel, to understand oneself the best and who one is, s/he need to understand her/his ancestors.

 cisneros' emphasis on the importance of knowing the past is not limited to personal histories but extended to capital h-history.  my favorite part of the book was the historical tidbits that cisneros included.  her characters randomly interacted with important cultural figures.  thanks to her i learned about josephine baker*, maria sabina , senor wences, tongolele, and cri cri.  i also learned that some famous hollywood starlets were mexican (see:  rita hayworth).  another fact that surprised me was the story of emperor maximiliano and empress carlota, i didn't know that they were puppet monarchs nor did i know that bette davis played her in the movie.  i also finally discovered the title of the song "cielito lindo".  as i read the lyrics to "cielito lindo", i oddly knew the melody from years of hearing it growing up though  i never knew it was called "cielito lindo".  the tidbits were great because aside from being an entertaining novel, it was also educational.

the novel was also filled with cultural observations.  for example, how taquerias smell like pine-sol.   or introducing the updated version of the aged old question, which came first real life or the telenovla?  there were also sad and harsh observations like how chicanos treat mexicans who claim their spanish roots.  another sad observation is how the INS treats veterans like illegal immigrants especially when those individuals gained their citizenships by serving in a war.  and lastly how mexican mothers can be overbearing and strict but that is really because they are lonely.  there was a handful of times i had ah-ha moments because cisneros shed light on mexican and mexican-american cultures or explanation to certain stereotypes.

in addition to sharing truths, "caramelo" was filled with cisneros' poetic flair, which i have come to love. my favorite were:

"a person of independence, who does not need nor want us, inspires our admiration, and admiration is love portion.  a person who needs us too much, who is weak with neediness, inspires pity.  and pity, the other side of admiration, is antidote to love."

" a dream is a poem the body writes.  even if we lie to ourselves in the day, the body is compelled to speak its truth at night."

"for a long time after, i'd just burst into tears, if anyone even touched me. [ . . .] anybody touched me, by accident or on purpose, i cried.  i was like a piece of bread sopped with gravy.  so when something squeezed me, i started to cry and couldn't stop.  have you ever been that sad?  like a donut dunked in coffee?  like a book left in the rain."

lastly, two of my favorite images included food; feet as tamales and mentions of clean towels that fresh tortillas are kept in.  both of which all made me extremely hungry every time i read about them.  also does anyone know where i can get a tamal sandwich?!?!?!

imagery aside, the most important aspect of "caramelo" is that it shares an experience that is not always told. during my last year at ucla, i took a seminar about the american immigrant experience and we read autobiographies. the class focused on autobiographies not only as a counter to the dominant history (or white male american history) but stories that need to be integrated into the dominant history so that it can be complete. america is not america without the immigrant experience. furthermore, since so much land of present america was once a part of mexico and with mexicans going back and forth across the border; the american experience would be incomplete without the mexican/mexican-american experience being told. and though things can be labelled as a specific racial, cultural or religious experience, at the heart of it all, it is simply a human experience. this is true of "caramelo", it can not be reduce to just mexican lit, chicano it or womens lit because it holds a valuable lesson for everyone regardless of how one labels oneself. that lesson being the importance of everyone knowing their family history and roots. though "caramelo" was filled with a very specific cultural experience, it still possessed universal truths.

like cisneros i will add una pilón.

i loved this part because it reminded me of my grandmother, not so much because we have had the same conversation.  but because my grandma bea, like ceyala's little grandmother, keeps it real.

when discussing her running away with ernesto, ceyala explained:

"-but i saw god when we made love."

to which the little grandmother responded:

"-of course you did.  you think that's a miracle?  smell a flower and you'll see god too.  god's everywhere. and yes, he's in the act of love too.  and so?  that boy's not the only one who can love you like that.  there'll be others, there ought to others, you must have others."

*josephine baker is amazing.  i googled her and read her wikipedia entry (click and read it!).  and she is simply amazing.  she started off dancing on the streets then became this international sensation.  then became an international spy during world war II!!!! and was the first angelina jolie and adopted 12 children from different racial/national background.  amazing right?!?!?