"The Cariboo Cafe," divided into three parts, opens with several images of fragmentation: displaced

people, frightened children, broken glass, neighbors who talk to themselves and aren't to be spoken to,
and the threat of the disguised immigration police. Images of fragmentation further develop in the first
part of the story, told from the point of view of Sonya, who has lost her key to the apartment she shares
with her brother Macky and her father. She must wait on the steps with her brother until her father returns
because "the four walls of the apartment were the only protection against the streets" (61).
Not only has Sonya been separated from her key, which she considers her "guardian saint" (61), but the
children have been cut off from the central place of safety and unity in their lives, the place where their
family is whole. This opening image of the children locked out of the apartment marks the beginning of
the breaking apart of the nucleus of the family. In an effort to recreate a sense of centeredness, the
children decide to go to Mrs. Avila's house to wait, where they "sometimes got lost in the midst of her
own six children" (62) and where "she'd probably have a stack of flour tortillas, fresh off the comal, ready
to eat with butter and salt" (62). Their attempt to enter again into the familiar, the nourishing, and the
safety of an adopted family gets frustrated by the increasing presence of fragmentation, here expressed in
the confusion of a city street.
At the major intersection, Sonya quietly calculated their next move while
the scores of adults hurried to their own destinations. She scratched one
knee as she tried retracing her journey home in the labyrinth of her
memory. Things never looked the same when backwards and she searched for
familiar scenes. (62)
The sense of the gaining momentum of the fragmentation that separates the children from any sort of
family increases in successive passages. Here we see that what prevents Sonya and Macky from reaching
either their adopted family's or their own home is not only an external sense of uncenteredness, as
depicted by the image of a host of people all scurrying to different places, but an internal one, as well:
Sonya's memory fails her. Instead of providing her with the sureness and solidity of a direct path to
safety, her memory becomes a labyrinth, a place where the connections between things are obscured. She
becomes divided within herself.
Sonya's confusion and internal fragmentation only gets worse as the lost children see the police, "the
Polie," arresting a man they mistake to be a friend's father.


Helena Mara Viramontes (b. 1954)

Chronicler of the West Coast urban barrios, Helena Mara Viramontes was born, raised, and educated in East Los
Angeles, California. Daughter of working-class parents, she and her nine brothers and sisters grew up surrounded
by the family friends and relatives who found temporary sanctuary in the Viramontes household as they made the
crossing from Mexico to the United States. Her writings reveal the political and aesthetic significance of the
contemporary Chicana feminists entrance into the publishing world. Viramontess aesthetics are a practice of
political intervention carried out in literary form. Her tales of the urban barrios, of the border cities, of the Third
World metropolis that cities such as Los Angeles have become, record the previously silenced experiences of life
on the border for Chicanas and Latinas. Now living in Irvine, where she is a graduate student in the University of
California, Irvine, MFA program and a full-time mother to two young children, Viramontes remains an exemplar of
the organic intellectual; she organizes the community to protest the closing of local public libraries in areas
populated with Chicanos and Latinos; she gives readings and literary presentations to a population that is
represented by the media as gang-infested and whose young men are more represented in the prison system than in
the education system.

Viramontess first short story collection, The Moths and Other Stories (1985), is a feminist statement on the status
of the family in the Chicana/o community. In many of the stories, she transforms the concept of familia as the
community itself changes with the last decades infusion of refugees from war-torn countries in Central America;
what were once predominantly Mexican American areas are now international Latina/o communities within the
borders of the United States. The new immigrants bring with them specific histories which produce new stories that
further emphasize the resemblances between Chicanas/os and los otros Americanos: people Cherre Moraga calls
refugees of a world on fire.

Viramontess project in her short stories also gives historical context and voice to the women who many Chicano
writers silenced through their appropriation of female historicity. As she challenges an uncritical view of the
traditional Chicano family, she presents an altered version of familia that makes more sense in a world where
governments continue to exert power over womens bodies by hiding behind the rhetoric of the sacred family as
they simultaneously exploit and destroy members of families who do not conform to a specific political agenda or
whose class positions or race automatically disqualifies them from inclusion.

In The Cariboo Cafe, Viramontes makes explicit the connection between Chicanas and refugees from Central
America. Written in early 1984 after Viramontes learned of the atrocities that the U.S. policies in countries such as
El Salvador had enabled, this story embodies a Chicana feminists critique of the political and economic policies of
the United States government and its collaborators south of its border. Viramontes presents the oppression and
exploitation of the reserve army of laborers that such policies create and then designate as other, the illegal
immigrants. Combining feminism with race and class consciousness, Viramontes commits herself, in this Chicana
political discourse, to a transnational solidarity with the working-class political refugee seeking asylum from right-
wing death squads in countries such as El Salvador.

In addition, the narrative structure of The Cariboo Cafe connects Chicana aesthetics to the literary traditions of
such Latin American political writers as Gabriel Garca Mrquez and Isabel Allende. The fractured narrative
employed in this story hurls the reader into a complicated relationship with the text. The reader enters the text as an
alien to this refugee culture; Viramontes crafts a fractured narrative to reflect the disorientation that the immigrant
workers feel when they are subjected to life in a country that controls their labor but does not value their existence
as human beings.

Further, the narrative structure shoots the reader into a world where she or he is as disoriented as the storys
characters: two lost Mexican children; a refugee woman (possibly from El Salvador), whose mental state reflects
the trauma of losing her five-year-old son to the labyrinth of the disappeared in Latin American countries ruled by
armies and dictators the United States trains and supports; and a working-class man, an ironic representative of
dominant Anglo-American culture, who runs the double zero cafe. The reader, particularly one unfamiliar with
life in the border regions of that other America, must work to decipher the signs much in the same way the
characters do. Through the artistry of her narrative, Helena Mara Viramontes shows how a Chicana oppositional
art form also becomes an arena that reflects politics.

http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/author_pages/contemporary/viramontes_he.html