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To study the architectural form of a building, a viewer must stand back to capture the whole. But to see its internal events, the viewer is obliged to come up close to look through a window. In her short story "The Cariboo Cafe," Helena Maria Viramontes uses these conflicting perspectives to play two very different forces off each other: structure and legend. She uses structure, which asks the reader to see the whole of a story from a distance, to interact with legend, which, combining elements of both plot and symbol, requires the reader to look closely. Viramontes builds her story around the form created by the image of a tight nucleus, the family, beginning to spin and gain momentum, until it spirals and fragments outward. With this powerful image as the structure of her story, Viramontes demands that the reader take note of the pattern of increasing fragmentation of families, individual and collective, in our society. Forcing the reader to shift focus to the specific by evoking, dismantling, and then recasting the legend of La Llorona, Viramontes is able to further hone her message. Using the interplay of focus-distant and specific-on the external layer of structure and on the internal level of legend, Viramontes is able to disturb reader perception, thereby causing the reader to refocus and rethink the causes of and possible solutions for the problem of expanding fragmentation in our cultures.
"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...