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Symbols & Motifs
The Wedding Cake
Carmen and Dick’s wedding cake is a miniature version of the ranch: Its “shutters marzipan, / the cobbles almonds. A maiden aunt housekept / touching up whipped cream roses” (Lines 20-22). The cake symbolizes the ranch and the issues of gender and class therein. An unmarried woman keeps house while Tio dances, illustrating the ranch’s hierarchy that Tio demands. Marzipan is sugar mixed with ground almonds. The almonds themselves represent the ranch’s stones (cobble is what makes up cobblestone). When the wedding guests are too full to eat the cake, the working class staff eat “with their fingers from their open palms / windows, shutters, walls, pillars, doors, / made from the cane they had cut in the fields” (Lines 62-64). They take pride in the cake’s ingredients because they harvested them. Their hands produced the sugar for the cake, and their hands eat the cake. The upper-class owners of the ranch are not connected to what the ranch produces like their working-class employees are. Tio and his family not eating the cake symbolizes their alienation from the labor and sugar that they profit off of, illustrating Tensions Between the Working Class and the Upper Class.
Dances
The dances that the guests perform at the wedding symbolize different cultures, and illustrate Intersections Between Caribbean and US Cultures. The Minnesotans perform a dance called the Charleston, which represents American culture and how white people have appropriated dance from Black people who were enslaved or the descendants of enslaved people. The Charleston was invented by Black people but is familiar to Dick’s white family. The merengue represents Caribbean culture.
The speaker’s uncle jokes that her “merengue had lost its Caribbean” (Line 29) while the speaker has been living in Vermont. This comment implies that Caribbeans are generally more improvisational and sensual in their dancing than Americans. Some merengue enthusiasts deny the influence of enslaved people on Dominican dance, in the same way that some Americans deny the African roots of the Charleston (a dance called juba). However, both assertions surface racist assumptions that deny the influence of Black people. A large amount of scholarship points to how enslaved people influenced both the merengue and the Charleston (Austerlitz, Paul. “Merengue: Dominican Music and Identity.” The Cupola, 1997; Butler, Nic. “Tracing the Roots of the ‘Charleston’ Dance.” Charleston County Public Library, 2020).
Sun and Fire
The sun and fire represent danger. For instance, the groom’s family is described as a “group of sunburnt Minnesotans” (Line 9). They are from a cold place—a higher latitude—than the Caribbean. Their white skin is unable to handle the tropical sun without being harmed by it. They are in danger of skin cancer.
A more serious danger is fire. The speaker has a vision as the sun rises: “the fields around us were burning” (Line 56). This represents two kinds of danger—to the employees and to the owners. Sugar cane workers are subjected to dangerous working conditions, including the cane being intentionally set on fire during the harvest. On the other hand, if the sugar cane goes up in an uncontrolled and unplanned fire, the ranch owners lose their profits from the crops.
However, there is also a positive association with fire. Alvarez describes the “Chinese lanterns strung between posts / came on and one snapped off and rose / into a purple postcard sky” (Lines 30-32). Chinese lanterns contain tiny fires, and one becomes free of the wedding party to lift into a picture-perfect sky. This little fire symbolizes the freedom to be in the sky before the sun rises.
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By Julia Alvarez
