Homecoming

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.