A salty, greasy hot dog.

Caramelo Sandra Cisneros Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 454 pp.

Sandra Cisneros's novel Caramelo could, dryly but accurately, be said to be about the American--specifically Mexican American--immigrant experience. But oh, that would so completely miss the point or, rather, the flavor, which is sometimes a rich/spicy mole sauce, sometimes a sweet/burnt dulce de leche, sometimes a greasy/salty hot dog.

Cisneros's story is not about Mexicans becoming Americans, but about people with feet on both sides of the border, who have a complicated, back-and-forth relationship both with Mexico and the United States, never entirely at home in either. It is also, at least on the surface, an autobiographical tale. It tells the story of a girl, born in Chicago in the 1950s as the seventh child and only girl of Chicano parents, as Cisneros was, whose family makes periodic treks back to the mother country, just as Cisneros's family did.

As the author repeatedly points out, even the best story (especially the best story) contains many lies, and the lies may contain as much truth as the facts do. "Here is how I heard them or didn't hear them," she says of her stories. "Here is how I imagine the stories happened, then."

The story by Cisneros, author of the much-praised novel The House on Mango Street as well as several short-story collections, begins straightforwardly enough, or in as straight a line as a story told by someone with her wry humor and musical ear can tell it. The family--the three brothers Reyes, their wives, and assorted children--leave Chicago for Mexico City in a rather ragtag car caravan, to visit their parents and childhood home for the summer. Celaya Reyes, the youngest child and only daughter of the oldest Reyes brother, Inocencio, sees and hears the story. "As soon as we cross the bridge everything switches to another language. Toc, says the light switch in this country, at home it says click. Honk, say the cars at home, here they say tan-tan-tan."

No one but Inocencio, the beloved oldest son, is pleased to see the woman known as the Awful Grandmother, and the summer promises few rewards. It's after a startling, mysterious crisis between Celaya's parents that Caramelo takes flight, when Cisneros scrolls back in time to tell of the Awful Grandmother when she was a girl named Soledad, in love with the precise little soldier Narciso.

These stories of a Mexico long lost are magical, reminiscent of Garcia Marquez in their sweep and evocation of generations of souls. There is Regina, the magisterial matron wed to a piano teacher, who conceals the flea market business that keeps the family alive. Then there is little Soledad, sent away forever by her father, when her mother dies, to be a kitchen girl, a Cinderella, for a distant relation. There's Narciso, the first to beat the path to Chicago to find a future, only to be swept back into Mexico. Cisneros plays with her forms in surprising ways. In one section, the story of Soledad's love of Narciso takes the shape of a dialogue between the Awful Grandmother and the teller of the story, whom she accuses of inaccuracies and exaggerations.

Cisneros never flinches from the complexities of the Mexican character. The men are, often, dogs. The women almost never hold onto their chastity quite as long as they might. And, most important, mothers find the loves of their lives not in their faithless husbands but in their sons--and vice versa. This complicated bond (complicated, especially, for the wives), passed down through the generations from mother to baby, forms one of the novel's key threads. Celaya comes to see that she can't understand anyone, including herself, until she understands this.

Through it all, Cisneros weaves ribbons of Spanish language, great stripes of Mexican history, little slubs of coincidence--such as Inocencio's pivotal encounter with Senor Wences in a jail cell. Yes, it's a cultural education, occasionally not a smooth and easy one, but it is utterly engrossing.

The cloth metaphor is not accidental. Little Soledad's only souvenir of her dead mother is her rebozo, her beautiful, all-purpose shawl, striped in caramel and black. Rebozos, and especially this one, figure essentially in the culture and in this story. But the title Caramelo refers not only to a cloth color. It is also a skin color. Caramel is close to the color of the skin of reviled Indians, and the color of the skin of the beautiful, impoverished house girl, Candelaria, who appears, behaves wondrously, then is gone in a tragic and silly moment out of a telenovela, a TV soap opera.

This central portion of this immense, epic-size (but not slow-moving) novel serves as its soul. When Celaya returns to telling the story of her puberty and high school years in Chicago and San Antonio, involving her coming to terms with her heritage and her future, the story falls to earth with a thump. Is there more to be said about coming of age, no matter what the cultural context in which it occurs? Alas, menstruation appears to be the great leveler of both characters and writers. (And clear as Cisneros is about mothers and sons, she is murky on mothers and daughters. The reader forms no clear impression of Celaya's mother, Zoila, and only the roughest and most grudging notion of Celaya's contentious relationship with her.)

Cisneros's strengths, ones that rarely fail her in Caramelo, are her ability to spin a story, and to play with language as if it were the knots in an elaborate rebozo. A reader can wrap herself in this one and feel at once elegant and protected.

Kyrie O'Connor is an assistant managing editor of the Hartford Courant.