Idaho Commission for Libraries

Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros

"[T]o suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end." Cleofilas, in the title story of Cisneros' collection, believes this message, expressed in her favorite soap operas. But her romantic fantasies about life suffer when she faces the ordinary man who is her husband, who can be abusive, who lives in a macho world where women have little value beyond sexual use. Even the hardworking life she knew in her father's home seems preferable. The last we see of her, she is escaping back home to Mexico, riding to the Greyhound bus station with a woman named Felice, crossing Woman Hollering Creek. Cisneros does not allow us to know what becomes of Cleofilas; there is no "happy ending" in which she finds herself or achieves any kind of power. But there is hope, for on the bridge over the creek, she laughs with Felice, whose independent life and strength amazes her; she shares that moment of freedom to "holler like Tarzan."

This story not only names the book, but begins the longest of its three sections: There Was a Man, There Was a Woman. It serves as a sort of thematic center for this collection of stories that deals with the lives of Mexican-American women in south and central Texas. Cisneros explores what it is like to grow up in this environment, to live balanced between the cultures of Mexico and the United States. Cleofilas, newly arrived in the States from Mexico cannot speak English. Others--the young girls of the first seven stories or the hip artist of "Bien Pretty"--are native citizens of the U.S., but still strongly connected to their Mexican ancestors and ways of life. These women seek to come to terms with both worlds in themselves; they struggle to achieve dignity and a measure of self-determination and self-knowledge. And, in many of these stories, they try to understand what love between men and women means. Without minimizing the depth of the struggles or the variety and complexity of the issues involved, Cisneros shows us women who may, for a moment, share a "holler" of confidence and hope.

In this book, Cisneros contributes to the growing number of Mexican-American and other Hispanic writers published in the U.S.in the last twenty years. These writers reveal the poverty, the violence, the confusion of living in two cultures. But they also celebrate their roots, their parents' and grandparents' ways of life, preserved in big city barrios and small rural towns across this country. For these writers, la raza, the sense of community among Mexican-Americans is important. In Woman Hollering Creek Cisneros emphasizes this community in her mix of voices through the stories. Although most of the stories are written in first person, the author never indicates whether several stories are being told through the voice of the same person or whether all are told by different narrators. We hear a variety of women speaking in this volume, from children to grown women, yet we hear also a collective voice, a unity created from both individual and shared experience.

Suggestions for further reading

Alvarez, Julia.  How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.   Chapel Hill, NC:  Algonquin Books, 1991.

Chavez, Denise.  The Last of the Menu Girls.   Houston:  Arte Publico Press, 1986.

Cisneros, Sandra.  House on Mango Street.  New York:   Random House, 1991.

Esquivel, Laura.  Like Water for Chocolate.  New York:   Doubleday, 1992.

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