“Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories”

by Sandra Cisneros

Review by Meredith McKinnie

Chicana poet Sandra Cisneros writes lyrically about the dreams, lives, and limitations of Mexican American women in this collection of short stories, ultimately vignettes, ranging from a few paragraphs to almost 30 pages. In each encapsulated plot, little girls and grown women dream of the life they’ve been promised, one in which a girl can unleash the power of the world if she can only find the right man to love her. “He said he would love me like a revolution, like a religion.” The fairy tale aspect of the culture’s perspective for women is both recognizable and heartbreaking, for in this culture where poverty overtakes promise, the men suffer societal limitations and break the hearts and bodies of the women who dare to love them. 

In one short story, My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn, the white narrator is fascinated by her Mexican American friend Lucy, who has numerous female siblings and a father who returns home at night. The narrator idolizes Lucy’s dark skin, baking hours in the sun in hopes of burning to resemble her friend. The innocent subversion of a white girl emulating a dark girl is Cisneros’ way of compounding the idea of difference. Rather than focusing solely on gender or race, the two girls are connected via socioeconomic background, free to relish 79-cent flip flops from KMart and secondhand clothes. Cisneros lets readers glimpse the reality of children who have yet to register the societal differences that will ultimately classify them further. 

The collection is divided into three parts focusing on girlhood, female adolescence, and womanhood. Each stage compounds the problems for the women in this novel. In a patriarchal culture that isolates women from the world, a girl’s only hope is that the next master will be kinder than the former. Any woman who deviates from the norm, either through working outside the home or refusing to marry, is alienated from society, deemed a pariah, one who bucks tradition and raises a middle finger at the accepted way of life. Cisneros shows through her elegant prose how one’s dreams can only stretch so far without the cost being too great to bear. 

Sandra Cisneros most popular novel is The House on Mango Street published in 1983. A poet by nature, Cisneros’ beautiful arrangements of words, often weaving Spanish and English, creates a hybrid language all her own, reminiscent of her female characters living on American soil, but raised in a Mexican tradition. Within that contrast, Cisneros discovers the truth, the complex, multi-layered reality for immigrants in this country, the border women battling an inherent past, a risky present, and an unknown future.

“The way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit inside each other, each year inside the next.”