Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek [1 ed.] 9789042031302, 9789042031296

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Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek

DIALOGUE 9

Edited by

Michael J. Meyer

Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek

Edited by

Cecilia Donohue

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover Image adapted by Maciek Niedorezo Cover Design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3129-6 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3130-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents General Editor’s Preface

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Introduction

xi

I. Negotiating Borders: Issues of Sociocultural Cooptation Amphibious Women: The Complexity of Class in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Michael Carroll and Susan Naramore Maher

1

So You’ll Know Who I Am: Inventory and Identity in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol

17

The Chicana Trinity: Maternal Mestiza Consciousness in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Shannon Wilson

31

Author Dialogue

53

II. Toys, Tiny Candies, and Telenovelas: Popular and Material Culture as Storytelling Agents Male and Female Roles in Mexican-American Society: Issues of Domestic Violence in “Woman Hollering Creek” Ana María Almería

61

Reading the Puns in “Barbie-Q” Mary S. Comfort

79

The Gummy Bears Speak: Articulating Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s “Never Marry a Mexican” Dora Ramirez-Dhoore Author Dialogue

89 107

III. Images of Masculinity “Are you my general?”: Revising Representation in “Eyes of Zapata” Philip Coleman

115

Boys to Men: Redefining Masculinities in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Pamela J. Rader

131

Author Dialogue

151

IV. Images of Women: Role Expectations and Conflict Resemantization of Chicana Motherhood and Sexuality Through the Virgin of Guadalupe María Jesús Castro Dopacio

155

The Cries of La Llorona: Maternal Agency in “Woman Hollering Creek” Brandy A. Harvey

169

Voicing Taboos in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Victoria L. Ketz

189

Author Dialogue

227

About the Authors

231

Index

235

General Editor’s Preface The original concept for Rodopi’s new series entitled Dialogue grew of out two very personal experiences of the general editor. In 1985, having just finished my dissertation on John Steinbeck and attained my doctoral degree, I was surprised to receive an invitation from Steinbeck biographer, Jackson J. Benson, to submit an essay for a book he was working on. I was unpublished at the time and was unsure and hesitant about my writing talent, but I realized that I had nothing to lose. It was truly the “opportunity of a lifetime.” I revised and shortened a chapter of my dissertation on Steinbeck’s The Pearl and sent it off to California. Two months later, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my essay had been accepted and would appear in Duke University Press’s The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (1990). Surprisingly, my good fortune continued when several months after the book appeared, Tetsumaro Hayashi, a renowned Steinbeck scholar, asked me to serve as one of the three assistant editors of The Steinbeck Quarterly, then being published at Ball State University. Quite naïve at the time about publishing, I did not realize how fortunate I had been to have such opportunities present themselves without any struggle on my part to attain them. After finding my writing voice and editing several volumes on my own, I discovered in 2002 that despite my positive experiences, there was a real prejudice against newer “emerging” scholars when it came to inclusion in collections or acceptance in journals. As the designated editor of a Steinbeck centenary collection, I found myself roundly questioned about the essays I had chosen for inclusion in the book. Specifically, I was asked why I had not selected several prestigious names whose recognition power would have spurred the book’s success on the market. My choices of lesser known but quality essays seemed unacceptable to those who ran the conference which produced the potential entries in the book. New voices were unwelcome; it was the tried and true that were greeted with open arms. Yet these experienced scholars had no need for further publications and often offered few original insights into the Steinbeck canon. Sadly, the originality of the lesser-known essayists met with hostility; the doors were closed, perhaps even locked tight, against their innovative approaches and readings that took issue with scholars whose authority and expertise had long been unquestioned.

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Angered, I withdrew as editor of the volume, and began to think of ways to rectify what I considered a serious flaw in academe. My goal was to open discussions between experienced scholars and those who were just beginning their academic careers and had not yet broken through the publication barriers. Dialogue would be fostered rather than discouraged. Having previously served as an editor for several volumes in Rodopi’s Perspective of Modern Literature series under the general editorship of David Bevan, I sent a proposal to Fred Van der Zee advocating a new series that would be entitled Dialogue, one that would examine the controversies within classic canonical texts and would emphasize an interchange between established voices and those whose ideas had never reached the academic community because their names were unknown. Happily, the press was willing to give the concept a try and gave me a wide scope in determining not only the texts to be covered but also in deciding who would edit the individual volumes. When Cecilia Donohue asked about a volume on Sandra Cisneros’s Women Hollering Creek, I was quite pleased to see a proposal that would discuss the contribution of an Hispanic author. While a number of scholars have published articles on this text in a variety of journals, and while a volume on Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was already in print in the Dialogue series, I wanted to encourage a wide range of ethnic interests in the texts chosen for consideration. The resulting essays address many of the issues that evoke spirited discussion about this novel and cause it to be such a controversial text: the challenges of negotiating socio-cultural as well as geographical borders; the significance and utilization of religious imagery, folkloric material, and popular culture in character development; the diverse roles and representations of male characters; the frank discussion of women’s sexuality all were features that make this collection of stories a popular if often controversial selection for literature courses. In this volume’s pages, such issues are not avoided but are addressed skillfully by authors with a variety of publication histories, some experienced, some neophytes. All are committed to a discussion of what earlier reviewers had determined were pluses and non-essential to understanding of Women Hollering Creek’s characters and plot and to addressing elements in Cisneros’s stylistics and themes that were seen as flaws required new or renewed attention. As you will see, some of authors break fertile new ground in the process, and offer approaches which will help readers see the novel

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from several new angles. This volume will soon be followed by a volume on Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and one on Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark. Volumes of Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are also in progress. It is my hope that as each title appears, the Dialogue series will foster not only renewed interest in each of the chosen works but that each will bring forth fresh interpretations and will open doors to heretofore silenced voices. In this atmosphere, a healthy interchange of criticism can develop; one that will allow even dissent and opposite viewpoints to be expressed without fear that such stances may be seen as negative or counter-productive. My thanks to Rodopi and its editorial board for its support of this “radical” concept. May you, the reader, discover much to value in these new approaches to issues that have fascinated readers for decades and to books that have long stimulated our imaginations and our critical discourse. Michael J. Meyer 2/07/2010

Introduction Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 20th, 1954, the third child and only sister of six brothers. Her father, Alfredo Cisneros del Moral, a native of Mexico City who would take his family on several extended trips to Mexico over the years, worked as an upholsterer in Chicago. Her mother, Elvira Cordero Anguiano, was a first-generation Mexican-American who was born in the Windy City. Remaining close to home to attend college, Sandra Cisneros earned a Baccalaureate Degree from Loyola University in 1976; immediately following her graduation, she was admitted into the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Receiving her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1978, she wrote a collection of poems for her master’s thesis entitled My Wicked Wicked Ways (which would be published nine years later by Third Woman Press). Upon completing her graduate work at Iowa, Cisneros took a teaching post at the Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago; by this time she had commenced work on the youth-oriented vignettes that would comprise her first published prose work, The House on Mango Street. In 1980, Bad Boys, another poetry collection, was published. Two years later, she was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; this afforded her the opportunity to focus on completing The House on Mango Street, which was published by Arte Público Press in 1984 and was honored with the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award the following year. In 1987, the year My Wicked Wicked Ways was published, Cisneros accepted a visiting professorship at California State University in Chico and was awarded a second grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her second NEA award was devoted to the writing of Woman Hollering Creek, which was published in 1991 by Random House; this year also marked her reception of a Lannon Literary Award as well as the reprinting of The House on Mango Street by a larger publishing house—Vintage Books. In addition, Cisneros spent a semester at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, during 1991, teaching a course in United States-Latina Literature. In 1994, Random House published a second volume of Cisneros’s poetry, Loose Woman. One year after that, the author received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” In 1997, her bilingual children’s book Hairs/Pelitos was published.

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In the late 1990s, Cisneros purchased a home in San Antonio, Texas, the locale which figures prominently in Woman Hollering Creek and where she still resides today. Her relocation to the staid King William neighborhood caused quite a stir when she painted her Victorian home a bright purple color; her choices of “colores fuertes” [strong colors] and “colores alegres” [happy colors] were a nod to her heritage—“the colors of my Mexican memories,” as she would explain in House and Garden magazine (Shea 34). Nature may have muted the color of her home over time but the writer’s dedication to her colorful, colorful ways remains intact, as indicated by the following statement on her web site: “My house is no longer violet because the sun faded it from violet to blue after a few years. We painted it Mexican-pink so it can fade into pink, then built my office in the backyard and painted it Mexican-marigold. The colors make me happy.” In 2002, Alfred A. Knopf published Sandra Cisneros’s most ambitious work, Caramelo. A 430-page novel, the work chronicles the Reyes family within the context of United States and Mexico history. The basic story of Caramelo was originally planned for inclusion in Woman Hollering Creek, but, as Cisneros stated, “It just kind of swelled up, and I could never finish it” (Shea 32). An internationallyknown author whose works have been translated in many and varied world languages, Cisneros remains active in the literary community, promoting the efforts of the next generation of writers through her creation and leadership of the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, the latter named for her father who passed away in 1997. She is currently at work on a second children’s book, a guide for writers, and a new collection of short fiction. The story Cisneros relates in Caramelo may not have been included in Woman Hollering Creek as originally planned, but it is not as if the latter suffers for this deletion. The significance of Woman Hollering Creek as a major contribution to women’s literature in general and to Chicana literature in particular, was reflected in the critical reception upon its publication. Marrihelen Ponce, writing in Belles Lettres, hailed Woman Hollering Creek as “an important addition to fiction by ethnic American women” (40). Acknowledging that the female protagonists of Woman Hollering Creek are “wiser Mexicanas/Chicanas” than those who populated the pages of The House on Mango Street, Ponce singled out “Eyes of Zapata,” the firstperson narrative of Inés Alfaro Aguilar, mistress of General Emiliano Zapata, as the “strongest work in this collection” (40). Peter S.

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Prescott and Karen Springer, in their review of Woman Hollering Creek for Newsweek, also commented on the “strong girls, strong women” who are featured in the stories; they designate the title story of Cleófilas, who survives and presumably thrives after the ill-fated, abusive marriage that takes her from Mexico to Texas, as the highlight of the book (60). Patricia Hart, in her review of Woman Hollering Creek for The Nation, observed the richness of Cisneros’s prose creations: “Cisneros breathes narrative life into her adroit, poetic descriptions, making them mature, fully formed works of fiction” (598). Merle Rubin, reviewing the book for the Wall Street Journal, pointed out the energy of Cisneros’s prose, manifested in the writer’s “keen interest in language” and “penchant for vivid and exotic imagery … Ms. Cisneros portrays her people with vigor and not a trace of sugar coating” (A9). The sole objection to Woman Hollering Creek raised from more than one critical quarter relates to its gendered portrayals. Alongside her aforementioned words of praise in the Wall Street Journal, Rubin argued that the collection of stories, featuring Chicana protagonists imbued with “strength, self-assertion, bilingualism, [and] sexual liberation” could arguably be perceived as a “product of politically correct thinking” (A9). Ilan Stavans, reviewing the book for Commonweal, took issue with alleged stereotypical characterizations: “The image of Hispanic men … is grim and depressing: while the guys are always abusive, alcoholic, and egotistical, the girls are naïve, doll-like, occasionally in control yet obsessed with how nature transforms itself, how relationships deteriorate, and how people escape their responsibilities to meet a different, although not a better fate” (524). In addition, Barbara Brinson Curiel reports that in response to the publication of the title story in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Miguel Sanchez Gracia’s letter to the editor condemned the “derogatory” and negative portrayals of Hispanic immigrants (52-53). Yet, for Stavans, this weakness was outweighed by Cisneros’s “welcomingly different … refreshing and often hypnotizing” writing style (526). Over more than a decade since Woman Hollering Creek was published and these reviews appeared in print, controversies about the book prevail. Some have been echoed in college classrooms where Woman Hollering Creek is taught. I recall female students in my Women in Literature class taking issue with the “promiscuous” portrayals of the female characters in this text, alongside male students who consider the text a primer in “male bashing.” Potential

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risks of teaching Women Hollering Creek in the secondary school classroom are clearly articulated by Carol Jago in her book Sandra Cisneros in the Classroom: “Do Not Forget to Reach.” Jago’s text, primarily dedicated to approaches to teaching Cisneros’s initial volume of prose, The House on Mango Street, includes this cautionary message to educators: Do not even think of assigning Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories to students unless you have read it from cover to cover. While the grouping of stories in Part I, “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn,” will seem familiar territory to any student who has read The House on Mango Street, later stories deal with increasingly mature themes, specifically sex and sexual power. You know your students. You know your community. The literary merit of the book is not in question. What may be is the appropriateness of this text for a particular group of students. At my school we use Woman Hollering Creek in a Latino literature senior elective. I teach in liberal Santa Monica and I still think the book would be an unwise choice for ninth-grade literature circles following the study of The House on Mango Street. The problem is that even when you win a censorship battle, you lose. (83)

While Jago’s admonishments continue to be of value, particularly her reservations regarding Woman Hollering Creek as a teachable text for middle-school students, one cannot dismiss the increasing relevance of this work even after the passage of nearly two decades since its initial publication. Many of the “mature themes” addressed in the stories have become commonplace quotidian content in contemporary news media. In addition, the relatively short units of fiction that comprise the book play to today’s students’ exposure to and comfort with brief clusters of prose. Finally, the book, as it approaches its adult years, maintains its relevance in its tribute to the achievement of voice (both literal and figurative) by members of demographic groups that have been historically and traditionally underrepresented and silenced. Given the assorted testimonies in Woman Hollering Creek from women characters seeking self-actualization, it should come as no surprise that the majority of scholarly criticism published on this work

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examines it through the lens of feminist theory, particularly in relationship to role expectations and conflicts. A number of critics base their analyses of selected stories/protagonists in Woman Hollering Creek on modern interpretations of traditional Mexican female cultural icons, notably The Virgin of Guadalupe (the Mexican image of the Virgin Mary); Malinalli or La Malinche (the mistress of Aztec conquistador Hernán Cortés); and La Llorona (“Weeping Woman”), the legendary figure who drowned her children on account of a dysfunctional romantic relationship, and hence was condemned to weep forever in search of them. This latter folktale, the details of which take several variations, provides the inspiration for the overarching title of the book and the title story. Academic discussions addressing the connections between this triumvirate of religious/historical/folkloric figures and Cisneros’s fictive creations for Woman Hollering Creek been published by Jean Wyatt (1995), Jacqueline Doyle (1996), Ana María Carbonell (1999), Maythee G. Rojas (1999), and Alexandra Fitts (2002). Criticism on Woman Hollering Creek has examined the work through other critical lenses as well, albeit with far lesser frequency. Elizabeth Mermann-Jozwiak’s 2000 postmodern reading of the text focuses on the nonlinear implementation of appropriation and pastiche in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.” Rose Marie Cutting, in an article published in 2003, also chooses a postmodern approach to Woman Hollering Creek, arguing that the indefinite dénouement of the final story in the book, “Bien Pretty,” with its multiple conclusive components, play to the fragmentation and ambivalence inherent in postmodern literature. Additional critical study of Woman Hollering Creek speaks to structuralist/formalist/new critical considerations. Jeff Thomson, in a 1994 character study, identifies Inés of “Eyes of Zapata” as the standout protagonist in the collection due to her courage, multidimensionality, and strong sense of self-perception. Mary Pat Brady and Sonia Saldívar-Hull, both writing in 1999 (apparently the banner year for scholarship on this particular Cisneros volume), explore how geographical, spatial, and border elements inform the safety and empowerment of the Woman Hollering Creek’s female protagonists. Finally, in an essay from 1996 endorsing close reading of the text, Harryette Mullen pays tribute to the “cryptography” crafted for Woman Hollering Creek that results in a distinctive bilingualism informed by the mining of Mexican culture. Building upon an impressive body of existing scholarly product, the eleven essays in this collection expand upon published

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observations, address key themes of the book, and endorse new directions in textual interpretation. They are grouped by section, along the lines of a common textual theme or element addressed by each essay. In addition, at the conclusion of each section, each author has provided candid commentary/dialogue in response to the other articles in the section, providing springboards for additional reader discussion. In the first section, “Negotiating Borders: Issues of Sociocultural Cooptation,” Michael Carroll and Susan Naramore Maher, in their article “Amphibious Women: The Complexity of Class in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories,” focus on the socioeconomic duality of the two protagonists they argue as among Cisneros’s “most memorable”: Clemencia of “Never Marry a Mexican” and Lupe of “Bien Pretty.” Carroll and Maher make note of the differing degrees of success achieved by these two lead characters: Clemencia declares her amphibiousness, talking the talk, yet remaining caught in a stagnant cycle of betrayal and abusive power. Lupe, however, walks the walk of amphibiousness as well, playfully inverting and subverting patriarchal mythology and celebrating her greater freedom with the wild birds, the raucous urracas of San Antonio, in a celebratory assertion that concludes both her narrative and Cisneros’s entire collection.

In her article entitled “So You Know Who I Am: Inventory and Identity in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol surveys all three sections of Cisneros’s book to identify and analyze a variety of lists of either concrete items or abstract concepts which are compiled by several of the protagonists. Much as Carroll and Maher identify the amphibious nature as a means of negotiating socio-psychological borders in search of self-identity, Tontiphaphol sees the articulation of inventories or collections as a viable path to personal knowledge in the face of frontera conflict: As evidenced by its association with an eccentric variety of genres and texts, listing is arguably intrinsic to human experience, and early in Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros asserts that to catalogue is the most effective and efficient way to comprehend. … In her short stories, men and women inventory self-shaping moments and conditions more minutely, and the result is an accretive … sense of identity. … the

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catalogue becomes an intriguing metaphor for the individual’s existence within the context of a group.

In the third and final article in section one, “The Chicana Trinity; Maternal Mestiza Consciousness in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Shannon Wilson argues that the female protagonists of the stories “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” “Never Marry a Mexican,” and “Woman Hollering Creek” undertake what might be called a socio-historic inventory. Drawing on the legends and stories of la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, and la Llorona, as well as those of their mythical predecessors, Chayo, Clemencia, and Cleófilas position themselves to carve out their individual paths to Chicana identity and empowerment over any geographic or psychological borders they may encounter. As Wilson states: … Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories represents an example of [Gloria] Anzaldúa’s concept of unlearning the whore/virgin dichotomy. This unlearning is brought about by bringing together elements from either side of the binary. Traits labeled negative or positive are explored through and by the characters in Cisneros’s work to expose their natural compatibility. In fact, Cisneros’s characters are engaged in the process of obtaining/producing mestiza consciousness ….

Section Two of this collection, “Toys, Tiny Candies, and Telenovelas—Popular and Material Culture” focuses on how the popular and material cultural artifacts featured in Woman Hollering Creek provide insight to greater understanding and new interpretations of the text. In her essay “Male and Female Roles in MexicanAmerican Society: Issues of Domestic Violence in “Woman Hollering Creek.” Ana María Almería explains how the telenovelas, Mexicanbased television serial dramas, can fill a naïve young Mexican bride with false expectations of romantic love within the institution of marriage; her dreams are especially vulnerable when her husband turns out to be physically abusive, as is the case when Cleófilas Enriqueta DeLeón Hernàndez of the story “Woman Hollering Creek” leaves her father’s home to marry Juan Pedrito Martínez Sànchez. As Almería states:

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Women live just to reach the type of life they see in their favorite [telenovelas] programs, which sometimes turns into an unhealthy obsession because they never achieve it. The plots upon which telenovelas are based are completely fantastic, impossible to realize. This genre sets up fantasy situations that debase love stories and deform the social reality.

Social realities can be altered for younger women as well through popular culture icons, as observed by Mary Comfort in her article, “Reading the Puns in ‘Barbie-Q’.” Like Almería, Comfort focuses on one story in the volume; she argues that the manufacturer-inspired play with the popular culture icon named in the story’s title can pose a viable threat to a young Chicana’s sense of self. Cisneros’s rhetorical strategy underscores this threat, as Comfort explains: In addition to helping to characterize the children … their Barbie-talk suggests that the children have surrendered their entire cultural identity. This cession is emphasized by the story’s lack of Spanish terms and phrases. While “Barbie-Q” is narrated exclusively in English, almost all of the other stories in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories mix Spanish words with English. By using Spanish words and names in these stories, Cis-neros shows the resilience of Mexican culture in the United States. In contrast, “Barbie-Q” contains neither italicized Spanish words nor Spanish names. Indeed the children have no names at all.

Cisneros’s choice of rhetorical strategies plays a major role as well in Dora Ramírez-Dhoore’s essay, which also focuses on just one story in the book. In “Let the Gummy Bears Speak: Articulating Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’,” Ramírez-Dhoore traces Clemencia’s search of literal and figurative voice, a quest hampered by her geographic amphibiousness and her open defiance of societal norms, as the protagonist willingly and enthusiastically engages in adultery. When her affair with an Anglo married man ends, his son becomes her next sexual conquest. The silence which has been imposed on her by both circumstance and choice is ultimately superseded by unorthodox, innovative means of communication and drawing attention, one of which involves a well-known candy:

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As she maneuvers around [her lover’s] house and places … gummy bears in specific locations, Clemencia gives voice to her own existence and presence in the house, while crying out to Megan [her lover’s spouse] to take notice of her existence. … The gummy bears speak for Clemencia, since she focuses her attentions on feminine products such as the makeup organizer, nail polish, lipsticks, and diaphragm.

While “Woman Hollering Creek” has long been analyzed along the lines of cultural/feminist theory, far less critical attention has been paid to the male characters featured in the text. The two articles in Section Three of this collection, “Images of Masculinity,” assist in filling this critical gap. Philip Coleman’s essay, “‘Are you my general?’: Revising Representation in ‘Eyes of Zapata’” examines Cisneros’s deconstruction of previous literary and largely masculinist images of this historic figure within her short story, and connects the subjectivity of revised interpretations to Cisneros’s placement of Zapata’s image through the eyes of his lover, the story’s narrator Inés: Cisneros is not just calling the authority of Zapata as a hero-figure into question in “Eyes of Zapata” … she is also critiquing representation itself. …in the richness of her language, “Eyes of Zapata” destabilizes earlier versions of Zapata … and … projects a version of Zapata into the future that is harder to identify with rigid systems of representation and control … In the text’s timeframe, Zapata’s eyes have been closed in sleep, but the reader has been invited to look into them through the magic of Inés’s vision.

Pamela Rader’s essay “Boys to Men: Redefining Masculinities in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories” examines Cisneros’s portrayals of maleness in five other stories in the collection: “Salvador Late or Early,” “Tepayac,” “One Holy Night,” “Remember the Alamo,” and “Bien Pretty.” Drawing on the theories of Octavio Paz and George L. Mosse, Rader, in agreement with Coleman, argues that Cisneros redefines the male image. She focuses in particular on how selected characters represent revisions of long-established myths, incorporating greater degrees of ambiguity and humanity:

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While Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros is recognized for her reclaimed and empowered female characters, she has also put forth readings that humanize and expand bicultural definitions of maleness … Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a collection that offers an intriguing … and … more humane spectrum of masculinities …

The fourth and final section of this collection builds on the existing body of feminist scholarship on Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. The first essay in the section entitled “Images of Women: Role Expectations and Conflict” focuses on the reinvention of a key religious figure within the pages of Cisneros’s text. In “Resemantization of Chicana Motherhood and Sexuality Through the Virgin of Guadalupe,” María Jesús Castro Dopacio argues that the female characters in Cisneros’s text are empowered to reinterpret la Virgen in alignment with the challenges and demands of women’s roles in contemporary society: In Cisneros’s fiction the Virgin of Guadalupe is no longer a one-dimensional figure. In fact, she has moved from a secondary role to be now at the forefront of Chicanas’ lives. Among the new aspects the Virgin acquires is the expression of her own wishes and her capacity for pleasure, including sexuality, a feature that was entirely forbidden in past representations of JudeoChristian tradition.

Brandy A. Harvey, in her essay “The Cries of La Llorona: Maternal Agency in Woman Hollering Creek, explores the impact of another icon of Mexican legend on the female protagonist of the title story in the collection. Much as Dopacio sees Cisneros’s heroines as revising their responses to the Virgin of Guadalupe to meet situational needs, Harvey contends that Cleófilas consults and reinterprets the La Llorona legend, including its tragic elements, so that it can serve as a source of strength in her attempts to overcome her dilemma. As Harvey states: To some, the legend [of La Llorona] serves as traumatic testimony, allowing for communal understanding on the borderland. In “Woman Hollering Creek,” the legend promotes the

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understanding of the witness’s position and her ability to change it. Cleófilas responds to the legend with action that will preserve her life and the lives of her children.

In the third essay of this section, “Voicing Taboos in Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories,” Victoria L. Ketz surveys the “forbidden” behaviors addressed within the pages of the text: adultery, homosexuality, rape, and domestic abuse. Those characters who are either perpetrators (adultery, homosexuality) or victims (rape, domestic abuse) of these conducts suffer society-enforced silencing, and Ketz, in agreement with Dopacio and Harvey, sees the route to voice as related to self-acknowledgement of one’s sexuality: Although any mention of sexuality has always been surrounded by taboos, Cisneros writes of it as an empowering experience … Her characters do not admit to shame for their sexual feelings, and some even learn to use sexuality as a weapon. … By exploring sexuality and the conflicting nature of it, Cisneros gives rise to a voice that will denounce the taboos [with the exception of homosexuality] as unacceptable. This … allows Cisneros to break the imposed silence that surrounds prescribed norms of behavior, gender stereotypes, ethnic identities, and sexual violence.

This introduction would not be complete without extending gratitude and appreciation to several individuals. First of all, I extend thanks to the twelve outstanding scholars who have contributed essays to this volume. Their insight, patience, and collegiality have made this work a labor of love over the past two years. A sincere note of gratitude is also extended to Dr. Michael J. Meyer, General Editor of the Rodopi Press Dialogues Series, for the opportunity to shepherd this project, as it afforded me a priceless opportunity to revisit a timeless text and communicate with an impressive group of academics that spans two continents. Gratitude must also be extended to Ms. Cheryl Henson, Information Technology Specialist at Madonna University, for her generous assistance in assembling this volume. Finally, I must express my deep appreciation to Mr. William Vine, Arts and Humanities Librarian at Madonna University, for his invaluable assistance in locating and accessing scholarly and review

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articles on what is arguably the brightest jewel in Sandra Cisneros’s crown of writings. Cecilia Donohue Madonna University, Livonia MI

Works Consulted About Sandra Cisneros. On line at: http://www.sandracisneros.com (consulted 30.12.2009). Brady, Mary Pat. “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.” American Literature 71.1 (March 1999): 117-150. Carbonell, Ana María. “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” MELUS 24.2 (July 1999): 53-74. Curiel, Barbara Brinson. “Sandra Cisneros: Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories” in Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature. ed. Alvina E. Quintana. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. (51-60) Cutting, Rose Marie. “Closure in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek” in The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues. ed. Farhat Iftekharrudin, Westport CT: Praeger, 2003. (65-76) Doyle, Jacqueline. “Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” Frontiers 16.1 (1996): 53-70. Fitts, Alexandra. “Sandra Cisneros’s Modern Malinche: A Reconsideration of Feminine Archetypes in Woman Hollering Creek.” The International Fiction Review 29. 1-2 (2002): 11-22. Hart, Patricia. Review of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. The Nation 252.17 (6 May 1991): 598. Jago, Carol. Sandra Cisneros in the Classroom: “Do not forget to reach.” Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002. Mermann-Jozwiak, Elisabeth. “Gritos desde la Frontera: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Postmodernism.” MELUS 25.2 (July 2000): 101-118. Mullen, Harryette. “‘A Silence Between Us Like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek. MELUS 21.2 (July 1996): 3-20. Ponce, Marrihelen. “A Semblance of Order to Lives and Loves.” Belles Lettres 7.2 (Winter 1991): 40. Prescott, Peter S., with Karen Springen. Review of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Newsweek (3 June 1991): 60. Rojas, Maythee G. “Cisneros’s ‘Terrible’ Women: Recuperating the Erotic as a Feminist Source in ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Eyes of Zapata.’” Frontiers 20.3 (1999): 135-157. Rubin, Merle. “Stories of Death, Disease and Sexism.” The Wall Street Journal (19 July 1991): A9.

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Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. “Woman Hollering Transfronteriza Feminisms.” Cultural Studies 13.2 (1999): 251-262. Shea, Renee H. “Truth, Lies, and Memory: A Profile of Sandra Cisneros.” Poets & Writers (September – October 2002): 31-35. Stavans, Ilan. “Una Nueva Voz.” Commonweal 118.15 (13 September 1991): 524525. Thomson, Jeff. “‘What is called heaven’: Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” Studies in Short Fiction 31.3 (Summer 1994): 415-424. Wyatt, Jean. “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s “Never Marry a Mexican” and “Woman Hollering Creek.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (Fall 1995): 243-271.

Negotiating Borders: Issues of Sociocultural Cooptation

Amphibious Women: The Complexity of Class in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Scholarship on Sandra Cisneros has tended to highlight themes other than class: her Mexican-American Heritage, her interest in coming of age in tales, her position in the growing body of Latina writing, Cisneros and hybridity, Cisneros and eros. Discussions of Cisneros and class are almost non-existent despite its importance in the growing body of scholarship on Chicana literature. “Amphibious Women” redresses the muted impact of class analysis in Cisneros scholarship. With particular attention to the stories “Never Marry a Mexican” and “Bien Pretty,” this essay examines the mutable terrain of class in the lives of Cisneros’s upwardly mobile protagonists. Their first-person narratives expose finely tuned interior radar, an incisive ability to detect the nuances of class. Through entering the domain of the middle class, these heroines negotiate uncertain ground, playfully and forcefully resist multiple hegemonies, and insist upon redrawing and revising the borders and scripts of class in America.

In Sandra Cisneros’s story, “Never Marry a Mexican,” the narrator Clemencia declares: I’m amphibious. I’m a person who doesn’t belong to any class. The rich like to have me around because they envy my creativity; they know they can’t buy that. The poor don’t mind if I live in their neighborhood because they know I’m poor like they are, even if my education and the way I dress keeps us worlds apart. I don’t belong to any class. (71-72)

Clemencia’s ability to negotiate class positions in U.S. society, her “amphibious” nature, involves an irony: she measures her position against the class system, and her denial of its power over her belies her history and her defining relationship with her former lover Drew. She might refuse “to be fixed or measured by [class],” yet class remains “central” to her existence (Skeggs 75). Clemencia and her counterpart Lupe from the final story of the collection Woman Hollering Creek, “Bien Pretty,” are among Cisneros’s most fluid, socially untethered protagonists, yet neither can absolutely position herself outside of the structural realities of class. Still, the desire to read oneself into a new reality, a classless one, distinguishes these two amphibious narrators and propels the collection away from an oppressive patriarchal mythos that afflicts both sides of the border toward a woman-centered mythos of “Matzlán,” Gabriella Gutiérrez

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Muhs’s coinage for “the mythic homeland of womanhood” (xxv). As amphibians, they are emblematic of those who over-ride or step away from the prevailing class structure. Their ability to defy, if not fully escape, social prescripts makes them among Cisneros’s most memorable protagonists. Clemencia and Lupe live on the cusps of transformative change, and their desire to swim in a borderless world positions them as advanced thinkers or artists. Class, after all, is not an “essential” category with absolute boundaries and reified edges. As Beverly Skeggs argues, “Identities are continually in the process of being reproduced as responses to social positions” (94). Class tends to be fluid on the edges in the U.S., certainly more so than the less elastic variables of gender and race, though these, too, may give way to some “amphibiousness.” Still, apart from the border-crossing at the edges of class divisions, social class tends to be largely essentializing and essentialized, particularly for women of color. Clearly, more than wealth operates as a touchstone for establishment of class. Prominent among these signifying sociological variables are the perception and performance of gender and race. Here the Chicanisma of Cisneros’s two narrators becomes more pronounced: both identify as brown women, twice marginalized in the gaze of mainstream culture. By discovering strategies that diffuse the effects of such class and race discrimination, that resist the reproduction and reformulation of class structures, and that allow them to live in the fluid edges, they open up space for transformation (Skeggs 6). Neither Clemencia nor Lupe can define herself legitimately as working class; yet neither aims to define herself as middle- or upper-class, or to strive or pass for something she is not. These women exercise the audacity to claim agency and definition for themselves. Their narrations expose finely-tuned interior radar, an incisive ability to detect the vagaries of class. Though entering the domain of the middle class, Clemencia and Lupe navigate uncertain ground, playfully and forcefully resisting multiple hegemonies, and insist upon redrawing and revising the borders and scripts of class in America. Their success at doing so, however, is equivocal. Cisneros’s examination of class in Woman Hollering Creek reflects recent critical re-examinations of class that complicate social arrangements. For example, in Dissenting Fictions: Identity and Resistance in the Contemporary American Novel, Cathy Moses overviews the intricacies of classifications, boundaries, and other assigned cultural markers in narrative: “We interact with systems of

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power, we resist, and in these interactions and resistances, our understanding of agency and identity is produced and transformed” (6). Seeing little use in traditional categories and simplified binaries, Moses presents an understanding of class, race, and gender that underscores complexity, that rejects easy answers, and that celebrates the “assertion of agency . . . of demanding and articulating a voice” (7). Carlton Smith’s study, Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier, parallels Moses: the territory of the postmodern, he argues, is “the space of hybridity and transitional identities” (5). Cultural cartography, including markers such as class, race, or gender, is “mutable terrain” (Smith 9). Playful resistance, the performative subject, appears in his text as a dance: “[This dance is about] the process of resistance, reconfiguration, and semiotic appropriation. This dance is about the process of how borders are drawn and erased, and redrawn and again revised” (Smith 151). In such mutable terrain, class along with other categories of identity, becomes “slippery, problematic, and mobile” (Smith 3). Ramón Saldívar, studying folk music and dance in the American Southwest, reports equally complex negotiations: a history of resistance is encoded in folk music and dance, particularly in the Borderlands, the territory of “Hispanic diaspora,” where migration and cultural blurring have made notions of “identity, history, and borders” anything but simple (qtd. in Smith 152-53). To unravel the intricate web of identity in any culture—which includes the individual in the social hierarchy of class—requires sensitivity, caution, and a careful use of theory, including Marxist theory, which may be challenged by the shadings of existence or the telling nuances of narrative. What we need, Cathy Moses asserts, is “a multidimensional continuum that represents race, class, caste, and other ‘body specifications’” (9). There is, she concludes, a significant “distinction between a structured subject and a subject that interacts with structures” (152). Cisneros herself underscores the role of class—conflated with race and gender—in her emergence as a writer. Explaining the shame she once felt about her working-class origins, Cisneros reflects, “I used to be ashamed to take anyone into that room, to my house, because if they saw that house they would equate the house with me and my value. And I knew that house didn’t define me; they just saw the outside. They couldn’t see what was inside” (“Interview” 302). Brownness, too, presented a barrier to understanding. Feminist scholar Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano insists that “the Chicana’s experience as a

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woman is inextricable from her experience as a member of an oppressed working-class racial minority and a culture which is not the dominant culture” (140). Additionally, Angie Chabram-Dernersesian delineates the connection between “La Chicana” and labor, noting that “this figure is synonymous with national minority identity and lower social class, and again with indian and the mestizo. The link between race, class, and gender is thus made available through the embodied female subject who establishes herself at the center of the struggle for survival and resistance” (90). Cisneros’s fictional characters operate similarly. Through the very physicality of her women—their sexuality, their palpable desires and appetites, their skin, what Moses calls “body specifications”— Cisneros weaves the many layers of identity. According to Cisneros, embracing these embodied differences gave her the creative authority and energy at the Iowa Writers Workshop to “[realize] my difference from the other classmates as far as class differences, or cultural difference, my color difference” (“Interview” 302-03). In doing so, she became a writer. Clemencia and Lupe, who are both struggling to express identity in art, engage in parallel journeys in their stories. Clemencia, however, remains a caged bird while Lupe opens up space for transformation.

1. “Never Marry a Mexican” and the Constriction of Class Katherine Rios’s work on Cisneros is essential reading for anyone attempting to decipher the complexity and “multipositionality” of class (and other categories) in Woman Hollering Creek (205). Discerning the intricate “code switching,” playful social positioning, transgressions, and negotiations of Cisneros’s heroines, Rios argues that any claim to “cultural authenticity” is subverted in Clemencia and Lupe’s stories. “Crossing over” as metaphor structures these stories, as traversals “across geographical borders and borders of culture, class, and color” (202). Moreover, the stories in Woman Hollering Creek work “contrapuntally” in a way that elides a unified presentation, exposes opposition and cross currents, and forces a rhythmic push and pull “between humor and bitter revelation” (Brady 121). The stories carry the reader through multiple experiences, experiences that span childhood to adulthood, Mexico City to Chicago, the barrio to posh art galleries, female to male. Often

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the stories present counter or alternative narratives, displaying different facets, options, or fates for characters facing similar challenges: violence, oppression, seduction and betrayal. In the third section of her linked collection, the stories “Never Marry a Mexican” and “Bien Pretty” serve as purposeful complements. In both, the narrator is a visual artist struggling to maintain her aesthetic and personal integrity in and to rise above a competitive, commercial, and indifferent world. Both stories present heroines struggling in the borders and assuming amphibious identities as much for protection as for assertion. While neither heroine is acquisitive or desirous of middle-class security, both are preternaturally astute about the nuances of class and, as Bohemian artists, of their ambiguous relationship to class. A social geography is at work in both narratives, but Clemencia and Lupe use different strategies to stake autonomous claims. Clemencia remains confined within alien space, a white male-dominated mythos, never truly escaping her white lover Drew’s fantasy of conquistador and courtesan. In Moses’s words, Clemencia remains a “structured subject.” Lupe, on the other hand, proves the more transformed and amphibiously transformative figure, on a trajectory toward selfdefinition. She is the “subject that interacts with structures.” Clemencia declares her amphibiousness, talking the talk, yet remaining caught in a stagnant cycle of betrayal and abusive power. Lupe, however, walks the walk of amphibiousness as well, playfully inverting and subverting patriarchal mythology and celebrating her greater freedom with the wild birds, the raucous urracas of San Antonio, in a celebratory assertion that concludes both her narrative and Cisneros’s entire collection. The title of Clemencia’s tale expresses an immediate and absolute declaration: never marry a Mexican. Under her mother’s tutelage, she has learned a complicated class barometer: “My father,” Clemencia tells us, “had married down by marrying her. If he had married a white woman from el otro lado, that would’ve been different. That would have been marrying up, even if the white girl was poor” (69). From her mother’s position, the opposite holds true. When Clemencia’s father dies, “she married that white man, and he and his boys moved into my father’s house” (73). Marrying white means marrying up to a “U.S. Mexican.” Ironically, Clemencia’s Mexican father is educated, a possessor of “fanfarrón clothes . . . clothes that cost a lot. Expensive. That’s what my father’s things said. Calidad. Quality” (70-71). In Mexico, a world of servants, of “separate plate[s] for each course at

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dinner,” of folded “cloth napkins” and silverware, his class status trumps that of his American-born wife (69). Yet in the United States, Clemencia’s working-class white stepfather, “the foreman at the photo-finishing plant,” usurps her father’s place and improves her mother’s class standing in the community (73). Brown Mestiza skin marks one racially and socially, and even when Clemencia herself attracts a powerful white lover, Drew, he would himself echo her mother’s injunction one day, as she reflects, “Hadn’t I understood . . . responsibilities? Besides, he could never marry me. You didn’t think . .? Never marry a Mexican. Never marry a Mexican . . . No, of course not. I see. I see” (80). In the patriarchal community Clemencia grows up in, power, authority, and class run through the father’s or surrogate father’s assigned position. Her father dead, her step-father and mother dead to her, Clemencia ends up “effectively disinherited,” a reiteration of the “cultural-historical Malinche myth,” betrayed and betrayed again (Rios 203). In presenting such nuances, Cisneros “acknowledges class hierarchies not strictly as a function of economics, but also of race or color consciousness” (Rios 206). In response, and in rebellion, Clemencia and her sister Ximena move to the barrio to begin an “amphibious” life. Clemencia’s profession as artist and occasional substitute teacher provides her sufficient credentials to claim middle-class status if she wants it. But aligning herself geographically to the barrio removes Clemencia from the middle-class existence that her mother so envied. Still, Clemencia herself does not fit comfortably into this deprived world: “The barrio looked cute in the daytime, like Sesame Street . . . But nights, that was nothing like what we knew up on the north side. Pistols going off like the wild, wild West, and me and Ximena and the kids huddled in one bed with the lights off listening to it all, saying, Go to sleep, babies, it’s just firecrackers” (72). Her identity uncertain, her life under siege, Clemencia at nineteen begins an affair with her teacher, Drew, making a decision that will eventually pull her into an emotional undertow that proves more dangerous than the threats of violence in the barrio. In Drew’s sway, she becomes his captive, his “Malinalli, Malinche,” a courtesan still wearing the braid of girlhood (74). He wraps her within his own fantasy, desiring her skin, her language, her dark eyes and “hair blacker than a pirate’s” (74). Staking claim to her exotic otherness, Drew manipulates her with his compliments and controls her with his mentorship. She recalls his unctuous words of flattery: “Your eyes are beautiful, you said. You said they were the darkest eyes you’d ever seen and kissed each one as if they were capable of

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miracles” (75). As Clemencia reveals in another interior monologue to her current lover, Drew’s son: I was your father’s student, yes, just like you’re mine now. And your father painted and painted me, because he said I was his doradita, all golden and sun-baked, and that’s the kind of woman he likes best, the ones brown as river sand, yes. And he took me under his wing and in his bed, this man, this teacher, your father. I was honored that he’d done me the favor. I was that young. (76)

Even in memory Clemencia cannot fully accept how powerless and naïve she was at nineteen, an ersatz muse to a faithless adulterer. Ironically, she remains under Drew’s thrall, even in her vengeance. Drew, however, elevates her temporarily into a world of privilege and calidad. Cataloguing the objects in his house, Clemencia lingers over “the leaded-glass lamp . . . [the] Egyptian lotus design on the hinges of the doors . . . [the] four-clawed tub where he has washed my hair . . . [this] window. That counter. The bedroom with its light in the morning, incredibly soft, like the light from a polished dime” (80). Her “mental inventory” includes objects in the medicine cabinet, his wife’s objects: “Her Estée Lauder lipsticks . . . Her nail polishes . . . Her cotton balls and blond hairpins. A pair of bone-colored sheepskin slippers . . . On the door hook—a white robe with a MADE IN ITALY label, and a silky nightshirt with pearl buttons” (81). While Clemencia intrudes into this space, she remains a borrower, a sexual temp. Drew’s white wife’s material impact on this house bespeaks a permanence and intimacy that Clemencia can never claim. It also articulates Drew’s own upper-middle-class yearnings, his need to stake existence in this kind of house, with this kind of woman, with the accompanying quality and understated expensiveness. He is a parttime Bohemian, a pretend amphibian whose preferred geography is among the gente de alcurnia of San Antonio, the white elite. Clemencia’s small acts of subversion prove ineffective in blasting Drew’s world apart. Strategically placing hidden gummy bears in his wife Megan’s possessions—in her “Lucite makeup organizer,” her “bottle of nail polish,” and her “expensive lipsticks,” and even in her diaphragm—Clemencia finally has to acknowledge that “Drew could take the blame. Or she could say it was the cleaning woman’s Mexican voodoo” (81). Such spite, Katherine Rios notes, invokes “a

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vengeance that is ultimately self-destructive” (209). Rather than target the powerful man who has been her lover, Clemencia works indirectly, goading his wife in a way that might betray a fellow Mexican, perhaps an anonymous maid, and then seducing his son nineteen years later. In a pivotal scene several years after Drew discards Clemencia, she meets him again at a gallery opening. There she sees Megan, the wife, for the first time: “a redheaded Barbie doll in a fur coat. One of those scary Dallas types, hair yanked in a ponytail, big shiny face like the women behind the cosmetic counters at Neiman’s” (79). Clemencia is disarmed. Feeling exposed—“all the sepia-toned photographs, my students, the men in business suits, the high-heeled women, the security guards, everyone, could see me for what I was”—she “had to scurry out” in diminished stature, a whimpering Malinche with no force or possession, a deflated threat (79). When Drew pursues her, wife in tow, Clemencia recalls that she grinned “like an idiot and held out my paw” (79). All she can focus on is her shoes, shamed “at how old they looked” (79). Drew’s introduction, “This is Megan,” haunts her for years after. As a rebel, she fails. Clemencia holds a fantasy of possession, believing that she asserts power over Drew: You’re nothing without me. I created you from spit and red dust. And I can snuff you between my finger and thumb if I want to. Blow you to kingdom come. You’re just a smudge of paint I chose to birth on canvas. And when I made you over, you were no longer a part of her, you were all mine. The landscape of your body taut as a drum. The heart beneath that hide thrumming and thrumming. Not an inch did I give back. (75)

But she remains the possessed, trapped in an emotional tautology of skewed logic and recriminatory action based on that logic. In pursuing and trapping Drew’s nineteen-year-old son in an affair, Clemencia reproduces the asymmetric power that skewered her own young adult heart. Clemencia does not love the boy, yet wants the boy to love her, “[t]o make him want me, hunger, twist in his sleep, as if he’d swallowed glass” (82). By assuming Drew’s position in this dangerous teacher/student liaison, she does not resist a system of power; rather she replicates it. However, as a brown-skinned woman, she will never claim Drew’s full authority. The final effect of her

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manipulation of this boy’s desire is grotesque and self-destructive as she becomes fierce mother/lover to her former lover’s son: “Come to mamita,” she murmurs, “[m]y stupid little bird. I don’t move. I don’t startle him. I let him nibble . . . Rub his belly. Stroke him. Before I snap my teeth” (82). Whether she can reduce the boy to a state of unsatisfied hunger remains to be seen. He is, after all, the privileged son of powerful white parents, and he may not be susceptible to Clemencia’s Medea-like talent for nurturing vengeance. In a study of working-class females, Beverly Skeggs concludes that the women she interviews “are constantly aware of the judgments of real and imaginary others” (4). Indeed, for this group, “class is experienced by the women as exclusion” (74). Thus, many of Cisneros’s heroines are dogged by a sense of exile, even her would-be amphibious ones. They are attuned to the eyes that watch, judge, and deny their presence: mothers’ eyes that tell a daughter to reject her own kind and lovers’ eyes that eagerly consume the dark skin of a Mexican woman while reviling her status in larger society. Under the burden of such gazes, Clemencia shrinks into passive aggression, working stealthily if ineffectively to dismantle the effects of her history, a legacy of exclusion across class, race, and gender that is both personal and national. That she still loves a man who has multiplied her sense of exile is telling. Her vengeful dance of resistance exposes a sad truth: it is not Clemencia who leads this dance, but an unwitting partner, Drew, the man she still calls at 2 a.m., the man reiterated in his son’s “hard thighs [. . . and] . . . small hard downy ass,” the man who makes her “crazy as a tulip or a taxi,” the man who would never marry a Mexican (82-83).

2. “Bien Pretty” and Amphibious Possibilities At the tail end of Clemencia’s story, one sees a whispered hint of change in the narrator’s assessment of her life thus far. Despite her avowed midnight insanity, her desire to see Drew killed when, “dangerous as a terrorist,” she picks up the phone, Clemencia also opens herself to compassion, atonement, and peace (83). In a final passage, she confesses, “Human beings pass me on the street, and I want to reach out and strum them as if they were guitars. Sometimes all humanity strikes me as lovely. I just want to reach out and stroke someone, and say There, there, it’s all right honey. There, there, there” (83). These last words suggest that at some point Clemencia may release herself from the bondage of entrenched memory and of a

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hegemonic script. In stroking a stranger in consolation, she conceivably paves the way in her imagination toward transformation and productive resistance. What Clemencia grasps haltingly and intuitively, Lupe, in “Bien Pretty,” embraces fully. Also nursing a bruised and vulnerable heart, Lupe seeks compensatory salve in her art, in a mythos of womanhood and in the natural world around her. Unfortunately, seeking amphibious freedoms in life opens Lupe up to hurt as well as exaltation. Yet in her openness to geographical relocation, to trans-cultural exchange, and to cross-class love, Lupe demonstrates a genius for interaction and resistance. Lupe’s itinerancy is part of her personal response to the wider world’s codification of class, gender, and race. House-sitting for “a famous Texas poet,” Lupe has left San Francisco to experience life in the borderlands of San Antonio. In amphibian fashion, she settles “near the river in one of those houses with wood floors varnished the color of Coca-Cola” (139). The house, replete with Spanish, indigenous, and Mexican antiques, sits adjacent to the exclusive King William district, though “on the wrong side of South Alamo to qualify, the side where the peasantry lives” (139). Calidad and kitsch define this home, an eclectic, culture-crossing mix of heritage and modernity; its interior ambiguities comfortably reflect Lupe’s own layered and playful identity. In an extensive catalogue of material objects that rivals Clemencia’s itemizing of Drew’s home, Lupe revels in:

(8) Oaxacan black pottery pieces / signed Diego Rivera monotype / upright piano / star-shaped piñata / (5) strings of red chile lights / antique Spanish shawl / St. Jacques Majeur Haitian voodoo banner/cappuccino maker . . . replica of the goddess Coatlicue/ life-size papier-mâché skeleton signed by the Linares family … [among other objects sacred and profane]. (139)

While the poet and her husband, “an honest-to-God Huichol curandero” (139), represent San Antonio’s creative class of academics and artists, their objects and geographical affiliations align them with multiple communities. Their home gives Lupe a rich matrix in which to practice her evolving amphibious ways. Significantly, the lively presence that propels Lupe into her most adventurous encounter are cockroaches, vermin who themselves slip easily into the homes of the wealthy and poor alike, particularly in the

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urban South and Southwest. Cockroaches disarm a woman who has traveled a distance with the objects of her “pared down” past (141), her womanist aesthetic vision, and her need to forget Eduardo— Eddie—whom she supported after college and who ditched her for a “financial consultant for Merrill Lynch. A blonde” (142). Betrayed and terrified of Texas—“it was big. It was hot. And it was bad”— Lupe enters a liminal period of growth and healing (142). Rather than retreat into her past and accept the injustices of life as a Mestiza, she risks connection and change, of living extra-marine and ultramontaine, climbing out of one existence into a new, amphibious one. Ironically, a bigamist exterminator takes her there. Flavio Munguía Galindo is himself a master of multi-positionality, a border crosser of impressive dimensions, despite his small size and unappealing profession. His appearance in Lupe’s life is fortuitous, even if he leaves her with nights like “Gethsemane” (159). Though poor, Flavio, the grandson of Oralia, mesmerizes Lupe with his storytelling, his seductive, lyrical Spanish, and his ability to turn phrases into poetry or philosophy. His poverty has not abated his appetites for life, as his tattoos of women’s names, his healthy meals at Torres Taco Haven, and his sexual prowess with Lupe attest. Together they have lively conversations that often surprise and enlighten the better educated Lupe, despite her familiarity with Tao, Georgia O’Keefe, and post-colonial theory. One evening, over dinner, Flavio sweeps Lupe literally off her feet to demonstrate “‘pure tango,’ classic and romantic like Gardel” (150). Retrieving tapes from his pick-up, he plays old dance music: “‘Violín, violonchelo, piano, salterio. Music from the time of my abuelos. My grandma taught me the dances—el chotis, cancán, los valses. All part of that lost epoch’” (151). When Lupe asks if he knows any “indigenous dances . . . Flavio roll[s] his eyes” (151). Lupe’s attempt to define him through her own false mythic lens falls flat, and the dance lesson ends. On another evening, teasing Flavio for wearing a Lacoste shirt, Lupe says, “‘What you are, sweetheart, is a product of American imperialism,’” plucking “the alligator on his shirt” (151). Flavio’s response unravels her defenses: “‘I don’t have to dress in a serape and sombrero to be Mexican . . . I know who I am’” (151). All Lupe can manage in riposte is a weak, ineffective insult: “perro” (152). Dog. Clearly, Flavio outmaneuvers all of Lupe’s strategies of possession; her power play of artist and controlled subject collapses every time Flavio opens his mouth and produces language that promises ancient knowledge, secret origins, and grounded truths. The fact that he has less money than

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Lupe, that his possible status as undocumented worker makes him vulnerable, and that he has to crawl under houses and face off possums, snakes, and rats does not diminish his innate qualities. Lupe gains no leverage over him. Trying to wow him with her eclectic knowledge, Lupe quotes the I Ching. In response, Flavio didn’t say anything, just stared at his beer for what seemed a long time. “You Americans have a strange way of thinking about time,” he began. Before I could object to being lumped with the northern half of America, he went on. “You think old ages end, but that’s not so. It’s ridiculous to think one age has overcome another. American time is running alongside the calendar of the sun, even if your world doesn’t know it.” (149-50)

Then, to add sting to the blow, raised his beer bottle to his lips and added, “But what do I know, right? I’m just an exterminator” (14950). Flavio repeatedly deflates Lupe’s assumption of superiority and control and gives her a needed lesson in equity and humility. In doing so, he opens her up to life, loss, and greater artistic and imaginative vision. Flavio makes the interplay of the sacred and profane quite tangible. He is at once ordinary and mythic in Lupe’s imagination, her Prince Popo “with that face of a sleeping Olmec, the heavy Oriental eyes, the thick lips and wide nose, that profile carved from onyx” (144). He has “something,” Lupe recalls. “Some way of moving, of not moving, that belongs to no one but Flavio Munguía” (152). Like a precious art piece, made from common red clay, he emerges elegantly cast, “with skin sweet as burnt-milk candy, smooth as river water”; he is “bien pretty” (152). In memory, Lupe reclaims his feel, his smell, his touch, and his voice “like the pull of the ocean when it drags everything with it back to its center—that kind of gravelly, charcoal and shell and glass rasp to it” (155). When he leaves Lupe to return to Mexico to see to his four sons from multiple mothers, she is left with potent vestiges of their short history, snatches of philosophy—“‘I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes’” (150)—and visceral images of “that beautiful Tarascan face” (154). The grinding realities of his life, including separation from family, money struggles, and loneliness, elude her, and indeed Flavio himself has defied the defining categories of class and race, embracing his skin, his culture,

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and his work with confidence. His gift to Lupe is her own journey after which she can finally declare, “I know who I am.” Border crossing does not diminish this self-knowledge; it enhances it. Unlike Clemencia, who wraps herself in bitterness and remains entrenched within asymmetrical, disempowering systems of class and patriarchy, Lupe pushes outward through her tears, accepting life’s lessons and appearing hungry to learn more. Her affair with a male, Mexican counterpart brings to her an unexpected wholeness and healing, even while she nurses a wounded heart. Torres Taco Haven, the Kwik Wash, Centeno’s Mexican Supermarket, Woolworth’s, and Casa Preciado Religious Articles remain important geographical points for her as she ventures out into the bi-cultural world of San Antonio. In these places, she rubs elbows with other women, absorbing solace from this shared sisterhood. At home, telenovelas connect her more deeply to feminine wellsprings, too, for in her dreams she slaps the besotted and passive heroines “because I want them to be women who make things happen, not women who things happen to” (161). She suddenly revels in “real women. The ones I’ve loved all my life . . . Las girlfriends. Las comadres. Our mamas and tías. Passionate and powerful, tender and volatile, brave. And above all, fierce” (161). Knowing Flavio has guided Lupe into new appreciation of herself as a woman. Flavio’s power, his “something,” differs from Drew’s leveraged power over Clemencia. While Drew wields the power of denial—of access, of inclusion, and of respectability—Flavio does not wield power at all. Rather, he transfers intangibles to his lover: a sense of belonging, a growing vision, a confidence to resist the social order. Undaunted, Lupe declares: One way or another. Even if it’s only the lyrics to a stupid pop hit. We’re going to right the world and live. I mean live our lives the way lives were meant to be lived. With the throat and wrists. With rage and desire, and joy and grief, and love till it hurts, maybe. But goddamn, girl. Live. (163)

With this life-embracing declaration, Lupe becomes the poster girl of dissenting fictions, the voice of the once disenfranchised individual who now is remaking the world, taking down the barriers, and hollering resistance. When she finally completes her painting of Prince Popocatépetl and Princess Ixtaccíhuatl, she reverses their positions, placing the

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Prince on his back with the Princess overlooking him. In demythologizing a powerful cultural myth, Lupe playfully wags her finger at tradition and chalks one up for Maztlán. Internalizing myth into “the deep structure of our symbolic and discursive landscape” has its dangers, Carlton Smith argues, self-loathing among them if the myths of class, ethnicity, and gender deny individuals a valid, valued identity (4). Clemencia, in “Never Marry a Mexican,” has yet to gain release from the deep structure, but Lupe avoids Clemencia’s error by re-visioning myth and shedding out-worn symbols. By loving a Mexican man, she learns to love herself; in the process, her love of the ordinary, the common, and the real intensifies, sharpening and inspiring her aesthetic transformation of the real into art. Lupe’s internal revolution concludes the collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. We believe that positioning Lupe’s story at the end is intentional on Cisneros’s part. Using contradictory imagery, she concludes at the beginning of a new year, January. The sun is setting, silhouetting the grackles sitting on leafless branches, “dark and distinct as treble clefs, very crisp and noble and clean as if someone had cut them out of black paper with sharp scissors and glued them with library paste” (164). Feathered amphibians, birds master two environments, the air and the ground. Something about their “swooping and whooping” stirs Lupe to bilingualism, to the code-switching, border-crossing moments she shared with Flavio (164). In a lyrical crescendo, the grackles transform into urracas, exploding into the air, “[w]ide wings against blue” (164). Smaller starlings join them in a natural choreography above Lupe’s yard, “off and running, high high up . . . swooping in one direction and others crisscrossing. Like marching bands at halftime. This swoop never bumping into that” (164). The “throbbing” sky, moving columns of birds against “light . . . soft as nacre, a Canaletto, an apricot, an earlobe” (165), enters into Lupe’s being, bringing her a sense of transcendence grounded in the here and now. The “chittering, jabbering, clucking, chirruping, squawking, gurgling, going crazy because God-bless-it another day has ended” sound celebratory, crescendo-like notes in recognition of today, with “no thought of the future or the past” (165). In this in-between space, detached for a moment from the contingencies of life, Lupe stands marveling at the simple beauty of day’s end. A transplant to new terrain, a risk-taker and envelope pusher, Lupe has gained comfort in her own skin and the knowledge required to be a woman who makes things happen.

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Cisneros’s heroines are always attempting, if not always succeeding, in remaking the fabrics of identity and remarking the boundaries of their own cultural landscapes. Through their stories, the author guides her readers through the complexities of “systems of power” (Moses 6). For Chicanas, such remaking can be hazardous. Denise Segura relates that any resistance to tradition opens Chicanas up to the charge that “they are acting ‘like white women’—an act of betrayal to la cultura, a possible harbinger of its end, and something to be avoided among many women who give priority to maintaining traditional Chicana/Mexican culture” (39). To become la Malinche, betrayer of la raza, is a heavy charge indeed. But to betray one’s self proves the worse sin in Cisneros’s worldview. Her heroines face many barriers connected to class, race, and gender on both sides of the Mexican and U.S. border. Figuring out how to make an end run around or better yet how to dismantle these barriers remains her heroines’ primary challenge, whether they are children or experienced adults. “Never Marry a Mexican” and “Bien Pretty” present two correlative sides of this challenge. Clemencia’s declaration of amphibiousness is perhaps a necessary psychological strategy in defying the intransigent realities of class, race, and gender discrimination in the U.S. To declare the fluid borderlands one’s preferred cultural geography, to stake claim in post-modern ideas of hybridity, transnationalism, and mutable terrain, provides one with new compass points to negotiate the contested spaces of modern existence. Although old history and old myths remain potent forces in the modern world, Cisneros is determined to challenge, resist, and reconstruct ideologies that clip her heroines’ wings and keep them in a bound landscape. The urracas at collection’s end bespeak the hope of a new cultural order in which the most common among us negotiate both ground and sky, horizontal and vertical dimensions that offer multiple ways of living lives and defining our worlds. ¡tan TÁN!

Michael Carroll Susan Naramore Maher University of Nebraska at Omaha

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Works Consulted Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute P, 1987. Brady, Mary Pat. “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.” American Literature 71.1 (1999): 117-150. Chabram Dernersesian, Angie. “And, Yes . . . The Earth Did Part: On the Splitting of Chicana/o Subjectivity” in Building with Our Own Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies. eds. Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Perquera. Berkeley: U California P, 1993. (34-56) Cisneros, Sandra. Interview with Feroza Jussawall and Reed Way Dasenbrock in Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. eds. Feroza Jussawall and Reed Way Dasenbrock. Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1992. (286-306) ———. “Bien Pretty.” Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1992. (137-165). ———. “Never Marry a Mexican.” Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1992 (68-83) Gutiérrez y Muhs, Gabriella. Communal Feminisms: Chicanas, Chilenas, and Cultural Exile: Theorizing the Space of Exile, Class, and Identity. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Moses, Cathy. Dissenting Fictions: Identity and Resistance in the Contemporary American Novel. New York: Garland, 2000. Rios, Katherine. “‘And you know what I have to say isn’t always pleasant’: Translating the Unspoken Word in Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek” in Chicana (W)rites: on Word and Film. eds. Maria Herrera-Sobek and Helena Maria Viramontes. Berkeley: Third Woman P, 1995. (201-223) Segura, Denise A. “Chicanas in White Collar Occupations: Work and the Gendered Construction of Race and Ethnicity” in Color, Class, and Country: Experiences of Gender. eds. Gay Young and Bette J. Dickerson. London: Zed, 1994. (36-52) Skeggs, Beverley. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997. Smith, Carlton. Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier. Hanover: U P New England, 2000. Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Chicana Literature from a Chicana Feminist Perspective.” Americas Review 15.3-4 (1987): 139-145.

So You’ll Know Who I Am: Inventory and Identity in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories “So You’ll Know Who I Am: Inventory and Identity in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories” identifies and explores Sandra Cisneros’s unique reliance on lists, or catalogues. In Cisneros’s hands, the list is both method and metaphor; a prominent rhetorical structure in the short stories, the catalog can both literary portray and metonymically represent a Chicano experience simultaneously common and varied, collective and unique. After examining Woman Hollering Creek’s relationship to a variety of list-heavy and list-like narrative forms, this essay considers many of the collection’s stories but concludes with an emphasis on “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” in which an inventorying protagonist struggles to value community without sacrificing identity.

Many authors include acknowledgment pages, but the acknowledgements that open Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories are an integral part of the text. The critical attention they receive is, I believe, rightly deserved. “Los Acknowledgments,” though hardly a short story itself, effectively introduces a number of the themes and devices that shape the book it begins. Casual and peppered with Spanish, Cisneros’s voice in “Los Acknowledgments” is not unlike the voices of the narrators who inhabit her fictional worlds, and the relationships represented in the list of thank-yous—their variety, their intensity—also presage what will follow. “Los Acknowledgments” is so interesting, in fact, that it’s easy to forget that it’s just a list, an overgrown catalogue of the kinds of statements that authors generally confine to a five-line paragraph. That feature, however, is important, too, since Woman Hollering Creek is filled with inventories—catalogues, itemizations, collections, enumerations—which, in Cisneros’s hands, become particularly powerful descriptive and explanatory devices. Cataloguing, I want to suggest, is central to both Cisneros’s descriptive technique and, more importantly, to her cultural project. Cisneros strives to identify a shared Chicano experience without subordinating, dismissing, or devaluing individual Chicano experiences, and in Woman Hollering Creek, the list is both method and metaphor, a rhetorical structure that both literally portrays and metonymically represents a Chicano experience simultaneously common and varied, collective and unique. The artistic tradition most often associated with the catalogue is, of course, the epic, an originally oral form in which catalogues served

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not only a descriptive function but also a mnemonic one. Walter Ong contends in Orality and Literacy that since “[o]ral structures often look to pragmatics,” oral expression, now and in the past, tends to be “additive rather than subordinative,” “aggregative rather than analytic,” and, perhaps most important to our consideration of the catalogue, “redundant or ‘copious’” (37-9). “In oral discourse,” he explains, “[t]here is nothing to backloop into outside the mind, for the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. Hence the mind must move ahead more slowly… Oral cultures encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility. Rhetoricians call this copia” (39-41). However, despite its close association with the logistics of oral storytelling, the catalogue was never, according to Ong, a device without narrative purpose. He notes that “[p]rimary oral cultures commonly situate their equivalent of lists in narrative, as in the catalogue of the ships and captains in the Iliad (ii. 461-879)—not an objective tally but an operational display in a story about a war” (99). Chicano/a literature, critics have observed, is indebted to and informed by a rich oral heritage, and what Margot Kelley identifies as a trend in Chicano/a literature toward the composite novel is not, perhaps, unrelated to the copiousness Ong associates with oral tradition in general. A “hybrid of the novel and the short story” (Kelley 63), the composite novel might even be understood as a kind of catalogue in itself, as an extended collection of related but individuated moments in which inventory becomes infrastructure, less visible but there all the same. Kelley contends that Tomás Rivera’s And the Earth Did Not Devour Him “is arguably a composite novel, a series of vignettes interspersed with very short… impressionistic pieces which together offer a picture of Mexican-American migrant workers’ lives,” and she notes that “[t]hrough the stream of consciousness presentations of the varied narrators and the briefness of the pieces, Rivera captures the sense of the told tale, of the oral form… [H]e hearkens back to the corrido (the Texas-Mexican border ballad)” (68). Kelley points also to Rolando Hinajosa’s experimentation with the “‘estampas’ format, a use of sketches that work together to form a novel. To combine the individual elements into a coherent whole, Hinojosa – like Rivera – relies upon a logic of accretion, an elaborate parataxis” (69). Kelley’s description of a “logic of accretion” is not, it seems, dissimilar to Ong’s description of oral structures as “aggregative rather than analytic,” and she states that “it is but a tiny step narratologically and ideologically from Hinojosa’s

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estampas” to Cisneros’s acclaimed composite novel The House on Mango Street. When questioned about The House on Mango Street, Cisneros admits to “relish[ing] all those little things no one ever writes about,” and she explains that Mango Street includes “all of the girl knowledge that you get. I had this storehouse of information—little nursery rhymes and jump rope songs—and I thought what can I do with these things?” (Satz 167). The storehouse metaphor notwithstanding, inventory is a conspicuous feature of Woman Hollering Creek in a way that is isn’t in Mango Street, which, as a composite novel, is structured as a sort of inventory but lacks the internal listing so prevalent in Cisneros’s collection of short stories. Woman Hollering Creek, then, might be understood as a return to the catalogue as feature rather than infrastructure, as an affirmation of Chicano/a literature’s debt to oral structures but as a departure from the corridoestampas format. Helen Lock observes that “a useful distinction can be made between the differing perceptions of the memory process generated by oral and by literate cultures” (200), and Cisneros’s use of internal inventory may be linked to the fragmented way in which experiences are recounted in oral cultures: “Recall is… seldom exact, but ‘constructed or reconstructed from a few remembered details combined with an impression left by the original… it has been built up from fragments’” (201). Lock cites Toni Morrison’s Beloved as her example, and her critical description of remembering as the location and collection of members suggests something like an inventory: “Through her central character, Sethe, Morrison coins the neologism ‘rememory’… It puns on the fact that to ‘re-member’ something is to perform the act of reassembling its members, thus stressing the importance to the memory process of creative reconstruction” (203). We must not, however, overlook the catalogue’s notable heritage in literate (that is, non-oral) traditions. Consider, for example, Henry Mayhew’s proto-sociological Victorian treatise London Labour and the London Poor, which established the catalogue as an effective way of documenting the people and institutions of a society – or, as it were, a segment of a society. “Those who obtain their living in the streets of the metropolis are a very large and varied class,” states Mayhew early on. “[T]he mind is long baffled in its attempts to reduce them to scientific order or classification.” Quickly, however, Mayhew settles on a rubric, lists its components—“street-sellers,” “streetbuyers,” “street-finders,” “street-performers, artists, and showmen,” “street-artizans, or working pedlars,” and “street labourers”—and

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proceeds to offer detailed inventories of the possessions, habits, wares, and manners of London’s poorest class. His catalogues of minutiae are so long and explicit that they sound almost celebratory, triumphant. “[S]treet-sellers of eatables” include, according to Mayhew, “vendors of fried fish, hot eels, pickled whelks, sheep’s trotters, ham sandwiches, peas’-soup, hot green peas, penny pies, plum ‘duff’, meat-puddings, baked potatoes, spice-cakes, muffins and crumpets, Chelsea buns, sweetmeats, brandy-balls, cough drops, and cat and dog’s meat” (5). Although it’s unlikely that Cisneros would identify Mayhew’s work as an ancestor of her own, it’s equally undeniable that Woman Hollering Creek, like London Labour, aims to introduce readers (some of them, anyway) to a segment of society with which they may not be familiar. In Cisneros’s text, Harryette Mullen argues, “[t]he reader again and again confronts the untranslatability of the subordinated cultural discourse into the language of the culturally dominant other” (4), but we may, perhaps, understand list-making as a means of decoding without fully translating, as a method of presenting data without necessarily interpreting it. Mayhew’s lists may sound festive, but Walt Whitman’s catalogues are overtly, unquestionably so. The list, linchpin of Mayhew’s scientific rhetoric, becomes poetry in Whitman’s hands, and the catalogue form, we note, can accommodate both objectives. Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” inventories the “varied carols” (l. 1) that together constitute America’s social voice: “The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,/ The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,/ The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning…” (ll. 5-7). Whitman and other practitioners of so-called “catalogue verse” (Benét’s… 166) proved the versatility of the list as a written form, and since Cisneros incorporates a variety of lists in a variety of ways, her work may, perhaps, be understood as operating in a related context. As evidenced by its association with an eccentric variety of genres and texts, listing is arguably intrinsic to human experience, and early in Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros asserts that to catalogue is the most effective and efficient way to comprehend. The narrators and other characters introduced in the first third of the book are primarily children, and they seem literally to take stock of their environments, instinctively collecting and cataloguing the materials of their lives. For example, Micaela of “Mericans” sees the church as a reservoir of

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smells and sounds and a sort of holding tank for wishes, its “ceiling high and everyone’s prayers bumping up there like balloons” (19). Bored by her grandmother’s interminable praying on behalf of what she describes as a “long, long list of relatives who haven’t gone to church,” Micaela counts saints and “the awful grandmother’s mustache hairs” (19), finding solace and interest in the same kind of detailed inventory that represents play for the girls of “Barbie-Q,” which opens in the voice of a child reveling in a catalogue of Barbie attributes: “Yours is the one with mean eyes and a ponytail. Striped swimsuit, stilettos, sunglasses, and gold hoop earrings. Mine is the one with bubble hair. Red swimsuit, stilettos, pearl earrings, and a wire stand” (14). The script for the Barbie game, she notes, is “[e]very time the same story,” and a large part of the toys’ appeal seems to stem from their piecey nature, from the fact that they are, essentially, a collection of parts: “strapless gown… formal-length gloves, pink chiffon scarf, and mike included” (14). The impulse to inventory extends beyond childhood, however, and when interviewed, the adult Cisneros comes across as something of a collector herself. She describes Loose Woman as “what I call a box of poems… ‘poems I threw under the bed,’ metaphorically” (Satz 172). Cisneros also notes with amusement that the manuscript for My Wicked, Wicked Ways “was in these different typefaces that kind of documented my poverty and my rise out of it. Some poems were composed on my junky little typewriter—the one that made little holes with the o; there were some on my little typewriter that was a step up, an electronic one; all the way finally to computers” (Satz 174). Though obviously casual, her discussion of typefaces is significant in its suggestion that inventory represents a way of understanding the past as well as the present, a mode of remembering as well as a means of experiencing. Not only do Cisneros’s characters list in response to their current realities—“This town with its silly pride for a bronze pecan the size of a baby carriage in front of the city hall. TV repair shop, drugstore, hardware, dry cleaner’s, chiropractor’s, liquor store, bail bonds, empty storefront, and nothing, nothing, nothing of interest” (50)—but just as Lock suggests should happen, they often re-experience past realities as catalogues of fragments of memory. Inés of “Eyes of Zapata” is perhaps Cisneros’s most articulate spokesperson for inventory’s dual power. Her story begins with a deeply physical, forcefully present-tense inventory of her lover’s body:

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Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol I put my nose to your eyelashes. The skin of the eyelids as soft as the skin of the penis, the collarbone with its fluted wings, the purple knot of the nipple, the dark, blue-black color of your sex, the thin legs and long thin feet… For now you are here, you are mine.” (85)

But as the tale continues, inventory becomes primarily a means of remembering: “I don’t leave you, not ever. Do you know why? Because when you are gone I re-create you from memory. The scent of your skin, the mole above the broom of your mustache, how you fit in my palms. Your skin dark and rich as piloncillo” (88). Inés seems intimately familiar, and that sort of realism is, perhaps, among Cisneros’s primary claims to fame as a literary artist. “[T]hese stories invite us into the souls of characters as unforgettable as a first kiss,” reads one quotation, reprinted from The New York Times Book Review, on the paperback’s front cover. Few critics, however, have discussed Cisneros’s methods of developing character, which, I would suggest, depend upon catalogues and similar devices. People, Cisneros asserts throughout her story collection, are collections themselves – or, to put it more accurately, people simply are what they collect. We’re best understood, these tales imply, in terms of the stuff that we accumulate, store, and inventory. Perhaps the unnamed narrator of “One Holy Night” explains it best when she describes her boyfriend Chaq, who “showed me the guns – twenty-four in all. Rifles and pistols, one rusty musket, a machine gun, and several tiny weapons with mother-of-pearl handles that look like toys. So you’ll see who I am, he said, laying them all out on the bed of newspapers. So you’ll understand” (29). In “Bien Pretty,” Lupe operates similarly, offering the book’s only textually emphasized—that is, set-off—list to describe the intellectual, affluent owners of the house in which she lives. It’s a register that includes, among other things, “(8) Oaxacan black pottery pieces/ signed Diego Rivera monotype/ upright piano/ star-shaped piñata/ [and] (5) strings of red chile lights/ …” (139). To tell about herself, Lupe provides a less formally constructed inventory that imparts a sense of her character just the same: “I’d driven all the way from northern California to central Texas with my past pared down to what could fit inside a van. A futon. A stainless-steel wok. My grandmother’s molcajete. A pair of flamenco shoes with crooked heels. Eleven huipiles. Two rebozos – de bolita y de seda. My Tae Kwon Do uniform…” (141).

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But Lupe’s particular appropriation of the catalogue evokes another aspect of the we-are-what-we-collect paradigm that Cisneros articulates. Since Lupe notes that she “pared down” her possessions to travel to Texas, we’re meant to understand her inventory as a list of self-defining essentials, and we may, perhaps, offer a revised version of Cisneros’s rule of lists, one amended to state that we can also know a person by what she opts to include in her collection—and by what she chooses to omit. In “Never Marry a Mexican,” for instance, Clemencia begins her last visit to her married lover’s home by making “a mental inventory of everything. The Egyptian lotus design on the hinges of the doors. The narrow, dark hall where your father and I had made love once. The four-clawed tub where he had washed my hair and rinsed it with a tin bowl. This window. That counter. The bedroom with its light in the morning…” (80). Clemencia’s subsequent decision to focus her inventory on the wife’s possessions is far more telling, maybe even the story’s most illuminating passage: I found myself opening the medicine cabinet, looking at all the things that were hers. Her Estée Lauder lipsticks. Corals and pinks, of course. Her nail polishes – mauve was a brave as she could wear. Her cotton balls and blond hairpins. A pair of bone-colored sheepskin slippers, as clean as the day she’d bought them. (81)

Whereas Lupe the mover is constrained by space, Clemencia the snoop is constrained by time, and her choices regarding inventory offer the reader a window onto her psyche, a glimpse of her mind at work. People collect intangibles as well as tangibles, however, and the characters of Woman Hollering Creek keenly employ counting and listing structures to take stock of identity-defining experiences as well as possessions. “I think everyone has to stumble around to find her voice,” Cisneros states, before itemizing, briefly and generally, the experiences that shaped her own life and career: “Coming from a working class background, an ethnic community, an urban community, a family that did not have books in the house, I just didn’t have the same frames of reference as my classmates [in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa]” (Satz 169). In her short stories, men and women inventory self-shaping moments and conditions more minutely, and the result is an accretive, rather than a monolithic, sense of identity. Critics have noticed that “Eleven,” for

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example, “sets up a system of multiple selves” (Thomson 416), but its poignant catalogue opening has generally escaped remark: “What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one” (6). For Cisneros, even the experience of time, a phenomenon usually understood as a fluid progression, becomes a collection of individuated pieces, “eleven years rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box” (7). As Flavio puts it in “Bien Pretty,” “You Americans have a strange way of thinking about time… You think old ages end, but that’s not so. It’s ridiculous to think one age has overcome another” (149-50). The nature of an individual’s experiences is, of course, largely related to the community in which she lives, and many readers prefer to regard Cisneros as a writer of collective experience (particularly the Chicana experience) than as a writer of idiosyncratic identity. Jeff Thomson, for example, contends that “the power of Cisneros’s women is to “understand the confluence of all things; women continue in a cycle of birth and blood; they become themselves through the honest acceptance of the world beyond the body” (416), and he asserts that “[t]he vignettes that Cisneros offers [in Woman Hollering Creek] are not supposed to be read as isolated incidents, but rather emblematic of a social structure that allows little… possibility for the formation of an identity outside the boundaries of the barrio” (418). Communities are, perhaps, even more easily understood as collections than are individuals, and inventory is a device as conducive to introducing a people as it is to introducing a person. Cisneros’s characters catalogue the physical, geographical components that define their communities as places—“…we walk past the basilica, where each Sunday the Abuela lights the candles... Past the very same spot where long ago Juan Diego brought down from the cerro the miracle that had drawn everyone… down the avenue one block past the bright lights of the sastrería of Senor Guzmán…” (22)—as well as the materials that distinguish communal habits, rituals, tastes, and traditions. Susan Griffin observes that Cisneros’s women are particularly “influenced by all the contemporary forms of popular culture, like movies, television, and songs” (86), and Cisneros, we notice, frequently documents these forces, among others, as lists: “Five songs 50 cents. I punched 132, ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas,’ George Strait; 140, ‘Soy Infeliz,’ Lola Beltrán; 233, ‘Polvo y Olvido,’ Lucha Villa; 118, ‘Mal Hombre,’

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Lydia Mendoza; and number 167, ‘La Movidita,’ because I knew Flavio loved Flaco Jiménez” (155). “Bien Pretty” also includes an inventory of artifacts less associated with popular culture than with Mexican Catholicism and folklore, and it nearly consumes the entirety of one division of the story. In “the Mexican voodoo shop,” Lupe explains, “[t]he votive candles are arranged like so. Church sanctioned powers on one aisle—San Martín de Porres, Santo Nino de Atocha, el Sagrado Corazón, La Divina Providencia… Folk powers on another – El Gran General Pancho Villa, Ajo Macho/Garlic Macho… Bingo Luck, Law Stay Away, Court Case Double Strength…” (158-9). Cisneros’s next two paragraphs are nothing but inventory, and her bold decision to let these extended catalogues stand without commentary, to speak for themselves so near the end of the story and the book, seems to merit – or even require – their partial reproduction here: Magic oils, magic perfume and soaps, votive candles, milagritos, holy cards, magnet carstatuettes, plaster saints with eyelashes made from human hair, San Martín de Caballero good-luck horseshoes, incense and copal, aloe vera… Herbs stocked from floor to ceiling in labeled drawers. AGUACATE, ALBAHACA, ALTA-MISA, ANACAHUITE, BARBAS DE ELOTE, CEDRÓN DE CASTILLO, COYOTE, CHARRASQUILLA, CHOCO-LATE DE INDIO, EUCALIPTO, FLOR DE ACOCOTILLO, FLOR DE AZAHAR, FLOR DE MIMBRE, FLOR DE TILA, FLOR DE ZEMPOAL… (159)

Writing character and writing community are not, of course, mutually exclusive objectives, and since the components of a list are, by definition, individuated yet associated, independent unto themselves yet part of a larger whole, the catalogue becomes an intriguing metaphor for the individual’s existence within the context of a group. Specifically, the voodoo shop in “Bien Pretty” presents Lupe with so many cultural artifacts that she can’t possibly incorporate them all into herself—that is, into her collections of possessions and experiences—and this, perhaps, is the lesson that Cisneros means to impart by dramatically dumping what might pass for the store’s stock register into Lupe’s narrative at the height of her

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confusion. Although, in many ways, Cisneros clearly desires to articulate a shared Chicano/a experience, she won’t do so at the price of individuality, either her own as a writer (hence her unique adaptation of various accretive forms and genres) or her characters’ distinctive personalities. Lupe, Thomson notes, tries throughout “Bien Pretty” to be “so many things [that] she is nothing” (422); she must learn to pare down her collection in order to understand where the community around her ends and her self begins. “Remember the Alamo” even more overtly employs catalogue to describe a single individual within the context of a group. Tristán’s highly unique experience—“One-man show, girl. Flamenco, salsa, tango, fandango, merengue, cumbia, cha-cha-chá”—is described in pieces, interspersed among segments of a list of Latino names that runs the length of the story: “Gustavo Galindo, Ernie Sepúlveda, Jessie Robles, Jr., Ronnie DeHoyos, Christine Zamora…” (63). The story’s title suggests that its list identifies the victims of a modern massacre, and Tristán, dancing fearlessly with “La Flaquita, Thin Death” (64), seems certain to be on the roster shortly. The story entitled “Anguiano Religious Articles Rosaries Statues Medals Incense Candles Talismans Perfumes Oils Herbs” is more subtle. The store’s name foregrounds its inventory, but the two characters who display interest in and interact with that collection—the narrator and the shopkeeper—are fundamentally different in their motives and attitudes. As a result, the narrator asserts, they’re destined for opposite locations in the afterlife: “I should’ve told him, You go to hell. But what for? He’s already headed there” (115). “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” is, perhaps, the story in which Cisneros most vividly translates inventory into a statement of both individual and communal experience. The piece is structured as a collection of notes addressed to Catholic saints and deities, and Cisneros is clear that the note-writers are neither randomly chosen nor, likely, unassociated, since the listed names and hometowns, as well as the frequent incorporation of Spanish, identify them as members of a south Texas Latino community. However, as communally located as “Little Miracles” is, Cisneros offers more than a sense of collective experience, the distinct elements of her catalogue providing glimpses into highly unique individual lives. The letters inventory problems that include the severe, the cosmetic (“help me with my face breaking out in so many pimples” [121]), and everything in between (“[p]lease send us clothes, furniture, shoes, dishes” [117]). The notes invoke an array of religious figures—San Antonio de Padua

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(117) and Father Almighty (119), the “Virgencita de Guadalupe” (120) and “Cristo Negro” (123)—and as texts, they represent a collection of lengths, tones, and even typefaces. As Chayo observes, people’s gifts to their saints are as varied as their lives: Virgencita… I’ve cut off my hair just like I promised I would and pinned my braid here by your statue. Above a Toys “R” Us name tag that says IZAURA. Along several hospital bracelets. Next to a business card for Sergio’s Casa de Belleza Beauty College. Domingo Reyna’s driver’s license. Notes printed on the flaps of envelopes. Silk roses, plastic roses, paper roses, roses crocheted out of fluorescent orange yarn. Photo button of a baby in a charro hat. Caramel-skinned woman in white graduation cap and gown. Mean dude in bandanna with tattoos. Oval black-and-white passport portrait… (124-5)

Chayo’s narrative is at the heart of Cisneros’s desire to depict individuality as simultaneously shaped by and resistant to cultural forces. Cisneros contends that “growing up Mexican and feminist is almost a contradiction in terms” (Satz 170), and Chayo, we sense, feels the same way. In an act of defiance, Chayo, who does not want to be a mother but “wouldn’t mind being a father” (127), cuts her long hair. However, despite her rebellious nature, she recognizes that her identity as inextricably bound to the traditional as it is to the unconventional: “I’m a snake swallowing its tail. I’m my history and my future. All my ancestors’ ancestors inside my own belly. All my futures and all my pasts” (126). Her story of resistance is enriched with and interrupted by numerous catalogues of tangibles and intangibles, including milagritos—“a gold sacred Heart, a tiny copper arm, a kneeling man in silver, a bottle, a brass truck…” (125)—and her community’s names for a woman like herself: “Heretic. Atheist. Malenchista. Hocicona” (127). She lists her relatives’ questions and comments—“Chayito, when you getting married? Look at your cousin Leticia. She’s younger than you… You’ll change. You’ll see” (126)—and documents in list form her own rebellious concept of the Virgin: “When I could see you in all your facets, all at once the Buddha, the Tao, the true Messiah, Yahweh, Allah, the Heart of the Sky, the Heart of the Earth, the Lord of the Near and Far, the Spirit, the Light, the Universe, I could love you, and finally learn to love me”

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(128). An individual, like the community in which she exists, is a collection of memories, experiences, and influences, and by including her own unconventional “little miracle” (129) with the others at the Virgin’s statue, Chayo affirms her ability to remain unique within a collective context, to participate in her culture without losing her sense of herself. She can (quite literally) add a piece of herself to the collection without becoming that collection, and she can list the experience of doing so among the events that have shaped her own unmatched and unmatchable identity. Cisneros notes that Mango Street translates uncannily well into Spanish: “The syntax, the sensibility, the diminutives, the way of looking at inanimate objects—that’s not a child’s voice as is sometimes said. That’s Spanish!” (Kelley 73). It is possible, of course, that a similar force operates in Woman Hollering Creek; perhaps Cisneros, in other words, due to her linguistic background and/or unique psychology, simply tends to speak and write in lists. If this be the sole truth, however, such listing is strangely and conspicuously absent from The House on Mango Street and disproportionately present in Woman Hollering Creek. And accidents of this nature seem unlikely in the work of a writer so deliberately and exquisitely attuned to the minutiae that, in the final analysis, define everything. Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol Trinity University Works Consulted “Catalogue Verse.” Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. 3rd ed. 1987. Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Griffin, Susan E. “Resistance and Reinvention in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek” in Ethnicity and the American Short Story. ed. Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1997. (85-96) Kelley, Margot. “A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre” in Ethnicity and the American Short Story. ed. Julie Brown. New York: Garland, 1997. (63-84) Lock, Helen. “‘Building Up from Fragments’: The Oral memory Process in Some Recent African-American Written Narratives.” Race-ing Representation: Voice, History, Sexuality. Eds. Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. (200-212) Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. 1861-1862. Ed. Victor Neuburg. London: Penguin, 1985.

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Mullen, Harryette. “‘A Silence Between Us Like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” MELUS 21.2 (1996): 3-20. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Satz, Martha. “Returning to One’s House: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros.” Southwest Review 82 (1997): 166-185. Thomson, Jeff. “‘What is Called Heaven’”: Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek. Studies in Short Fiction 31 (1994): 415-424. Whitman, Walt. “I Hear America Singing.” Leaves of Grass. 1891-2. The Harper American Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. (1915-1916)

The Chicana Trinity: Maternal Mestiza Consciousness in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Gloria Anzaldúa’s essay “La conciencia de la mestiza/ Towards a New Consciousness” from her seminal text Borderlands/La Frontera explores the fragmenting affects of the competing cultural demands placed on Chicanas. Anzaldúa’s answer to this attack on the identity is pluralism. This multiplicity is created by synthesizing competing demands of Mexican, Anglo, and Indigenous cultures. Myth plays an important role in this synthesizing. Anzaldúa suggests that the Mestiza must take inventory of her ancestry, including the myths and legends of both pre- and postcolonial Mexico. Armed with the knowledge of how these myths and legends have been wielded as tools of oppression against Chicanas, the new Mestiza reinterprets and reshapes the myths, legends, and archetypal figures of all her cultures to create empowered pluralist modes of identity. Chicana author Sandra Cisneros’s text Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is an example of this type of psychic activism. Cisneros’s characters are engaged in this Mestiza process, as is Cisneros herself through the act of writing the text. This paper explores the presence of the Mestiza work as outlined by Anzaldúa in Cisneros’s stories “Woman Hollering Creek,” “Never Marry a Mexican,” and “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.” Within these stories, Cisneros presents and reworks the mythical figures of La Llorona, La Malinche, and La Virgen de Guadalupe. She draws out the power of these cultural archetypes and subverts the oppressive, negative connotations previously associated with them, hence creating a Chicana trinity.

The Chicana feminist movement has long been focused on psychological makeup and multicultural influences. The Chicana is influenced by Anglo, indigenous, and Mexican cultures. As a result of the disparate influences of these cultures, the Chicana lives in a perpetual state of ambiguous identity, having to mold herself to the social expectations of women from diverse points of view. Chicana feminist author Gloria Anzaldúa’s essay “La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness,” from her seminal text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, explores the fragmenting effects of these competing cultural demands. She states that this “[i]nternal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness,” and asserts that “[t]he mestiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness” (100). Anzaldúa’s answer to this psychological conflict is pluralism, which is created by synthesizing the competing demands of Anglo, indigenous, and Mexican cultures. Obviously, myth plays an important role in this process of synthesizing since myths, legends, and archetypes both affect and reflect cultural beliefs.

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Anzaldúa suggests that the mestiza must take inventory of her ancestry, including the myths and legends of both pre- and postcolonial Mexico. Armed with the knowledge of how these myths and legends have been wielded as tools of oppression against Chicanas, the new mestiza “reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths” (104). This refiguring of the female archetypes that are present in all of her cultures creates empowered pluralistic models of identity. To achieve this, Chicanas must cultivate what Anzaldúa calls “mestiza consciousness,” obtainable by occupying a place “where the possibility of uniting all that is separate occurs” (101). In this psychological state, referred to in an earlier essay by Anzaldúa as “the Coatlicue state,” the mestiza, like the goddess Coatlicue,1 is both creative and destructive. She receives a psychic energy that “comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspects of each new paradigm” (Anzaldúa 102). As she brings together seemingly incompatible traits and characteristics in her own being and in the productions of this being, she breaks down “the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and . . . [shows] how duality is transcended” (Anzaldúa 102). As an example, Anzaldúa discusses the need “to unlearn the puta/virgen [whore/virgin] dichotomy2 and to see Coatlalopeuh-Coatlicue3 in the Mother, Guadalupe4” (106). According to Anzaldúa, to achieve racial and cultural equality, there must first be equality between the sexes: “[a]s long as woman is put down, the Indian and Black in all of us is put down” (106). The oppression of women has served as a model for all other forms of oppression; Anzaldúa’s statement suggests that ending the oppression of women could serve as a parallel model for complete eradication of this particular form of abuse. Anzaldúa sees this longed-for gender equality as beginning with the archetype of the mother. She states, “[w]e’re halfway there—we have such love of the Mother, the good mother” (106). However, without respect for the “dark” or terrible aspects of the maternal archetype, the veneration of the good mother becomes oppressive. Specifically, the qualities of the good mother are often associated with acts of selflessness. The mother should feel a “natural” desire to protect and provide for her children and the needs of others, even if

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these acts require her to ignore her own desires and well being. In addition, she is subject to her husband and his needs. She is nonsexual, feeling no physical desire, but she is duty-bound to submit her body to her husband’s desires. In short, the model of the good mother limits female access to the totality of the human psyche and the autonomy of the physical body. By keeping themselves “good,” such women are kept from self-understanding and learn to fear and repress the socially unacceptable elements of themselves until these elements become completely foreign. These aspects are no longer regarded as natural. Anzaldúa claims that these “negative” elements need to be brought to the forefront of consciousness and reexamined. Chicana author Sandra Cisneros’s text Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories represents an example of Anzaldúa’s concept of unlearning the whore/virgin dichotomy. This unlearning is brought about by bringing together elements from either side of the binary. Traits labeled negative or positive are explored through and by the characters in Cisneros’s work to expose their natural compatibility. In fact, Cisneros’s characters are engaged in the process of obtaining/producing mestiza consciousness, as is Cisneros herself through the act of writing the text. Within her stories “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” “Never Marry a Mexican,” and “Woman Hollering Creek,” Cisneros presents and reworks the mythical maternal figures of la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, and la Llorona. Furthermore, she draws out the power of these cultural archetypes representing the good mother and the bad mother, and subverts the oppressive negative connotations associated with them, creating a Chicana trinity. In Mexican culture, the good mother is commonly represented by the Catholic figure la Virgen de Guadalupe, who first “appeared to the Indio Juan Diego in the early colonial period in an area known to be the sacred worshipping place of an important pre-Columbian Nahuatl goddess, Tonantzín5” (Rebolledo 50). The Virgen instructed Juan Diego to build a temple on the hilltop where she would be worshipped as the mother of Christ. Many believe that the Catholic Church created this story as justification for the appropriation of this sacred land in an attempt to encourage the conversion of the indigenous peoples of Mexico away from their pagan beliefs and toward the Catholic faith. It is true that the Catholic Church has a long history of destroying pagan sites of worship and replacing them with their own

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temples, cathedrals, and churches (Lafaye 214).6 However, this should not suggest that the Catholic Church was always pleased with the results. In the case of la Virgen de Guadalupe, the Church was greatly concerned that this indigenous Catholicism was merely a mask for the people’s sustained idolatry (Lafaye 217). This concern was centered on the indigenous deification of the Virgen. Catholicism holds that the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, is a human woman, not a goddess. She should not be worshipped but rather sought as a conduit to God. In honor of her position as the Mother of Christ, Mary’s body and soul were transported to Heaven in the Assumption, where she was named Queen of Heaven. So while she is not a deity, she is an immortal of distinction. To further complicate her mortal nature, Mary can hear the pleas or prayers of her fellow humans, but she does not possess the power to answer these supplications. However, petitioners of the Virgin look to her to act on their behalf before her Son. As the Mother of Christ, “the Blessed Virgin is invoked in the Church under the titles of Advocate, Helper, Benefactress, and Mediatrix” (Catechism of the Catholic Church). Clearly, any privilege Mary possesses is derived from her motherhood. The indigenous people of Mexico surely acknowledged many parallels between Mary and their own Mother goddesses, collectively referred to as Tonantzín or Our Holy Mother (Lafaye 212-13). These goddesses were powerful and autonomous. Their primacy was related to their motherhood, but in a very different way from that of the Virgen. According to Rostas, Tonantzín, as the goddess Coatlicue, is directly related to the power of the Earth (371). Anzaldúa further declares as the “[g]oddess of birth and death, Coatlicue gives and takes away life” (68). Clearly, the goddess was not considered subservient to anyone, and her power, while it was maternal, was not relational. The Aztec people assumed that the Virgin Mary was yet another incarnation of the divine Mother, as Mary is Mother to the divine. Yet the deification of Mary is problematic for the Church for many reasons. First, it challenges Christianity’s monotheism. Second, it challenges the Christian patriarchy. If women were allowed to identify with the divine, they would, by necessity, share a spiritual equality with men. The ramifications of this equality are profound. In Christianity, the male gender is eternal. It is something that has always been and will always be. It is divine. There is only one deity, and he is male. The female gender, on the other hand, was merely created to

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help the human image of God, Adam. Thus, according to Christian tenets, humanity becomes essentially male, and the female is only an afterthought since it is born out of God and the body of Adam. This Christian story of creation defines essential gender roles: Man is made in the image of God to rule over the Earth and all of its inhabitants. While woman is made as a companion for man, her role is to help him fulfill his. Mexico’s native people’s relationship to the divine feminine surely posed a threat to these normative gender roles, so the Church sought to stamp out this Marian cult. However, the church could not simply remove the Virgen from the consciousness of its new converts. Likewise, this identification of Mary with the native goddess was effective in their Catholic conversion efforts. Therefore, there had to be definite boundaries for the Virgen. Any “threatening” aspect of Tonantzín was removed. The divine feminine was split in two,7 retaining the “good” qualities of the goddess and bestowing them on Mary and vilifying the “negative” qualities, thereby creating in the native consciousness a female binary, puta/virgen. Where there had once been wholeness, there was now strife. What had once been seen as totality was now viewed as incongruent. The natural connection between sexuality and motherhood was now viewed as unnatural. Women were either like Mary, a subservient, pious, protective mother, or they were promiscuous, selfish, betraying whores. La Virgen de Guadalupe’s initial veneration in Mexican culture was due to the connection drawn between her and the goddess, but this very connection was soon denied and vilified. She became the standard of acceptable womanhood and motherhood, and all women must submit to the standard or be persecuted as whores. It is no mistake that female sexuality is both the target and emblem of these “negative” traits of the feminine. Female sexuality has always been a challenge to the patriarchy primarily because in pre-patriarchal goddess cults, a woman derived power and primacy from this very trait (Rich 59). Women were in control of their own bodies and sexuality. If they became pregnant, they decided if they wanted to give life. This was not only considered a reflection of the divine Mother, but also a power to create that the male sex did not possess. With the advent of the patriarchy, however, female sexuality had to be controlled. A man had to know that his wife was his property and that her body and its offspring belonged solely to him. He thus decided when life was made and given. Likewise, if a father could control his

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daughter’s sexuality, she was a valuable possession he could use to create powerful alliances with other influential patriarchs by arranging her marriage. The patrilineal model of inheritance and the power that accompanies it could only be controlled by men if men controlled the sexual bodies of women; otherwise, women would able to decide whose sons would have wealth and power. The male control of the female body meant that women were forced to repress their sexuality and find new ways to express this essential human energy. For Catholicism, this meant that the sexual energy of women is sublimated into religious piety and the emulation of the Virgin Mary. Modern-day Chicanas have a tenuous relationship with the Virgen. On the one hand, she is an oppressive model that must be challenged if Chicanas are ever to be free of the unrealistic and oppressive standards the Virgen has come to represent. On the other hand, Chicana scholarship has revealed Guadalupe’s indigenous roots, and, as Anzaldúa advises, such scholars are actively bringing about the synthesis of Guadalupe and her previous divine identities as the goddess. This synthesis is also present in the art and literary works of Chicanas. Sandra Cisneros’s story “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” is a sampling of prayers/petitions left to various Mexican saints and la Virgen de Guadalupe. The most prominent of these letters is one from a Chicana named Chayo8 who recounts her re-visioning of Guadalupe and her painful struggle to see past the patriarchal imagery of the Virgen to her indigenous roots and to envision how this struggle and its culmination relate to her own identity. In her letter, Chayo describes her former resistance to Guadalupe: … For a long time I wouldn’t let you in my house. I couldn’t see you without seeing my ma each time my father came home drunk and yelling, blaming everything that ever went wrong in his life on her. I couldn’t look at your folded hands without seeing my abuela [grandma] … Couldn’t look at you without blaming you for all the pain my mother and her mother and all of our mother’s mothers have put up with in the name of God. Couldn’t let you in my house. (127)

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Chayo attacks Guadalupe’s subservience and places blame on Guadalupe’s position as a role model of quiet endurance that allowed for the victimization and oppression of women. For Chayo, the Virgen was the enemy. The image of Guadalupe was a constant reminder of repressed autonomy for the women of her race. Chayo describes her desire for the figure of Guadalupe to reflect an indigenous past: “I wanted you bare-breasted, snakes in your hands. . . . I wanted you swallowing raw hearts and rattling volcanic ash” (127). Here Chayo draws on aspects of various Aztec goddesses. Almost all of the Aztec goddesses are associated with snakes; however, the Aztec Earth goddess Coatlicue most closely fits the description. Her hands were often “depicted as fanged serpents’ heads . . . ” (Rostas 371). She wore a necklace of “human hands and hearts,” but her breasts were always visible, representing her power to sustain life as well as take life (Rostas 371). As an Earth goddess, Coatlicue represents the fertility of the land, but as the divine feminine, she also represents the female psyche (Rostas 371). Coatlicue was known as the Mother of all people and she was worshipped on the sacred hill of Tepeyac, the future site of the shrine to la Virgen de Guadalupe. Eventually, Coatlicue came to be called Tonantzín [Our Holy Mother], a title similar to that of the Virgin Mary (Stone 84-85). Chayo’s reference to volcanic ash is an allusion to the goddess Chantico, the goddess of both home fire and volcanic fire (Stone 75). Chantico created the obsidian mirror, an object that allowed access to a visual identity and was used as a tool of divination. As the volcanic lava, Chantico was beautiful but untouchable, representative of pleasure and pain. Again, what seems to be duality or opposition is present in one deity. Chayo also makes reference to the goddess Tlalteotl, who was believed to swallow human hearts. The Aztecs regarded Tlalteotl as the first being to inhabit the Earth; all the bounty of the Earth came from her body. She was violated by the male gods “Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, who manifested themselves in serpent form and squeezed her in two …” (Rostas 379). As a result of this violation, Tlalteotl became a bloodthirsty goddess: “she wanted to eat the hearts of men and would not be silenced until she had received some, nor would she bear fruit unless drenched with the blood of men” (Rostas 379). Tlalteotl retaliates against her forced division by demanding that the relationship between creation and destruction, life and death, be maintained, even if it is viewed as monstrous. Like Tlalteotl, Guadalupe has been split in two. Chayo wants Guadalupe to share in her anger at this division by revealing her

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connection to this terrifying ancient goddess and her terrible power to destroy and withhold. She asks Guadalupe to embrace the contradiction of being the provider of nourishment, sustainer of life, and the heart-swallowing destroyer of life. Chayo’s request of Guadalupe is a request to create wholeness of the division, to undo the binary oppositions of good mother/bad mother, goddess/monster, creation/destruction, life/death. Chayo explains to Guadalupe how Chayo herself has been subject to this dualistic thinking. Because Chayo has refused to take on the traditional female roles of wife and mother, as represented by Guadalupe, and has spoken out against her, Chayo has been placed in the negative position of the virgen/ puta dichotomy: Don’t think it was easy going without you [Guadalupe]. Don’t think I didn’t get my share of it from everyone. Heretic. Atheist. Malinchista. Hocicona. But I wouldn’t shut my yap. My mouth always getting me in trouble. Is that what they teach you at the university? Miss High-and-Mighty.Miss Thinks-She’s-Too-Goodfor-Us. Act-ing like a bolilla, a white girl. Malinche. Don’t think it didn’t hurt being called a traitor. Trying to explain to my ma, to my abuela, why I didn’t want to be like them. (127128)

Here we see that if a Chicana does not model herself after the Virgen, she is labeled a traitor to her gender and race, like the patriarchal image of la Malinche.9 Chayo has come to a new, personal understanding of the Virgen. She states, “I don’t know how it all fell in place. How I finally understood who you are. No longer Mary the mild, but our mother Tonantzin” (128). Chayo has entered the Coatlicue state and taken the path of the new mestiza: “She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned” (Anzaldúa 101). For Anzaldúa, this plurality comes with the resolution of ambiguity. Like Chayo, Anzaldúa states that she is not exactly sure how this work takes place: that “[i]t is work that the soul performs” (101). Chayo’s soul has performed this synthesis through her understanding of the Virgen. She describes her (re)visioning:

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When I learned your real name is Coatlaxopeuh, She Who Has Dominion over Serpents, when I recognized you as Tonantzín, and learned your names are Teteoinnan, Toci, Xochiquetzal, Talzol-teotl, Coatlicue, Chalchiuhtlicue, Coyolxauhqui, Huixtocihuatl, Chicomecoatl, Cihuacoatl, when I could see you as Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Nuestra Señora del Perpetuo Socorro, Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Sorrows, I wasn’t ashamed, then, to be my mother’s daughter, my grandmother’s granddaughter, my ancestors’ child. When I could see you in all your facets, all at once the Buddha, the Tao, the true Messiah, Yahweh, Allah, the Heart of the Sky, the Heart of the Earth, the Lord of the Near and Far, the Spirit, the Light, the Universe, I could love you, and finally, learn to love me. (128)

Before this revelation, Chayo blamed Guadalupe for failing to reveal the totality of her self and for causing the oppression of Chicanas. The transition that allowed Chayo to love herself did not alter the Virgen, but changed Chayo’s consciousness. She is now capable of seeing what was always there. Chayo’s offering to the Virgen reflects this shift in consciousness and results in a communication with the divine that is both ancient and contemporary. Chayo addresses her letter to Virgencita. The -cita form, an endearment, implies a personal level of familiarity with the Virgen, as if she were a sister, and it is reflective of Chayo’s new understanding of Guadalupe. Chayo has included with her letter a braid of her hair, cut off as an offering to Guadalupe in gratitude for her answered petition that she not be pregnant. According to cultural historian Peter Tompkins, the act of women annually cutting their hair in devotion to the goddess is found throughout world religions and mythologies (205). The soul was believed to partially reside in the hair, and the hair of women was considered particularly powerful (Walker 367). The fact that Chayo’s hair is braided also holds some significance: “Tantric sages declared that the binding and unbinding of women’s hair activated cosmic forces of creation and destruction” (Walker 368). Through her petition and offering to Guadalupe, Chayo has activated the goddess’s powers of creation and destruction.

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By granting Chayo’s request not to be pregnant, Guadalupe represents the destructive aspects of the goddess rather than the creative aspects with which she is normally associated. Gypsies believed that a woman’s hair should always be let loose and unbound during childbirth; this was based on “the magic principle that braids or knots would ‘tie up’ the birth” (Walker 369). Cross-culturally, hair and the act of weaving or braiding were connected to fate. Goddesses were believed to determine or control the fate of an individual through the act of weaving (Walker 369). The Meso-American goddess Toci, or Our Grandmother, is the patroness of both weaving and midwives, “those who administered sedatives at childbirth, and of those who performed abortions” (Rostas 373-74). Through her new faith in the Virgen and the offering of her braided hair, Chayo asserts control over her own fate and finds the ability to determine how she will be a woman. She ties up the birthing process and decides not to become a mother. By bringing her hair into the church as thanks to Guadalupe for “making all those months I held my breath not a child in my belly, but a thyroid problem in my throat” (127), Chayo is challenging the traditions of the Church10 and forging her own brand of religion. Moreover, she is bringing in the forbidden and making her own choices. Chayo’s female relatives find it unimaginable that Chayo would cut her hair, a symbol of her femininity. They cannot relate to this sort of relationship with the divine. They see it as a betrayal of the mother: “how could you ruin in one second what your mother took years to create?” (125). For Chayo, the act of cutting, braiding, and offering her hair to Guadalupe is an act of honoring the Mother, an understanding and an integration of the goddess into herself. Unfortunately, for many, including the women of her family and community, Chayo’s autonomous spirituality makes her a traitor synonymous with the figure of la Malinche. The historical and legendary figure of la Malinche11 is the cultural representation of the vilified anti-mother. Today the term Malinche is synonymous with the words “traitor” and “whore.” Historically, la Malinche was a “Nahuatl woman of noble birth who was sold into slavery” (Rebolledo 62). How Malinche went from being a young woman of nobility to a slave is unclear; however, many theories have been brought forth. According to Karttunen, “Andres de Tapia and Francisco Lopez de Gomara state that as a child she [Malinche] was

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stolen by merchants and sold into the Maya area. Bernal Diaz weaves a more dramatic story of her being handed over secretly by her mother … to people of Xicalanco …” (299). After being separated from her family, Malinche continued to be passed from tribe to tribe. According to the legend, she and nineteen other young women were eventually given as an offering to the Spanish colonizer Cortez. While in the possession of Cortez, Malinche proved to be helpful as a translator, a skill that was the product of living amongst various linguistic groups. The people of Mexico saw her as a traitor because they believed that it was through her translations that Cortez was able to take Mexico from its indigenous people. After two years with the Spanish, Malinche gave birth to a son fathered by Cortez. Some have painted the relationship between Malinche and Cortez as a romance, while others find the occurrence of rape more likely. After his conquest, Cortez passed Malinche, once again, to the hands of “one of his soldiers, Don Juan de Jaramillo” (Rebolledo 62). Cortez then sent their son back to Spain to be educated. Clearly, La Malinche is an example of the vilified antimother figure. She brings about an unwanted blending of the races that results in biracial children. Moreover, her own biracial child never knows her as “mother.” This mother-child relationship is symbolic of the gap between the indigenous culture of precolonized Mexico and the mixed culture of postcolonial Mexico. The figure of la Malinche takes on a particularly negative connotation with the scholarship of Octavio Paz. In his 1961 text The Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz connects la Malinche to the figure of la chingada.12 According to Paz, the verb chingar13 has a sexual connotation: “[I]t is not a synonym for the sexual act … [W]hen it does allude to the sexual act, violation or deception gives it a particular shading. The man who commits it never does so without the consent of the chingada.” (77) Malinche becomes not only the duped, sexual victim, but as la chingada, she becomes “the Mother [who is] forcibly opened, violated or deceived,” and gives birth to “the offspring of violation, abduction or deceit” (79). As los hijos de la chingada,14 Mexican males are described by Paz as suffering from an anxiety resulting from a lack of

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motherly protection. This anxiety is tied to the collective character of Mexico and its political struggles. Paz posits that in la chingada “we find [no] traces of the darker attributes of the great goddesses: the lasciviousness of Amaterasu and Aphrodite, the cruelty of Artemis and Astarte, the sinister magic of Circe or the bloodlust of Kali” (85). For Paz, la chingada is devoid of all power, positive or negative. He goes so far as to claim that this passivity causes la chingada to lack all identity. Chicana feminist scholars, such as Emma Perez, have cited Paz’s depiction of la Malinche as la chingada as misogynistic: “For Paz, la india personifies the passive whore, who acquiesced to the Spaniard, the conqueror, his symbolic father—the father he despises for choosing an inferior woman who begot an inferior race and the father he fears for his powerful phallus” (E. Perez 61). Paz’s text operates as a point of departure for Chicana scholars, who seek to redress Paz’s depiction of la Malinche by reappropriating the figure through feminist historical scholarship and creative revisionist writing. One such revisionist text is Cisneros’s “Never Marry a Mexican.” The main character, Clemencia, is a Malinche-like character. Like Malinche, Clemencia has been alienated from her community. Malinche’s mother sold her into slavery, while Clemencia’s mother biases her daughter’s thinking toward the men of her race: “Never marry a Mexican, my ma said once and always” (68). Clemencia’s mother is motivated by a desire to protect her daughter from the type of mistreatment she has suffered at the hands of her Mexican husband and his family, since her ethnicity is Mexican-American and according to Mexican standards has not been trained to be a “proper” mother and wife. Another parallel to Malinche can be found in Clemencia’s work as a translator and how she views this work as “a form of prostitution” (71). However, the most overt connection to Malinche is made through Clemencia’s relationship with Drew, a white, married college professor. The couple is conscious of the differences in their cultures and of their similarities to the story of Cortez and Malinche. He calls her “[m]y Malinalli, Malinche, my courtesan …” (74). Eventually Drew, like Cortez, returns to his wife. But Clemencia’s behavior during and after the relationship has become obsessive, troubling, and anything but passive. As a Malinche-like character, Clemencia and her disturbing behavior can be viewed as Cisneros’s response to Paz’s claim that Malinche, as la chingada, is completely passive, without any of “the darker attributes of the great goddesses” (85). There are many

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parallels between Clemencia and the goddesses that Paz holds up as antithetical to la Malinche. Far from passive, Clemencia is the most aggressive character of the narrative. In particular, she is sexually aggressive, using her sexuality to assert control over others, for example, when she recounts the birth of Drew’s son: “Your son. Does he know how much I had to do with his birth? I was the one who convinced you to let him be born. Did you tell him, while his mother lay on her back laboring his birth, I lay in his mother’s bed making love to you” (74-75). Like the sexuality of the goddess and la Malinche, Clemencia’s sexuality is both creative and destructive. She has seduced her lover, allowing for the birth of his son, yet she has planted a destructive seed. She has both birthed and cursed. She revels in her cruelty, stating, “it’s not the last time I’ve slept with a man the night his wife is birthing a baby … It’s always given me a bit of crazy joy to be able to kill those women like that …” (76-77). This action creates a pseudo mother-child relationship between Clemencia and the children of her lovers. She imagines telling Drew’s son “[y]ou could be my son” (76), even though this mother-son connection is not a literal parent-child relationship. Like typified depictions of Artemis, Clemencia has a certain disdain for men and chooses to remain unmarried. She states that she will never marry because “[n]ot a man exists who hasn’t disappointed me, whom I could trust to love the way I’ve loved” (69). Paz attributes the characteristic of cruelty to Artemis. This characterization is likely made in reference to a prominent interpretation of the myth in which Artemis is happened upon by the hunter Actaeon while she is bathing in a stream. The man is so taken by the beauty of her physical form that he is transfixed. Artemis is affronted that any man would dare to look upon her naked body with desire. Reminiscent of Circe’s ability to transform men into animals, Artemis transfigures the hunter into a stag, shoots him with one of her deadly silver arrows, and his body is ripped apart by his hunting hounds (Walker 58-59). A more accurate reading of this myth reveals its connection to the ritual anointing of ancient kings. In this ritual, a stag representing the old king is hunted with arrows and killed by sacred hounds. The king’s heir is dressed in deerskin and antlers. He is anointed as king through sexual intercourse with a priestess chosen to represent the goddess (Walker 59), becoming both a symbolic son and literal lover to the divine feminine. This same ritualistic love triangle can be observed in Clemencia’s relationship to her appropriated son and his

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father. A number of years after Drew rejects Clemencia, she takes his son as her lover: I sleep with this boy, their son. To make the boy love me the way I love his father. To make him want me, hunger, twist in his sleep, as if he’d swallowed glass. I put him in my mouth. Here, little piece of my corazón. Boy with hard thighs and just a bit of down and a small hard downy ass like his father’s and that back like a valentine. Come here, mi cariñito. Come to mamita. (82)

This is an act of revenge, a metaphoric castration, meant to rob Drew of his phallic power as a patriarch, to dethrone him as “king,” and to vicariously possess him through the body of his son. This ritual is represented on a mythic level in many cultures. As the union of the goddess and her consort is often tied to the production and sustenance of life, consort gods are often vegetation gods and often strongly associated with the phallus and the planting of seed. In the Greek myth, the union of Aphrodite and her consort Adonis results in the birth of the “Greek’s personification of the phallus, Priapus . . .” (Walker 143). Castration is another element of this mythic ritual, for the death of the consort is associated with this act of violence. After the consort has sexually joined with the goddess and planted his seed, he dies. This is primarily because death is a metaphor of the male orgasm, since after an orgasm the penis is “dead.” In Aztec mythology, Walker notes, “Quetzalcoatl made new humans to repopulate the Earth after the Flood by cutting his penis and giving blood to the Lady of the Serpent Skirt [Cihuacoatl] . . . ” (142). Just as the union of Malinche and Cortez was also viewed as having created new people to populate Mexico so too Clemencia is involved in the creation of new people. While she is not literally a mother, through her sexual presence on the birth days of her lovers’ children, she is producing Chicana-infused children. Working from the inside, like Malinche, she performs a counter-colonization. She asserts her culture, her language, her power onto the dominant culture. Contrary to Paz’s assertion, Clemencia, as Malinche, has many similarities to the Hindu goddess Kali. Like many mother goddesses, Kali is representative of both the womb and the tomb (Walker 488). Her lovers are simultaneously her consorts and her sons, entering the Earth through her body and consumed by her body at their death. The

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acts of birth and consumption are related to the sexual act, something Paz describes as bloodlust. Kali is often depicted as “squatting over her dead consort Shiva and devouring his entrails, while her yoni sexually devours his lingam (penis)” (Walker 488). She is the dark and terrible mother and represents “‘[t]he hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses …’” (Walker 488). Both Drew and his son, as lovers of Clemencia, are described in terms of the edible and the sexual. Clemencia speaks of having created Drew out of “spit and red dust” (75). She split him from the inside “like an apple” (78). He dissolves in her mouth (78). The son is also described as prey, and Clemencia is “patient as a spider” waiting for her meal to come into her web (75). She calls him her “stupid little bird” (82), and she comforts him before she snaps her teeth (82). Even before his birth, the son is represented as candy. Clemencia takes the son not only from his father but also from his mother. This is foreshadowed in a scene in which after making love with Drew in the home he shares with his wife and son, Clemencia leaves gummy bears inside objects belonging to Megan, Drew’s wife: I went around the house and left a trail of them [gummy bears] in places I was sure she would find them. One in her Lucite makeup organizer. One stuffed inside each bottle of nail polish. I untwisted the expensive lipsticks to their full length and smushed a bear on the top before recapping them. I even put a gummy bear in her diaphragm case in the very center of that luminescent rubber moon. Why bother? Drew could take the blame. Or he could say it was the cleaning woman’s Mexican Voodoo … And just as Drew was shouting, “Dinner!” I saw it on the desk. One of those wooden babushka dolls Drew had brought her from his trip to Russia. I know. He’d bought one just like it for me. I just did what I did, uncapped the doll inside a doll inside a doll, until I got to the very center, the tiniest baby inside all the others, and this I replaced with a gummy bear. And then I put the dolls back, just like I’d found them, one inside the other, inside the other. Except for the baby, which I put inside my pocket. (81-2)

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Ironically, this scene depicts the last night that Clemencia and Drew will spend together. Clemencia recounts Drew’s rejection of her: “Hadn’t I understood . . . responsibilities. Besides, he could never marry me. You didn’t think . . . ? Never marry a Mexican. Never marry a Mexican . . . No, of course not. I see. I see” (80). In retaliation to this rejection, Clemencia, again, acts as a counter-colonizer. She has entered the territory of dominant culture, the home of the nuclear family, and undermines its stability by leaving proof of the intimate presence of the female “Other.” Clemencia’s actions are focused on objects of typified femininity (make-up, birth-control, dolls) belonging to the nuclear mother/wife, the role she is denied as “Other” and as la chingada. While Cisneros creates in Clemencia, a Malinche-like, anti-mother character and endows her with “dark aspects” of sexuality, cruelty, magic, and aggression, she, also, reveals Clemencia/Malinche’s desire for change. At the end of the narrative, Clemencia is alone. She states a desire to reach out to other people: “I just want to reach out and stroke someone, and say There, there, it’s all right, honey. There, there, there” (83). This comforting, motherly act reveals Clemencia’s desire to escape the cycle of desire, rejection, and retaliation and take on the collective, protective mother role, a role that is denied her and Malinche by their classification as la chingada. Finally, another representation of the negative mother is the figure of la Llorona, the weeping or wailing woman, whose legend has been passed down through many generations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and whose details were born of a combination of “Indian and Spanish folklore” (Rebolledo 62). As the legend was told and retold, many versions of la Llorona were created, each influenced by its own cultural and historical context. However, some key elements remain common to the varying tales: La Llorona is a mother; her children die; a body of water is present; she cries out in the night. The changing elements of the legend often include la Llorona’s part in the death of her children and her motivations. In some versions, la Llorona has killed her children either to protect them from suffering or as a way to seek vengeance on her husband. In others, her children are taken from her or are killed by someone else. What is common is that as a result of losing her children, La Llorona is doomed to spend eternity traveling through the night howling in pain and loneliness, searching for her lost offspring.

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La Llorona’s fate can be seen from two differing cultural perspectives. From the Spanish perspective, la Llorona is connected to the “medieval notion of animas en pena, spirits in purgatory expiating their sins” (Rebolledo 63). In fact, the pre-Columbian view of la Llorona’s story comes from the “Aztec heroines…the Mocihuaquetyque, valiant women who die in childbirth (and who were the only Aztec women to achieve afterlife in the place of warriors)” (Rebolledo 63). Chicana scholars, including Anzaldua, have also found connections between la Llorona and the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl, the “Serpent Woman, ancient Aztec goddess of the earth, of war and birth, patron of midwives, and antecedent of la Llorona” (Anzaldúa 57). Cihuacoatl was often depicted as covered in white chalk and wearing a white dress; not surprisingly, La Llorona is similarly represented. She is described as having long white hair and wearing a white ghostly robe. Another similarity can be found in la Llorona’s weeping: “Cihuacoatl howls and weeps in the night, screams as if demented” (Anzaldúa 57). Furthermore, she is associated with, and thought to bring on, bouts of depression and sorrow, suggesting the negative denotations of the Spanish folklore that have dominated the legend. Spanish-Aztec hybrid folktale “serves as a cultural allegory, instructing people, primarily women, how to live, act, and function within specific established social mores” (D. Perez 101). Moreover, it cautions that if women abandon their roles as wives and mothers, they too will be punished like la Llorona. La Llorona is the “dark” mother, the terrible mother, the antimother.15 In all versions of the legend, whether la Llorona has killed her children or merely been separated from them, she occupies the negative position in the maternal binary. The loss of her children turns la Llorona into “a boogey-woman, who haunts the shores of rivers or lakes” (D. Perez 100). She is often understood to have malicious sexual intentions, presenting herself as a beautiful and beckoning young woman, but revealing herself as a terrible hag when a young man gives into her charms and approaches her. Domino Renee Perez suggests that this legend occupies a powerful position in the shaping of the male psyche and its relationship to the feminine: “Boys through this allegorical tale, are taught to see women as temptresses, embodiments of a malevolent sexuality that could cause them to lose

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their souls, or as thieving mothers, who will take them away from the security of their “real” mothers and home” (104). La Llorona’s human identity is that of mother; however, once she loses her children, she no longer has a human or “natural” female identity. Instead, she is monstrous, threatening the lives of children, the identities of mothers, and the bodies of young men. She is the consuming mother body that is absorbing life rather than giving it. As the terrible mother, La Llorona is often associated with autonomous female sexuality. According to Tey Diana Rebolledo, the legend is “tied up in some vague way with sexuality and the death or loss of children: the negative mother image” (63). A sexual mother is viewed as a threat to her children, primarily because sexual desire is analogous to personal desires, and a mother’s desires should be focused on the welfare of her husband’s children. Thus young girls learn through the tale that “sexuality, when acted on, can lead to isolation and damnation” (D. Perez 104). In fact, infanticide committed by a mother might be the most socially unacceptable, in most cultures unfathomable, act a woman can perform. Therefore, the Llorona legend operates as a broad allegorical legend for many traits deemed socially inappropriate for women, including autonomous sexuality and violence. In the title story of Cisneros’s collection, “Woman Hollering Creek,” the image of la Llorona is examined through the story of Cleófilas, a young woman who leaves her father’s patriarchal household in Mexico to move to the United States after marrying a Mexican-American man. Cleófilas has hopes and romantic dreams for her marriage based on the telenovelas she watched as a young girl. She yearns for the kind of passion the “telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one’s life, and does whatever one can, must do, at whatever the cost” (44). However, her life with her husband is stifling and eventually becomes volatile: “[H]e slapped her once, and then again, and again; until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood, she didn’t fight back, she didn’t break into tears, she didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things in the telenovelas” (47). Cleófilas’s romantic understanding of marriage is shattered by the realities of her conjugal life and the helplessness she feels to make another choice or to escape the violence of her spouse. Cleófilas and her husband live next to an arroyo or creek named la Gritona, the crying or shouting woman, and Cleófilas wonders how the creek got its name. In the story, the creek represents la Llorona and the understanding of her legend. As images of the creek evolve throughout the story, readers can observe changes in the central

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character. For example, when Cleófilas crosses the creek for “the first time as a newlywed . . . she had laughed. Such a funny name for a creek so pretty and full of happily ever after” (47). Later, it is revealed that Cleófilas’s only friends are her neighbors, “[t]he woman Soledad on the left, the woman Dolores on the right” (46). Both of these women are representations of woman hollering, la Llorona. In English, Soledad means “alone” and “loneliness,” and Dolores means “sadness” and “pain.” Their names represent the emotions that are thought to inspire la Llorona’s cries. Although Cleófilas looks to these women for answers, they do not have any. They only possess the loneliness and sadness that is left behind by absent men: “Soledad liked to call herself a widow …. Her husband had either died, or run away with an ice house floozie, or simply gone out for cigarettes one afternoon and never came back” (46). As her name suggests, Soledad lives in a state of loneliness, while Dolores lives her life mourning her “two sons who had died in the last war and one husband who had died shortly after from grief” (47). Neither woman seems able to move past the loss of identity as wife and/or mother. Through the presence of the creek, the stories of la Llorona that she “learned as a child” (51), and the examples of her neighbor ladies, Cleófilas is persuaded into believing that the only option for her is to remain in her abusive marriage. Yet, when la Llorona calls to Cleófilas, it is not a death call, but rather a call to strength, to life, and to protect her children from her abusive Mexican-American husband, whose violence threatens to take them from her. It is this strength that Cleófilas draws on when she asks for the help of Graciela (grace) and Felice (happiness) to help her leave her husband and return to Mexico. This physical migration can be seen as symbolic of the psychological movement away from the colonial renditions of la Llorona tales and a return to a more indigenous view of la Llorona and her connection to the warrior goddess Cihuacoatl, protector of mothers and children. As the story continues, La Llorona’s ultimate resurrection takes place through the character of Felice. When Cleófilas first crosses the creek as a newlywed, she is naïve regarding la Llorona’s painful presence in this new land of “happily ever after” (47). However, when Cleófilas makes her escape, she crosses the river a final time. Her innocence is gone, but she remains naïve regarding the totality of emotions in la Llorona’s voice. The people of the town and Cleófilas assume that “the woman had hollered from anger or pain” (46). But Felice sees the woman hollering from a happy, joyful place of self-celebration, of

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womanhood. She explains that every time she crosses the bridge over the arroyo named la Gritona, or Woman Hollering, she hollers herself, to celebrate a form of womanhood different from the Virgen: “Did you ever notice, Felice continued, how nothing around here is named after a woman? Really. Unless she’s the Virgin” (55). Cleófilas internalizes this new image and carries it with her back to Mexico where she can share it with other women. Although her return to Mexico as a feminist triumph is complicated by the fact that she is “returning to the chores that never ended, six good-for-nothing brothers, and one old man’s complaints” (43), when the story ends, Cleófilas is still journeying, having not yet arrived at her father’s home in Mexico. This ending suggests that Cleófilas’s final destination is not her father’s home. Instead, she is journeying both physically and psychologically, following the path of the new mestiza. Cleófilas originally leaves the safety of her Mexican home and faced trials and tribulations from which she gained new knowledge, new consciousness. Nevertheless, the threat of the pain and loneliness, depicted by the traditional view of la Llorona, kept her in her abusive marriage. Ultimately, through the grace and happiness of the (re)visioned la Llorona she discovers from Felice, Cleófilas gains her freedom. Returning to the home of her birth, she brings with her this freedom, knowledge, and consciousness, traits which are both enabling and restorative. Guided by the trinity of la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, and la Llorona, these three stories track the growth of the Chicana subject. Chayo reconciles her anger toward la Virgen de Guadalupe and gains a new vision of the goddess, her cultural history, and herself. Clemencia, like la Malinche, struggles with the state of being marginal and recovers the dark power of the divine feminine. Cleófilas listens to la Llorona’s call to resistance rather than her oppressors’ demands to endure violence, gives up the necessity of the identity of wife, and sets out, with her new found consciousness, on a journey back home. These journeys out of and into identity are examples of the process of embracing the multiplicity of self and becoming truly mestiza. Shannon Wilson Central Washington University

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Notes 1

Coatlicue or Lady of the Serpent Skirt is the primary deity of the Aztec pantheon. She is the mother goddess, creatrix of the universe and all of its inhabitants. 2 Here, Anzaldúa has inverted the traditional value system of the binary by placing the label of puta [whore] in the positive, primary position and the label virgen in the negative, secondary position. 3 The goddess Coatlalopeuh or She Who Has Dominion Over Serpents was an aspect of Coatlicue. Because her name is “homophonous to the Spanish Guadalupe, the Spanish identified her with the dark Virgin, Guadalupe, patroness of West Central Spain” (Anzaldúa 51). Anzaldúa’s hyphenation of the names of these two goddesses might be an attempt to represent a divine feminine whole. 4 La Virgen de Guadalupe is the indigenized manifestation of the Virgin Mary in the Americas. 5 According to Rostas, Tonantzín or Our Holy Mother was a collective name given to “a range of goddesses that represent . . . the power of the Earth” (373). 6 “During the Christian era, Aphrodite’s temple on Cyprus was converted into a sanctuary of the virgin Mary . . .” (Walker 44). Building materials taken from the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, were used to build “numerous Christian sanctuaries—from simple chapels to imposing basilicas . . . ” (Caseau 40). 7 According to Ana Maria Carbonell, as the Aztecs began to conquer other tribal civilizations in Mexico, the divine feminine figures of indigenous Mexico were first split apart from their original all inclusive nature. Fertility was separated from destruction. “Tonantzin and Coatlopeuh became the ‘good mother’ while Cihuacoatl became the ‘bad mother’” (Carbonell 55). The divine feminine was split once again with the arrival of Spanish Catholicism, separating sexuality from motherhood. Mary was positioned as the good mother and the indigenous goddesses, including Tonantzin and Coatlopeuh, became images of the bad mother. 8 Chayo is a common nickname for people whose name ends in -ano or -rio. Chayo’s full name is Rosario De Leon. The name Rosario is Spanish for rosary. 9 La Malinche was a young Nahualt woman who was given to the Spanish conquistador Cortez. She became his primary translator, and eventually, the two became lovers and had a son. Malinche thus became a symbol of betrayal within Mexican culture. 10 “St. Paul greatly feared the . . . (spirits) that women could command by letting their hair flow loose. He insisted that women’s heads must be covered. . . . Thus it became a Christian rule that women’s heads must be covered in church, lest they draw demons into the building” (Walker 368). 11 La Malinche is only one of her many names. She has been called Dona Marina, Malintzin, and Malinalli Tenepal (Karttunen 302). 12 Roughly translated “the fucked woman.” 13 Roughly translated “to fuck.” 14 “The sons of the fucked woman.”

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Works Consulted Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1999. Carbonell, Ana Maria. “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” MELUS 24.2 (Summer 1999): 53-74. Caseau, Beatrice. “Sacred Landscapes” in Interpreting Late Antiquity. eds. G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar. Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1999. (21-59) Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1993. On line at http://www.vatican.va/archive/index.htm (consulted 27.05.2007). Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1991. Gugliotta, Bobette. Women of Mexico: The Consecrated and the Com-moners 15191900. Encino: Floricanto, 1989. Karttunen, Frances. “Rethinking Malinche” in Indian Women of Early Mexico. eds. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, Robert Haskett. Norman: U Oklahoma P, 1997. (291-312) Lafaye, Jacques. Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness 1531-1813. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1974. Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. 1961. New York: Grove, 1985. Perez, Domino Renee. “Caminando con La Llorona: Traditional and Contemporary Narratives” in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. eds. Norma E. Cantú and Olga Najera-Ramirez. Chicago: U Illinois P, 2002. (100-113) Perez, Emma. “Speaking from the Margin: Uninvited Discourse on Sexuality and Power.” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies. eds. Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera. Los Angeles: U California P, 1993. (57-74) Poole, Stafford. Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797. Tucson: U Arizona P, 1995. Rebolledo, Tey Diana. Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tucson: U Arizona P, 1995. Rostas, Susanna. “Mexican Mythology: Divine Androgyny But ‘His’ Story; The Female in Aztec Mythology” in The Feminist Companion to Mythology. ed. Carolyne Larrington. London: Pandora Press, 1992. (362-387) Stone, Merlin. Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: A Treasury of Goddess and Heroine Lore from Around the World. Boston: Beacon, 1979. Tompkins, Peter. The Eunuch and the Virgin: A Study of Curious Customs. New York: Bramhall, 1962. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. New York: HarperCollins, 1983.

Negotiating Borders: Issues of Sociocultural Cooptation Author Dialogue

Shannon Wilson: Betsy, reading your essay, I was reminded of a passage from Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldúa states that “[h]er [la mestiza's] first step is to take inventory. Despojando, desgranando, quitando paja. Just what did she inherit from her ancestors? This weight on her back—which is the baggage from the Indian mother, which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the baggage from the Anglo?” (104). Anzaldúa, in one of her creative interludes, writes: … [s]he goes through her backpack, keeps her journal and address book, throws away the muni-bart metromaps.” The coins are heavy and they go next, then the greenbacks flutter through the air. She keeps her knife, can opener and eyebrow pencil. She puts bones, pieces of bark, hierbas, eagle feather, snakeskin, tape recorder, the rattle and drum in her pack and she sets out to become the complete tolteca" (104).

In my view, Anzaldúa and Cisneros are engaged in similar cultural work. In light of Anzaldúa's claims and your insights regarding Cisneros's stylistic devise, might Cisneros's listing go beyond representation to highlight plural identity construction and cultural synthesis as recommended by Anzaldúa? Michael and Susan, I'm very interested in the character of Clemencia. When I first read the story “Never Marry a Mexican,” her character made me extremely uncomfortable for many of the reasons you identify in your essay. As I began my own work on Cisneros, I started to see Clemencia in a new light. This is not to say that the character does not remain problematic. However, can we understand Clemencia as subversive in that she challenges heteronormativity as represented by Drew and his marriage and family? Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol: My own perspective on Cisneros and Woman Hollering Creek has been shaped by an odd collection of

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circumstances. I was born and raised in Cisneros's San Antonio, where I lived until I moved to Houston for college; during my many car trips between those cities, I always kept an eye out for the Woman Hollering Creek, which crosses Interstate 10 not too far east of San Antonio. After a five-year stint in Charlottesville, Virginia, life brought me back to Houston and then, in an extraordinary turn of events, back to San Antonio, where I teach at Trinity University. My disciplinary specialty is nineteenth-century British poetry (my current project is, in part, about listing and inventory in Romantic and Victorian literature), but I remain deeply interested in Cisneros's work, which I read on my own at a young age but first studied formally at the University of Virginia in a course entitled “Contemporary Ethnic Women's Fiction.” I'm not Chicana—I’m descended from European Jewish immigrants, and my secondgeneration American-born parents moved from the northeastern United States to Texas only a few years before I was born—but by the time I encountered Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories in graduate school, I was eager to claim it as my own, anxious to announce with keen authority, “I know this collection and its stories.” I provide this brief biography only because it offers, I think, a nonfictional account of the messiness that inheres in identity, of the messiness that Cisneros so effectively conveys in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. I couldn't agree more, Shannon, that Anzaldúa and Cisneros are, as you've written, "engaged in similar cultural work," and your gloss of Anzaldúa's mestiza—she must “take inventory of her ancestry” and then use that knowledge to reinterpret history and write new myths-seems absolutely accurate. I can't help but wonder, though, whether that cultural work is a little less tidy than critical accounts sometimes seem to suggest, and for me, Cisneros's ubiquitous catalogues highlight the often muddled nature of selfhood. Unlike recipes or outlines, lists don't subordinate their elements, and if, as Anzaldúa suggests, the mestiza knows herself by inventory, she may not easily determine which weapons to pull from her arsenal in her quest for self-definition. I wonder, in other words, whether Cisneros is more interested than Anzaldúa in the gap between selfknowledge and self-definition. For instance, in the story “Bien Pretty” Lupe loads her van with her grandmother's molcajete and two rebozos, but she also includes a wok and her Tae Kwon Do uniform, material signifiers of a generic “Asian-ness” that, as Michael's and Susan's analysis suggests, she can't neatly or even logically claim as a component of her cultural identity. She reminds me a little, in other

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words, of a Jewish Texan who moves to Virginia with a dog-eared copy of Woman Hollering Creek and the sense that its stories belong to her. As truly compelling as Shannon's article is, then, I thought I'd pose a question: Is “pluralist” potentially too neat in its connotations of synthesis and integration (“The Chicana Trinity,” etc.) to apply to Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories? I've wondered, too, about the connotation of “amphibious.” Certainly, as Michael and Susan argue, Cisneros uses that term to describe Clemencia's (and Lupe's) ability to cross what are, for many, impenetrable borders, but amphibians themselves are, well, sort of messy: bumpy, slimy, poisonous. It's no accident, certainly, that in the iconic fairytale, the maiden must kiss a frog to find her prince. When Lupe, as Michael and Susan note, reverses the positions of Prince and Princess in her painting, is she rewriting that fairytale, reveling in the “froggishness” of her newly aware, post-Flavio self? Is she embracing not only authenticity (i.e. "real women") but the (sometimes ugly) disorder that accompanies it—the desire to give a place to both grandma's molcajete and the wok, to both telenovelas and post-colonial theory? Shannon Wilson: I must admit I find it difficult to think of Anzaldúa as neat and tidy, and I can’t imagine her opposing the incorporation of elements of other cultures as represented by the wok and Tae Kwon Do uniform you point to in your posting, but your point is well taken. I do think that Anzaldúa and Cisneros are engaged in similar cultural projects and share an interest in identity construction and selfknowledge; however, what they chose to highlight in their writing does differ. While Anzaldúa is interested in including sexual orientation in her pluralistic conceptions of self, Cisneros includes categories of class and cultural influences outside of her own ethnicity. Susan Maher: Shannon and Betsy, your dialogue responses have caused my brain wheels to spin. I appreciate Betsy’s autobiographical opening to her dialogue. My own road to Cisneros has been circuitous—my original training at the University of WisconsinMadison was in 19th-century British Literature as well—but I have long held a fascination with the writing of fiction and the risks that writers take to present their characters in situ, so to speak. Cisneros’s crystalline vignettes in The House on Mango Street stirred my admiration when I first discovered her writing, and from that point on

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I have enthusiastically followed her career as a poet and fiction writer. The many voices spanning the arc of maturation in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories are virtuosic, and I always welcome a chance to return to this collection and examine Cisneros’s technique and vision. Returning to the three essays in our section of the book, I am struck with how each of us grapples with complexity. Betsy uses the metaphor of untidiness to approach Cisneros’s fiction, and I think that each of us is tracking the stories of Woman Hollering Creek through the challenging, messy terrain of blurred borders, contradiction, multipositionality, and competing mythology. I think we invent terms like “pluralist” or metaphors like “trinity” to place an approximate meaning on vexed, complicated material. Think of Shannon’s trinity in terms of its idea of womanhood. How can one contain the sorrow, rage, and loving acceptance—the plethora of emotions and choices that la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, and la Llorona symbolize—into a single woman? Yet over and over again, Cisneros presents us with such intricately veined women. Inés, in Cisneros’s brilliant story “Eyes of Zapata,” speaks to this complex embodiment when she tells us, “I’m a story that never ends. Pull one string and the whole cloth unravels” (100). The many parts of her being, often at war with one another, still exist in such intimate alignment that “one string” of existence makes the entire jerry-rigged trinity of her self “unravel.” In pondering her multiple positions, Inés wonders, “What is it I am to you? Sometime wife? Lover? Whore? Which? To be one is not so terrible as being all” (105). Cisneros presents us women who are “all”—Shannon’s trinity—but this state of being is “terrible” because it is untidy, rent with opposing emotion, rich in its very uncanny nature. Disorder is the world of the present, and Cisneros joins an international cast of writers in exploring this terrain. Her characters, straddling borders, juxtaposing identities, representing “alternative cartographies” (Mary Pat Brady’s term in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies), are necessarily untidy. That is why the mirror-image that Clemencia constructs, assuming Drew’s position in her exploitative affair with his son, cannot hold. That is why Lupe’s comic and cosmic reversal of Prince Popo and Princess Ixta, entitled El Pipi del Popo, is only a brief stay against confusion. What is messier than a flock of grackles, urracas, settling into a tree, “dark and distinct as treble clefs, very crisp and clean as if someone had cut them out of black paper with sharp scissors and glued them with

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library paste” (164)? Lupe’s vision of order is quickly disrupted by the birds themselves, breaking into fractal energy, flying in all directions, chook-chooking in cacophony, and acting “like bad kids” (164). Lupe looks around the yard and asks herself, “‘Who’s gonna clean up this shit?’” (165). In a sense, it is never cleaned up. That is Betsy’s point. The world of contemporary fiction is messy. But what interesting stuff grows out of it!

Toys, Tiny Candies, and Telenovelas: Popular and Material Culture as Storytelling Agents

Male and Female Roles in Mexican-American Society: Issues of Domestic Violence in “Woman Hollering Creek” Domestic violence has always existed, not only within American society, but within every single society in the world. Some communities are confronting the problem and trying to place women within the same social and sexual conditions as men; however, other communities are very far away from attainment of equality between the sexes. This paper will discuss the issue of domestic violence within the Chicano world through the eyes of Cleófilas, the protagonist of Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Woman Hollering Creek. Cleófilas is a young woman who leaves her dusty little town in Mexico with a new husband she hardly knows, to cross north to Texas and become the focus of a story of poverty, alcoholism, and abuse. In its introduction, the paper will explore definitions of domestic violence, review aspects of its history in the United States and point out some statistics that show the importance of this issue within the Chicana community. The body of the essay will examine how dominant Chicana culture defines male and female roles and how the cultural myths of gender influence human development and the building of woman’s personal identity. For this purpose, I will focus on telenovelas since they embody the myth of perfect love within the Chicano culture and encourage the female audience to imitate the behavior of their heroines. The legend of La Llorona (the weeping woman) will be also analyzed as the prototype of the Chicana wife who suffers in her marriage due to her husband’s infidelities. Finally, this paper will point out the most relevant aspects of domestic abuse in the story and identify the scenes that best reflect it, to show how Cisneros uses the experience of Cleófilas to raise consciousness about violence in the home and its consequences for the Chicano family.

Domestic violence is defined as “the physical injury, sexual abuse or forced imprisonment or threat thereof of a family or household member, or of a minor child by a person with whom the minor child has had or is having a dating relationship, or of an adult by a person with whom the adult has had or is having a dating relationship” (Idaho Code 18-918, 2002). Another definition, from The Women’s Aid Federation (2003), sees domestic violence as “the physical, psychological, sexual or financial violence that takes place within an intimate or family-type relationship and forms a pattern of coercive and controlling behavior.” As we see through both these definitions and the title story in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, domestic violence implies more than hitting, fighting, or an occasional mean argument. It is a chronic abuse of power where the abuser tortures and controls the victim through calculated threats,

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intimidation, and physical violence. Thus, domestic abuse is more than direct and indirect physical violence (the former includes punching, murdering, and raping, while the latter ranges from destruction to throwing of objects). Insults, putdowns, facial expressions and attacks, that is, mental and emotional violence, usually signal the onset of physical torture, and can be even more harmful for the victim. Economic and social abuses are also common. Controlling the victim’s money, preventing her from seeing friends and relatives, or isolating her from social contacts can constitute mistreatment of the victim. In fact, this is what the reader perceives from “Woman Hollering Creek”—it is emotional violence, the complete denial of her value as woman and the isolation she suffers, that hurts Cleófilas the most and makes her feel depressed. This, together with her obsession for making her life resemble that of telenovelas ends up undermining her spirit and shattering all her dreams. The origins of domestic violence are social, legal, cultural, and even historical. When men have assumed the role of heads of households, women have traditionally remained in a secondary place. This is the main reason why men believe that they have the right to impose their opinions and criteria over women. Sometimes they have misunderstood the role that both men and women play in and outside the home, which has resulted on occasion in cases of domestic violence. In 1981, the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project became the first multi-disciplinary program designed to address the issue of domestic violence. This experiment was created to coordinate the actions of a variety of agencies that dealt with domestic situations. Moreover, The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (VAWA) was passed as Title IV, sec. 40001-40703 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 HR 3355 and signed as a Public Law 103-322 by U.S. President Bill Clinton on September 12, 1994. This act has been considered the greatest breakthrough in civil rights for women in nearly two decades. However, despite all of this progress, in 1996 the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics published their finding that fifteen hundred American women are murdered by husbands or boyfriends each year. Also in 1996, the American Medical Association informed society that one third of all women’s emergency room report injuries are no accident, but the result of deliberate, premeditated acts of violence, which are repeated until, in some cases, the woman is killed.

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Violence against women seems to be a prevailing problem in certain racial and ethnic groups, including the Latino populations. Statistics show a higher level of abuse in Latinos than in the population at large. For instance, according to the National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Mexican men are reported to be among the groups with higher risk of using violence against their partners. Moreover, the Immigrant Women Task Force of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights published a survey which revealed that thirtyfour percent of the Hispanic women who were interviewed claimed to have been hit by their husbands in their home countries, in the United States or in both places. Similarly, in 1991 the Center for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a study in San Antonio, Texas, in which researchers decided to include a question related to domestic violence. Surprisingly, they found that thirty-one percent of the women participating in the project answered affirmatively to experiencing such abuse. These frightening statistics show that domestic violence continues to be a major social problem that must be fought. But at the same time, the existence of such studies tells us that, at least, many communities (including Mexican-Americans) are aware of the problem and are attempting to confront and solve it. In 1848, the end of the Mexican-American War meant the creation of the current US-Mexican border, and, consequently, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans became United States citizens overnight. This population group had to adapt to difficult social and political conditions, but its cultural values remained constant. Male and female roles hardly changed, and families were still organized around men, although authors like Lown and Vega support the idea that “acculturation has been disruptive to families, resulting in deterioration of Mexicans´ traditionally strong extended family orientation and social support networks” (441). Despite many studies affirming that the cultural stereotype of male dominance is no longer valid, Sandra Cisneros´s short story “Woman Hollering Creek” shows how the role of women within the Chicano culture not only remained submissive in the 1980s, but also how this submissiveness created a favorable atmosphere for the development of domestic violence.

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1. Cultural Aspects of Gender Cleófilas, Cisneros’s main character in the story, marries Juan Pedro Martínez, and she is taken as a bride to Texas. She crosses the physical boundaries to move from her home town, where she lived “without even a mama to advise her on things like her wedding night (…) and with a father with a head like a burro, and those six clumsy brothers” (45). She is forced to relocate to her new husband’s place which is far from the home of her dreams. Through the whole story we see how Cleófilas moves from a patriarchal world where she was not allowed to think for herself and make her own decisions, to a place where “towns … are built so that you have to depend on husbands. Or you stay home. Or you drive. If you’re rich enough to own, allowed to drive, your own car” (50-51). As we see through Cleófilas’s words, the Chicano culture places women in a secondary position from birth; it teaches them that men are at the top of the pyramid, while women have to obey and respect their decisions. Girls growing up within Chicana communities know that their fathers will be in charge of deciding who their future husbands will be, determining who is the most suitable. Cleófilas was no exception to this rule; indeed her father, Don Serafín, “gave Juan Pedro Martínez Sánchez permission to take Cleófilas Enriqueta DeLeón Hernández as his bride, across her father’s threshold” (44), no matter who she might like better or be in love with. She starts a new life with a man she hardy knows that “has a very important position in Seguin with, with… a beer company, I think” (45). But brides just do not care about who their future husbands are because in their dreams these men are going to take them to the other side, to a new home: “[w]ell, not exactly new, but they are going to repaint the house … Why not? He can afford it. And later on add maybe a room or two for the children. May they be blessed with many” (45). What these brides ignore is that in their attempts to escape from their father’s dominance, they fall under their husbands’ powers, their dreams of freedom never realized. Jacqueline Doyle reports that in a 1998 interview, Sandra Cisneros discussed the difficulties Mexican-American women face growing up:

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always trying to straddle two countries but not belonging to either culture; trying to define some middle ground where revision and reinvention of cultural and sexual roles might be possible, only to be told she is a traitor to their culture. (1)

During the first year, brides taken across the border have to struggle to get used to the new life. Cleófilas hardly knows the language, spends most of her time alone, and realizes that the inhabitants of the new town are not as friendly as those in her home village in Mexico. For example, Trini, the Laundromat worker, yells at her for “putting too much soap in the machines. Later, for sitting on a washer. … And … for not understanding that in this country you cannot let your baby walk around with no diaper and his pee-pee hanging out” (46). Cleófilas assumes her role as a newlywed and dedicates most of the day to taking care of the house and getting everything ready for Juan Pedro. Sometimes “she is invited and accompanies her husband [to the ice house], sits mute beside their conversation, waits and sips a beer … nods her head, smiles, yawns, politely grins, laughs at the appropriate moments, leans against her husband’s sleeve…” (48). Within a culture and a society that provides women with a simply decorative role, men perceive themselves as powerful and assured in their right to treat their wives as objects. The Chicana society strongly defines men’s and women’s identities, promoting a conception of the roles they have to play in the society that clearly places women in an inferior position. The Chicana culture, like many others, teaches women that they have to follow traditions, which means accepting the role that this culture has established for them. Born a woman, Cleófilas finds that her life is completely predetermined. She is forced to develop a personality that is subjected to the norms that the male tradition has clearly established. In fact, other women such as Dolores and Soledad, Cleófilas’s neighbors in Texas, become passive members of the patriarchal society in which their husbands “either had died or run away with an ice-house floozie, or simply gone out for cigarettes one afternoon and never came back” (46). These women, unable to recover from pain or rage, “were too busy remembering the men who had left through either choice or circumstance and would never come back” (47). Having always been dependent on their husbands, they feel lost when they have to confront life alone. Instead of moving on

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independently, they do not know how to handle the new situation and decide to live passively, remembering their partners in the hope that they will come back one day. On her personal route to self-definition, Cleófilas of “Woman Hollering Creek” references elements of Chicana legend as a guide. 2. La Llorona: The Legend of the Weeping Woman Mexican-American culture is very rich in fairytales, myths, legends and ghost stories, many having become significant in the creation of the Chicana identity. For this reason, knowing the Chicano folklore is fundamental to comprehending the Chicano experience and understanding its attitudes towards the definition of male and female roles. Ever since she arrived in Texas, Cleófilas feels curious about the name of the creek that passes near her house and the story behind it. This creek is named after La Gritona (the hollering woman), and Cleófilas cannot find the reason why such a beautiful creek received such a funny name, as nobody is willing to tell her the real story. In fact, most of the townspeople say they do not know the story. Others shrug because “it was of no concern to their lives how this trickle of water received its curious name” (46). The creek’s mysterious name and her own unhappy situation makes Cleófilas think of the story of La Llorona, (the weeping woman): “Is it La Llorona, the weeping woman? La Llorona, who drowned her own children” (51). According to Ana María Carbonell: La Llorona emerges as both a figure of maternal betrayal and maternal resistance. While she is most often imagined as a destructive figure, contemporary Chicana writers Helena María Viramontes and Sandra Cisneros, by constructing defiant Llorona heroines in their respective short stories, "The Cariboo Cafe" and "Woman Hollering Creek," have propagated and vitalized the set of tales about maternal resistance. (1)

Thus the legend of La Llorona becomes an important element in “Woman Hollering Creek” since the short story presents a symbolic figure which shapes one of the myths that define the Chicana identity. La Llorona is the clearest example of a woman who suffers the abuse

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of male power so that, in desperation, she makes a fatal decision which ends with the death of her children. This folktale, told for centuries in Mexico, affirms that a young girl who married above her station became so enraged when her husband took a mistress of his own class that she drowned their children in the river (Doyle 1). When the woman realized that it was impossible to bring them back, she regretted her actions and died at the river’s edge. According to the legend, since this sad day, the villagers can see a woman in white walking up and down the riverbank after dark, crying and asking for her children. This folktale ends with a warning to children to stay at home after dark lest they fall into La Llorona´s arms. Cleófilas senses a strange connection with the creek near her village, linking it to the legend: “La Llorona calling to her. She is sure of it” (51). She likes to sit on its edge and wonder “if something as quiet as this drives a woman to the darkness under the trees” (51). This special, deep, and mystic relationship that Cisneros’s protagonist shares with the creek becomes stronger when, as time goes by, the story of her marriage starts resembling La Llorona´s, and she sees evidence of her husband’s infidelities: A doubt. Slender as a hair. A washed cup set back on the shelf wrong-side-up. Her lipstick, and body talc, and hairbrush all arranged in the bathroom a different way. No. Her imagination. The house the same as always. Nothing. (50)

At the end of the story, on her way back home, Cleófilas discovers why she feels attracted to the name and the story of the creek. It is neither its beauty nor its peace, but the feeling that it raises within her. Since she had arrived there, she had wanted to cry, to holler, and to let the voice get out of her mouth until she could not breathe anymore. But she is not brave enough to do it; only when she feels free from the authority of her husband can she holler and make peace with her life and herself. Transfiguring the holler of La Gritona, Cisneros “mimes new natural resources for the expectant mother Cleófilas” (Doyle 1). When the protagonist listens to Felice hollering as they cross the bridge, she releases her pain and finds a new way to articulate her own story: What kind of talk was that coming from a woman? Cleófilas thought. But then, again, Felice was like no woman she’d ever met. …

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Thus we see that Chicana legends, tales, myths and traditions show how this culture defines male and female personalities and warns women about a fatal destiny in which they must suffer for love and face life as it is without ever thinking of rebellion. Chicana culture, again, relegates women to secondary status and defines gender roles so that women are born to please men’s desires rather than satisfy their own. Such cultural products blind women in a way that they are not able to see this discrimination until they find out how other women belonging to different cultures, like America’s, live their lives far away from the male’s hegemony: Everything about this woman, this Felice, amazed Cleófilas. The fact the she drove a pickup. A pickup, mind you, but when Cleófilas asked if it was her husband’s, she said she didn’t have a husband. The pickup was hers. She herself has chosen it. She herself was paying for it. (Cisneros 55)

These other women, like Felice, are the only ones who seem to notice that the Mexican-American tradition places women in the shadow. Felice opens Cleófilas’s eyes by simply pointing out that “nothing around here is named after a woman. Really. Unless she’s the virgin” (Cisneros 55). Driving her own car and hollering freely as she passes by the creek constitute additional liberating acts. Men and women born in modern societies would not think of such behaviors as unbelievable for a woman because these cultures are gradually changing in favor of equality between sexes; however, other cultures remain stuck in this respect and women still must fight to be considered equal. To illustrate this, Cisneros creates active oppositions presenting characters such as Felice and Graciela, Cleófilas’s doctor, who portray self-sufficiency and independence from men in modern societies. These two women show how different cultures help define and establish distinct identities and how male and female roles can vary across borders. Their personalities and the way of looking at life amaze Cleófilas, whose only idea of what a woman is and should be comes from the telenovelas.

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3. The Myth of the Telenovelas: Searching for Models Latin-American telenovelas have been commonly defined as “popular Spanish-language soap operas” (Moran 1); nevertheless, American soap operas are slightly different from telenovelas in terms of duration, the former having an indefinite number of episodes and the latter lasting at most two or three years. In other countries, telenovelas are also known by the names serial and culebrón. Since they debuted in the 1950s with the debut of Senda Prohibida, Mexican telenovelas have been one of the most successful fiction genres among the Hispanic programs. They soon became a cultural and commercial phenomenon, not only within the Mexican boundaries but all over the world. According to Ana López, “the newly coined word telenovela evokes both the novelistic form and the technocratic respectability of the new medium of communication” (8). As these programs deal with social and popular issues, they have managed to increase their audience and the popularity of the form, considered nowadays the principal melodramatic genre worldwide (López 8). Telenovelas play a major role in Cleófilas’s life, both in Mexico and in Texas. When she moves to the United States, her economic situation does not allow her to have a television set, so she can only follow the plots when her husband is away and when Dolores, her neighbor, “was kind enough to retell what has happened” (52). Nonetheless, in Mexico young women like to go to “the girlfriend’s house to watch the latest telenovela episode and to copy the way the women comb their hair, wear their makeup” (Cisneros 44). As critic Kristin Moran notes, it is a fact that the media has always provided models, above all for teenagers; the members of this group search for models as they begin to be interested in sexuality (38). This is one of the reasons why characters such as Lucía Méndez, the protagonist of Tú o Nadie, became the heroine of Mexican-American teenagers in 1985. She embodied the myth of the young beautiful girl who falls in love with a rich man and gets involved in a story of romance as well as treacheries, deceits and envy. Tú o Nadie seems to be Cleófilas’s favorite telenovela. She never misses an episode and tries to imitate Lucía Méndez as much as possible. Cleófilas even tries to resemble her heroine, dying her hair and using makeup like hers. Nevertheless, these popular programs were not only created to provide models for young girls. Kristin Moran quotes Arvind Singhal and Everett M. Rogers, who list three main reasons why telenovelas

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appeal to their audience members who tune into their favorite program, all of which can be applied to Cleofilas’s story: A. Telenovelas provide emotional release through their stories and the characters, so that the audience feels free to cry and laugh and wants to be surprised by the sequence and dramatic turn of events. B. The audience members think of them as the opportunity to fulfill their dreams (wishful thinking) because their lives are maybe sad or tedious; therefore, watching telenovelas they manage to live a completely different life for a short while. C. Characters serve as a model for the audience members. They seek information and advice from the characters. (33)

As the story approaches its conclusion, we see Cleófilas’s disappointment over the fact that her dreams and expectations do not come true. Taking this into account, it is not surprising that Cisneros’s character looks for a form of release in the telenovelas and tries, in a way, to fulfill her dreams by watching them. Moreover, as established previously, Cleófilas used to live with her father and her six brothers and hence, lacks a female figure from whom she could take advice. Consequently, in characters such as Lucía Méndez, she sees the perfect model for imitation, as well as an information source. After each chapter of the telenovela is viewed, groups of friends gather together to discuss what happened in the episode, trying to anticipate the content of the next one, or simply to comment the outfit and new hair style of their heroines: “Does she dye her hair do you think?” (44); “Did you watch last night’s episode of The Rich Also Cry? Well, did you notice the dress the mother was wearing? (46). The 2003 research of Vicki Mayer illustrates how Mexican-American girls integrate these programs into their daily routine: Telenovelas serve emotional, social and economic needs in the lives of Latin American viewers. Emotionally, both women and men use gendered and class discourses to identify with characters in telenovelas and to discuss their personal problems. (481)

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From the data, Mayer concludes that telenovelas mirror “some of the ethnic, gender, and class tensions that defined the viewers´ identities as working class, Mexican-American girls” (479). The same author also points out that watching these programs helps the Chicana population to not forget its roots and origins and to maintain a living contact with its home country. Telenovelas are part of the MexicanAmerican heritage and tradition and they serve in many cases as a way “to travel to Mexico without leaving home” (Mayer 485). The Chicana population members are very influenced by the arguments they see everyday in telenovelas such as Tú o Nadie, The Rich Also Cry or María de Nadie, three of the most popular in the 1980s. After identifying those influences and the main reasons why this population watches them, it is time now to discuss the effect that these programs have on their audience, and how they help define Cleófilas’s identity and behavior throughout the story. The protagonist of the story dreams of living the kind of life that she sees in the telenovelas; she wishes to experience “[t]he kind [of passion] the books and songs and telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one’s life, and does whatever one can, must do, at whatever the cost” (44). Women live just to attain the type of life they see in their favorite programs, which sometimes turns into an unhealthy obsession because they never achieve it. The plots upon which telenovelas are based are completely fantastic, impossible to realize. This genre sets up fantasy situations that debase love stories and deform the social reality. In addition, according to Gustavo Aprea and Rolando Martinez, the plot points of telenovelas present unbelievable situations such as marriages between rich and poor, and loss and recovery of the character’s identity (18). Both male and female characters are always beautiful and perfect, and even though they suffer a lot, their stories, in one hundred per cent of cases, conclude with a happy resolution where the protagonists get married. Most of the telenovelas also communicate the implicit idea that to suffer for love is good; this could be misunderstood at times by some population groups who arrive at the erroneous conclusion that they, like Lucía Méndez in Tú o Nadie, must “put up with all kinds of hardships of heart, separation and betrayal, and loving, always loving no matter what, because that is the most important thing” (Cisneros 44). This is the message that some telenovelas convey to their audiences, or at least, the message that viewers seek. In “Woman Hollering Creek,” Cleófilas, for instance, affirms that “to suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end” (45).

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Telenovelas mainly teach their female audiences that they will have to suffer, and that it is necessary to fight and struggle through many obstacles to reach real love. Only through this will they be rewarded. Nonetheless, in real life, love stories are very different. Women try to put up with every burden in the hope of reaching their goal, true love. But real life is not a telenovela, so the reward remains distant and women become increasingly disappointed that their lives do not at all resemble those on television. Cisneros presents Cleófilas’s assessment of her husband as follows: “He is not very tall, no, and he doesn’t look like the men on the telenovelas. His face still scarred from acne. And he has a bit of a belly from all the beer he drinks. Well, he’s always been husky” (49). Cleófilas thought that “her life would have to be like that, like a telenovela, only now the episodes got sadder and sadder. And there were no commercials in between for comic relief. And no happy ending in sight” (52-53). Her wish to become one of those heroines goes to the extent that she even regrets her first name because “Everything happened to women with names like jewels. But what happened to a Cleófilas? Nothing. But a crack in the face” (53). Points of view vary regarding the message these programs send and the impact these productions have on their audience. Moran affirms that series like Simplemente María, a popular Peruvian telenovela, had a positive impact on society since “many women in the audience imitated the behavior of the heroine and enrolled in sewing and adult literacy” (35). On the other hand, Ana López establishes that: Telenovelas and films are not always necessarily manipulative in every context and for every viewer or reader. Popular culture forms may represent attempts at social control, but they also have to meet the real desires and needs of real people. (12)

Additionally, Clara Muñoz, María Cristina Asqueta, and Betty Martínez defend the idea that telenovelas are true fiction, since in real life, the relationships among the social classes are distant and tense; but these authors also affirm that the stories legitimatize social abuse; justify class, gender and race marginalization; and validate poverty for some groups and wealth for others (81-91). Never would it be said that telenovelas stimulate domestic violence, or encourage husbands

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to abuse their wives. However, by presenting certain behaviors as normal, these programs create stereotypes and contribute to the creation of structures of thinking which determine the construction of daily life (Muñoz, Asqueta, and Martínez 81-91). Chicana popular culture and folklore define male and female roles, showing how women are under men’s control, struggling with economic and emotional dependency on fathers, brothers, husbands, and even sons. Most of them never think of rebelling against male dominance and thus will remain mute until the end of their lives. If lucky, they survive; if not, they are briefly remembered as women who one day appeared in the newspaper as victims of domestic violence who died dramatically, but soon they are forgotten: “It seemed the newspapers were full of such stories. This woman found on the other side of the interstate. This one pushed from a moving car … this one beaten blue … The same grisly news in the pages of the dailies (Cisneros 52). Cleófilas is one of these mistreated women, but Cisneros creates her as a character brave enough to make the decision to escape. Unfortunately, Cleófilas is, as stated previously, the rule and not the exception among Mexican-American women. As noted in the last quotation from the text, newspapers print stories every day of abuse and domestic violence, which leads readers to think that the number of women beaten by their husbands is very high among those brides from across the border. It is probably even higher than expected, since many women are still not brave enough to raise their hands and accuse their husbands of having hit them, so they either suffer silently or, in the worst case, die: “she came at [me] with a mop. I had to shoot, he had said—she was armed” (51). Some men do not need excuses to hit a woman because the mere fact that she is a woman is enough. Don Serafín, Cleófilas’s father, is also aware of the fatal destiny awaiting his daughter. He knows perfectly well the type of life that a woman of her society and social position can aspire to. This is why, when he grants Juan Pedro permission to marry her, “already did he divine the morning his daughter would raise her hand over her eyes, look south and dream of returning to the chores that never ended” (43). However, even though Don Serafín knows the future situation of his daughter, he does nothing to change it except to promise Cleófilas that he will never abandon her. When the protagonist is hit for the first time, she is surprised at her reaction. Although no woman is prepared to be beaten, most of them think that they will be able to hit back or at least defend themselves.

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But Cleófilas “didn’t fight back, she didn’t break into tears, she didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things in the telenovelas” (47). She certainly does not follow the example of Raquel, the protagonist of Tú o Nadie, a woman with a strong personality who is brave enough to defend herself from her partner’s insults, offenses and rebukes. In one scene, where Raquel and Antonio are having an argument and he is shaking her, she tells him: "yo no voy a hacer lo que tu me mandesʾ” (translation: I am not going to do what you want”). Raquel faces her partner’s humiliations and defies them, but in real life few women possess the strength to imitate this behavior. Cleófilas even gets more disappointed when she realizes that she is not able to be like her heroine because her life is not a telenovela. Cisneros´s protagonist is mute in the face of her husband’s violence; she is speechless, motionless. The first time and each time “she could think of nothing to say, said nothing” (Cisneros 48), because nobody has taught her what to say or what to do when being hit. Nobody even informs her that she has the right to defend herself. After every beating, she silently “stroked the dark curls of the man who wept and would weep like a child, his tears of repentance and shame, this time and each” (Cisneros 48). Clearly, domestic violence means more than just hitting and fighting, and there are several ways in which men can torture women and make them feel inferior. Cleofilas’s story shows that emotional violence can be even more painful than physical violence. Insults, facial expressions, rebukes, etc., are responsible for the black-andblue marks and bruises that Cleófilas carries in the bottom of her heart. In a moment of desperation she affirms that she would be able to forgive physical violence but no other type of humiliation: “He had thrown a book. Hers. From across the room. A hot welt across the cheek. She could forgive that. But what stung was the fact that it was her book” (Cisneros 52). This episode as well as others, such as when he yells at her because of her requests to fix furniture, or tells her that she does not have any brains and that she exaggerates all the time (49), are examples of emotional violence, making Cleófilas feel like she is nothing but an object owned by her husband. Instead of getting indignant about Juan Pedro’s humiliations, Cleófilas grows sadder and sadder and starts to believe that she is nothing but the slave of a man that not only does not love her, but embarrasses her in public and private and makes her unhappy whenever they are together.

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Another important issue regarding domestic violence in Cleofilas’s story is her effort to hide her physical bruises. She feels so embarrassed that “she won’t mention it. She promises. If the doctor asks she can say that she fell down the front steps or slipped when she was out in the backyard” (53). Instead of raising anger and indignation in the victim, domestic violence provokes feelings of shame and guilt in most cases. Mistreated women usually end up thinking that the abuses they suffer come from their own mistakes. Since their husbands are emotionally strong enough to make their wives think that they are the source of all problems, these women can believe that they deserve to be mistreated: “Was Cleófilas just exaggerating as her husband always said?” (52). This is one reason why victims do not ask for help or report this abuse to the police. Like La Llorona, they just keep crying because there is nothing else they can do. Moreover, Mexican-American women do not often enjoy economic independence because all their relatives still live in Mexico; even though they dream of returning to their home country, they will never be able to make this dream true. Sometimes, Cleófilas “thinks of her father’s house. But how could she go back there?” (50); “She hasn’t been allowed to call home or write or nothing” (54). Cleófilas is the rule rather than the exception, but she finds someone willing to help her escape from the nightmare. Graciela discovers that “This poor lady’s got black-and-blue marks all over. … From her husband. Who else?” (54). Graciela, together with Felice, makes the decision to help her. But most mistreated women are, unfortunately, not that lucky, and spend all their lives suffering abuse and humiliation, feeling fear every time their husbands approach them. 4. Conclusion Domestic violence is one of the most important social problems society must confront today. Abuse at home is responsible for more than half of the deaths that take place every year because there are still cultures in the world that place women in a position of inferiority to men, who treat them as objects, cast them into oblivion, and force them into economic and emotional dependence. Sandra Cisneros uses Cleófilas’s story to raise consciousness about the existence of this problem within the Mexican-American community and to pay homage to the stories of the mute feminine victims of male dominance. She demonstrates how dominant Chicana

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culture defines male and female roles, focusing on cultural aspects of gender as well as on such legends as La Llorona and La Gritona— legends which Cisneros revives and reshapes. Mexican telenovelas portray the myth of the perfect love story that never becomes true in real life. The scenes that best reflect the issues of violence against women in the story showhow the roles that both men and women assume within Chicana society and families lead to the creation of an atmosphere conducive to domestic violence. Ana María Almería Madrid, Spain

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Works Consulted Aprea, Gustavo, and Rolando Martínez. “Hacia una definición del género telenovela” in Telenovela/Telenovelas: Los Relatos de una Historia de Amor. ed. Marita Soto. Buenos Aires and Atuel: Colección del Círculo, 1996. (17-30) Carbonell, Ana María. “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feministic Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” MELUS 24.2 (Summer 1999): 53-74. Online

(Consulted 12.06.07). Cisneros, Sandra. “Woman Hollering Creek” in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991. (43-56) “Domestic violence in Latino Communities.” Alianza: National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence. Online at http://www.Dvalianza.org/resor/factsheet_dv.htm (Consulted 05.06.07). Doyle, Jacqueline. “Haunting the borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros´s Women Hollering Creek.” Frontiers 16.1 (1996)” 53-70. On line at: Consulted 22.06.08). Idaho Code Statute 18-918. State of Idaho Legislature. 2002 On line (Consulted 5/6./07). López, Ana. “The Melodrama in Latin America: Films, Telenovelas and the Currency of a Popular Form.” A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism and Practice 7.3 (1985): 4-13. Lown, E., and W. Vega. “Prevalence and Predictors of Physical Abuse Among Mexican American Women.” American Journal of Public Health 91.3 (2001): 441-45. Mayer, Vicky. “Living Telenovelas/Telenovelizing Life: Mexican American Girls´ Identities and Translational Telenovelas,” Journal of Communication 53.3 (2003): 479-495. Moran, Kristin. Mexican Telenovelas and Latina Teenagers´ Understanding of Romantic Relationships: A Reception Analysis. Dissertation. University of Washington, 2000. Muñoz, Clara, María Cristina Asqueta, and Betty Martínez. “La Telenovela: ¿Ritualización Antidemocrática del Espacio Público?” Faculty Research. Minuto de Dios University, 2004. National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence. On line at: (Consulted 06.11.08). Women’s Aid Federation. On line at: (Consulted 06.11.08) .

Reading the Puns in “Barbie-Q” In "Barbie-Q," a first-person narrator recalls for her playmate the hours they spent playing with Barbie dolls. Except to reinforce the notion that Barbie dolls model negative values and damage children's self-identity, the story seems to describe a static—and lamentable—situation. Repeatedly, the girls give voice to their dolls, beg their parents to purchase more Barbie dolls, and then resume their play. "Barbie-Q" can also be read as a story of change and triumph. This article considers three rhetorical strategies which signal this triumph: subtle but significant changes in the children's inventories of their toys, a triple pun in the title, and the inversion of a sock image. These strategies show that the narrator changes, her cultural pride develops and she embraces her role as a creative storyteller.

In Sandra Cisneros’s “Barbie-Q,” the first-person narrator recalls for a friend their play with Barbie dolls. She reminds her friend that they dressed their dolls in outfits sold by Mattel as well as in a sock which one girl fashioned into a dress. The narrator also recalls that although they willingly did without a Ken doll, they longed to expand their dolls’ wardrobes. She remembers shopping at a flea market, discovering many Barbie dolls that were burnt in a warehouse fire, and begging her parents to purchase them. She concludes her narrative, lining up the dolls and assuring her friend that a prom dress will easily hide one doll’s melted foot. “Barbie-Q,” an apparently uncomplicated narrative about children and their toys, prompts discussion primarily on its focus on the choice of toys. Barbie dolls are seldom considered merely toys. In a fulllength study of “Barbie-Q,” Leticia I. Romo describes opposing views of the Barbie doll: it has been “defended for liberating the imagination of young girls” and “attacked because [the doll] incarnates and propagates… the idea that women are to be displayed as objects” (127). The doll’s influence can be complicated by cultural differences—since Barbie’s physical appearance aligns her with the dominant society. Even Mattel’s multicultural dolls can be problematic. Ann Ducille states: “These quick-and-dirty ethnographies only enhance the extent to which these would-be multicultural dolls treat race and ethnic differences like collectibles, contributing more to commodity culture than to the intercultural awareness they claim to inspire” (52-53). Since the children in “Barbie-Q” are vulnerable to messages about both, gender and culture, then, this brief story of childhood represents a crucial moment in identity formation.

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In “Barbie-Q,” even white Barbie dolls can encourage cultural awareness. Despite their exposure to and affection for their Barbie dolls, the Mexican-American children’s Barbie-play results in their embrace of a Mexican-American heritage and to an enhanced sense of self-identity. To appreciate these changes, it is helpful first to summarize the evidence that “Barbie-Q” is an indictment of the doll that damages the children’s esteem and values. Specifically, Barbie dolls influence personality, prompting children to value self-display and an extensive wardrobe. Pre-adolescent girls repeatedly list the clothing they have and the outfits they want, count the dolls they own, and list those they desire. In a story containing only six paragraphs, four consist of lists: lists of clothes worn by Barbie, clothes to buy for Barbie, Barbie dolls to purchase, and Barbie dolls owned. The remaining paragraphs describe the plans for getting more dolls: begging for them for Christmas and finding them at the Maxwell Street Market. Playing with Barbie, it seems, is a rehearsal for consumerism. To some extent, this superficiality and materialism can be seen as an adoption of negative gender stereotypes. Critic Jeff Thomson discusses the story in terms of personality and gender bias. Thomson explains that the Mexican-American children are influenced by stereotypes that society uses to “keep women confined in partial identity”; the children’s imagining an absent Ken doll constitutes a “comment on the absence of male figures in the culture” (417). And the use of a fancy dress to cover the melted Barbie foot is “attacking and acknowledging the depths our culture goes to in an attempt to hide women’s assumed “faults” (417). Cultural problems and gender stereotypes are attacked, in Thomson’s view, by satirizing “artificial feminine stereotypes epitomized in every Barbie doll” (417). While Thomson traces the gender bias to theories created by men and sees the absence of men as one of Cisneros’s cultural concerns, the Barbie doll bears the responsibility for delivering the stereotypes that shape children’s responses to these problems. Rehearsals require scripts and conflicts. In “Barbie-Q,” the children use language and fights provided by Mattel. In advertising copy, on descriptions found on boxes containing Barbie clothes, and in names given to dolls according to relationships or outfits—“Solo in the Spotlight,” “Red Flair,” “Sweet Dreams,” “Career Gal”—the children speak for their Barbie dolls, rather than for themselves. Thus, Barbie influences their relationships. As they imitate the doll associated with consumerism, with superficial self-display and

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acquisitiveness, they speak as if they were not friends. While the accessory lists and relationships are provided by Mattel, the passion for purchases and competition comes from the kids. Thus, when they interject an occasional phrase to the script, they remain in character. Imagining themselves competing for Ken’s attention, the children argue, “You dumbbell! He’s mine. Oh no he’s not, you stinky!” (14). By performing a gender stereotype assigning competitive materialism to women, the children create a pretense that threatens to undermine their friendship. In ordinary play, of course, children explore many roles, but such play might involve a variety of changing roles. By contrast, pretending to be Barbie is, as the narrator says, “Every time the same story” (14). At play, the girls rehearse their lines. This repetition helps to characterize the narrator and her friend. By having them perform as Barbie, Cisneros can, according to James Phelan, show “how impressionable the character narrator is by having her voice echo the language of the marketing division of Mattel toys.” (8) Mattel’s doll introduces values with this language, so the impressionable girls accept both her voice and her materialistic appetites. To the extent that this voice and these appetites differentiate the dominant culture from their own, the children make a choice that places their selfesteem at risk. As Phelan explains: The character narrator’s monologue about her desire for All Things Barbie, a monologue inflected with the language of Barbie’s advertisers, could demonstrate the speaker’s interpellation into the value system of mainstream culture particularly its norms about beauty, fashion, and consumerism, even though those norms implicitly exclude or denigrate someone of her race and class. (10)

In addition to helping to characterize the children, then, their Barbie-talk suggests that the children have surrendered their entire cultural identity. This cession is emphasized by the story’s lack of Spanish terms and phrases. While “Barbie-Q” is narrated exclusively in English, almost all of the other stories in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories mix Spanish words with English. By using Spanish words and names in these stories, Cisneros shows the resilience of Mexican culture in the United States. In contrast, “Barbie-Q” contains neither italicized Spanish words nor Spanish names. Indeed, the children have no names at all. Since it is unlikely that children in a

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Cisneros story would not be Mexican-American, the importance of this substitution of Mattel-isms and Barbie editions for Spanish phrases and names becomes amplified. In light of the traditional identification of language and culture, it would seem that the children’s Mexican heritage has disappeared and that the Barbie doll is responsible for its erasure. Even if they have a story to tell, the children have only Mattel-English to tell it. Barbie’s triumph is so complete that neither the narrator’s imagination nor the author’s resistance can reverse it. The children seldom use their imaginations, and the narrator dismisses as insignificant the dress made from a sock, the only item she has created herself. They must be satisfied, she notes, with “one outfit apiece not including the sock dress” (15). Distinguishing between narrative strategies chosen by Cisneros and those used by her narrator, Leticia Romo notes that it is Cisneros who burns Barbie, uses slang that Barbie’s class would dislike, places Barbie dolls in a pile of trash, and ridicules the doll’s name in the story’s title; still, the children in this tale adore their Barbie dolls. For Romo, the children’s embrace of the invader doll, despite obvious flaws, is evidence of their full surrender: “Cisneros may have mutilated and compromised the symbol used to represent and disseminate the values of the dominant class; but her characters, by failing to create new meaning with it, have reasserted Barbie’s ideological power and have validated it even more so by accepting the flawed doll after finding out that she is not perfect” (134). Notwithstanding Cisneros’s pyrrhic searing and the doll’s mutilated foot, the languageless, Barbie-identified children remain loyal to their dolls and the cultural values with which they are affiliated. For Phelan, the tone in the final paragraph is defiant as the children acknowledge Barbie’s values and claim to reject their full implications. Thus, the image of the damaged doll is simultaneously negative and positive. Because the girls see nothing wrong with these dolls, they remain naïve, showing an “inadequate understanding of the way the world works”; at the same time, the image “points to her [the narrator] as an agent who is not totally defined by her socioeconomic and racial position and who is determined to cope with her position” (Phelan 17). Their dolls are flawed, as they are; yet they will esteem Barbie and themselves. Phelan’s reading, then, posits a concluding note of triumph, a note that is distinct from that of submission in the opening scene.

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Although the case against Barbie can be supported by the aforementioned inventories and the image of the damaged doll, these same elements change in important ways to suggest that the children are not only poised for action but have actually taken action to claim their self-identity and, with it, their Mexican heritage. The puns in the story’s title suggest that “Barbie-Q” is a kunstlerroman, the story of the literary artist as a young Mexican-American girl. As Patricia Hart explains, “Calques and puns are hidden throughout [Woman Hollering Creek] like toy surprises that double the pleasure of the bilingual reader” (598). Three puns in “Barbie-Q” mark the steps in the narrator’s development. The first pun controls the first part of the story, prior to the warehouse fire, when the narrator had little self-knowledge. It recalls the use of Mattel’s language and points to the competition inherent in the frequent use of first-person possessive pronouns: the children play with “your meaneyed Barbie and my bubblehead Barbie” [emphasis added] (15). When they identify with “‘Solo in the Spotlight,’ evening elegance in black glitter strapless gown… formal-length gloves, pink chiffon scarf, and mike included” (14), they take their lead from Barbie. Although the children are younger, their tone is not unlike that of the narrator in “Never Marry a Mexican” who, when she sees her lover with his wife, describes the woman as “a redheaded Barbie doll in a fur coat. One of those scary Dallas types” (79). For the adult narrator, the Barbie doll is, according to Jean Wyatt, “an icon of white woman as idealized sex object.” For the children, the doll serves as prompt to their predictable play. Resigned to, and perhaps resentful of, this obligatory performance, the game has become, like one of the gowns, worn out from constant use. Thus, though they take every Barbie cue, they do so with little enthusiasm. In the second section, at the Maxwell Street Market, the lists, the tone, and the narrator change dramatically. Before the children see the burnt dolls, they beg for clothing and accessories displayed for sale. Their choice may be limited by the items displayed, but they have earlier made it clear that they prefer clothing to dolls: “Because we don’t have money for a stupid-looking boy doll when we’d both rather ask for a new Barbie outfit next Christmas” (14-15). Yet, when they see the burnt dolls, they immediately change their wish list to include “Ken, Barbie’s boyfriend... Tutti and Todd, Barbie and Skipper’s tiny twin sister and brother” (15). The shift in tone here suggests that, while outfits were merely satisfactory, dolls are delightful. Their tone becomes positive, their

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self-understanding improved: “On the outside you and me skipping and humming but inside we are doing loopity-loops and pirouetting” (15). Although both their external skipping and their internal swirling are signs of pleasure, it should be noted that this is the first time the narrator has distinguished an inner self—or shown an effort to disguise that self, an understanding of the importance of self-disguise that will influence her narrative style. She will mask her triumph with puns. The simultaneity of the shift in inventories and the shift in tone and self-understanding can be explained by the changes in the dolls: they have been made darker by the barbecue. The link between the title and the Spanish term for an oven-like device creates the second titular pun, which is recognized by many readers. The change in Barbie’s color, moreover, occurs by accident, not by Mattel. This origin transforms the story’s Barbie dolls from trespassers into neighbors. “The fact that [Mattel’s] Mexican Barbie is brown may be even more insidious,” observes Kathleen Grassel, “if Mexican girls think they must grow up to be thin, buxom, and leggy.” Values, too, may be introduced to children, values which differ from and even contradict the values introduced by family and community. It may be more difficult to choose between conflicting values if Mattel’s darker Barbies are marketed as representatives of the children’s cultural heritage. In this case, however, the dolls have been introduced on Maxwell Street at a market with a long tradition. The surprise and variety of available merchandise was articulated by Judge Hightower, employed by one of the Maxwell Street merchants, in a 1994 New York Times article written Isabel Wilkerson: “This [Maxwell Street Market] is the greatest market of chance in the world… You can come down here with nothing and go back with who knows what.” The dolls found here have not been manufactured brown; they are, as it were, born on Maxwell Street. Because of its longtime association with the Mexican-American community, this setting links the Barbie doll to those who shop here. When the children see the dolls, they recognize them as Mexican-American Barbies, and they are pleased. Evidence of their identification with this community can be found in the absence of fighting between the children. Their earlier “mine” and “yours” become plural possessives as they gather “our Barbies” (16). Just as the children repeated lists of clothes before the fire, they list dolls repeatedly afterwards. Their lists include other Mattel dolls, “Ricky and Alan,” as well as Francie and Barbie. The change can be

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illuminated by J. Paige MacDougall’s study of Mexican children playing with Barbie dolls. In a process called “creolization,” the children substitute local costumes and customs to make their dolls Mexican. More important for our purposes, “In addition [to the clothing changes], the Mexican image of Barbie as a woman enmeshed in a solid network of family and friends in Mexico contrasts with her North American incarnation as a liberated career woman.” For MacDougall, this creolization attests to cultural pride and selfidentity: “The indigenous processes by which Barbie has been transformed in Mexico are an assertion of local values and present a gentle resistance to the forces of globalization.” In MacDougall’s study, girls “arranged their collection of twenty-five dolls into a family and explained that ‘la familia’ was their favorite game… [because, in Mexico] The family is central to personal and social identity…” Like her Mexican sisters, the “Barbie-Q” narrator lines up her dolls. They are even water-damaged, perhaps from numerous trips across the Rio Grande. By preparing this ritual, she acknowledges and celebrates her Mexican-American family, a community fashioned from a Barbie queue. The result of this experience is twofold: it allows the children to give up their imitation of Barbie, and it inspires the narrator to define her authorial identity. This dual role is explained by Harryette Mullen. Focusing on the setting in which the children discover the bargainpriced dolls, Mullen says that flea markets are “religious or quasireligious cultural sites… for the reproduction of the dominant culture and the production of a resistant ethnic minority, which is neither entirely of the U.S. [nor entirely] or Mexico.” Coming out of the flea market, our narrator has seen the limitations of the dominant culture and decided to disguise her story of triumph as one of tragedy. In “Barbie-Q,” the narrator is recounting the experience which prompted her to become a storyteller who masks the full political implications of her story, dressing it up as a tiny tale of children at play. The narrator invites her reader to peek beneath the apparent simplicity to discover important changes. The damaged foot is one such invitation. Evidence that the Barbie doll has stepped briefly into the cultural melting pot, the melted foot also serves as a unifying image, linking the conclusion of the story to the beginning. When a gown covers a foot, that dress has become a sock. This image inverts—but repeats—an earlier transformation by which a sock became a dress. In both cases, appearance masks reality. This is the work of a narrator who has discovered—in Barbie queue—a story that

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is not “every time the same” (14). Unable to become enthusiastic in retelling a story that is not her own, she begins immediately to tell stories about—and disguise her affection for—her newly-recognized, lovingly embraced Mexican-American community. Mary S. Comfort Moravian College Works Consulted Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. 1991. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1992. Ducille, Ann. “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6:1(1994): 45-68. Grassel, Kathleen. “Barbie Around the World.” New Renaissance 8:4 (2008). On line at: (Consulted 31.10.2008). Hart, Patricia. Review of “Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros. The Nation 252.17 (1991): 597-598. MacDougall, J. Paige. “Transnational Commodities as Local Cultural Icons: Barbie Dolls in Mexico.” Journal of Popular Culture 37.2 (2003): 257-275. On line at: http://ezproxy.moravian.edu:2102/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2 003297361site=ehost-live (Consulted 31.10.2008). Mullen, Harryette. “‘A Silence between Us Like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek.” MELUS 21.2 (July 1996): 3-20. On line at: (Consulted 31.10. 2008). Phelan, James. Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004. On line at: (Consulted 31.10. 2008). Romo, Leticia I. “Sandra Cisneros' ‘Barbie-Q’: A Subversive or Hegemonic Popular Text?” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 24 (2005): 127-137. On line at: (Consulted 31.10.2008). Thomson, Jeff. “‘What Is Called Heaven’: Identity in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek.” Studies in Short Fiction 31.3 (1994): 415-424. On line at: http://ezproxy.moravian.edu:2102/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1 994060970&site=ehost-live (Consulted 31.10.2008). Wilkerson, Isabel. “Change Threatens a Legendary Street Bazaar.” New York Times. The New York Times Company. 23 March 1994. Wyatt, Jean. “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros's ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 14.2 (1995): 243-271. Online at:

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(Consulted 31.10.2008)

The Gummy Bears Speak: Articulating Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s “Never Marry a Mexican” Sandra Cisneros’s “Never Marry a Mexican” articulates a sense of selfcolonization and disconnection between the body and language. This essay examines the rhetorical shifts that Clemencia, the story’s protagonist, considers necessary for self-expression—verbal and physical—in a dominant society. These rhetorical shifts envision a woman whose voice and silence is transformed into alternative forms of communication such as action, or wailing, reminiscent of La Llorona. Clemencia resides in la frontera, and is confronted with an invisibility that makes her amphibious to those outside the borderland. This paper examines how these multiple or colonized identities are manipulated as Clemencia becomes an object without a voice: this presses her to adopt a nonverbal language that is carried out throughout the narrative, especially when moments arise when she is unable to articulate her reasoning, such as the placement of the gummy bears. Ahogadas, escupimos el oscuro. Peleando con nuestra propia sombra El silencio nos sepulta.1 —Gloria Anzaldúa I guess my feminism and my race are the same thing to me They’re tied in one to another, and I don’t feel an alliance or an allegiance with upper-class white women. I don’t. I can listen to them and on some level as a human being I can feel great compassion and friendships; but they have to move from their territory to mine, because I know their world. But they don’t know mine. Then I moved to Texas, and that made me so angry. I don’t know why Texas did that to me. Texas made me angry. In some way that I never had before, I started getting racist toward white people. I was wandering around like this colonized fool before, trying to be like my women friends in school. I didn’t have any white women friends when I was in Texas[…]I have to say now that I’m in a more balanced place than I was at that period. And so my politics have been changing, and some of my white women friends who have bothered to learn about my culture have entered into my life now and have taught me something. Maybe a little sliver of glass of the Snow Queen in my heart has dissolved a bit. But I’m still angry about some things, and those issues are going to come up in my next book. – An Interview with Sandra Cisneros, 299

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In the above quote, Sandra Cisneros articulates her anger towards white feminist women, and, recognizing that her politics continually shift, reveals that this anger will be part of her next book, Woman Hollering Creek (1992). In this collection of stories, Cisneros traces the movement of her anger to a place that is indefinable, where she confronts her sombra2 in the borderlands. The short story “Never Marry a Mexican” best articulates a sense of self-colonization and disconnection between that body, sombra, and language. The narrator, Clemencia, attempts to articulate the effects of racial and gendered social constructs, with the end result being anger towards a dominant society. Within this text, there is also a realization that the languages she does speak (Spanish and English) do not give her the rhetorical tools necessary for self-expression. Thus, this essay speaks to the affects of self-colonization on voice. Through Clemencia’s misconceptions, insecurities, and frustrations with white women and Mexican men, Cisneros explains that this is an issue of Chicana subjectivity that is difficult to verbalize to others and one that can only be acted on by Chicanas. In her interview with Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock, Cisneros reflects and speaks to the results of self-colonization: “That’s an issue we talk about only among ourselves—the Latina women. That’s really hard for me to tell my white women friends and make them understand without offending them” (289). Even Cisneros, a prize-winning novelist, is at a loss for words when she is asked to describe her emotions concerning the issue of anger within portions of the Chicana community. Cisneros’s early works, including House on Mango Street (1991) and Loose Woman (1995) focus on inarticulateness in Chicana women, especially in reference to sexuality as a public space and the impact of spatial narratives. Public space is defined by certain social elements. Literary critic Stephanie Wickstrom examines “the logic of sexual control by ‘civilization’” (2), while Mary Pat Brady’s essay, “Sandra Cisneros’s Contrapuntal: ‘Geography of Scars’” illustrates the manner in which “spatial narratives help to sustain class structures” (111), and in turn define the individual or community. Her most recent novel, Caramelo (2003), continues the process of merging language, culture, sexuality, and knowledge as Cisneros focuses on the physical form of the border by describing a car trip from Chicago, Illinois to Mexico and recording the transition occurring in the young Celaya Reyes as her contrapuntal cultural identity contrasts with her sexual identity—leaving her at times inarticulate. In this novel, Celaya

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labors to discover a language that defines her on both sides of the border and through her sexual awakening in the United States. As Sonia Saldívar-Hull explicates when discussing Cisneros’s use of gender and race, “The women of Mango Street and the women ‘hollering’ their defiance against patriarchal constraints offer resistance strategies in the face of domination by Chicano and Mexicano men, as well as by the ruling class and dominant race” (104). Similarly, in her critique of Cleófilas as a character, Ann Folwell Stanford continues this discussion in “It Tried to Take My Tongue” by focusing on “the growing ability to use language as a naming, defining tool [that] becomes a primary healing agent, central to each character’s emergence from powerless unspeakability to an empowered voice and consequent sense of personal agency” (114). I agree that Cisneros’s works undertake the thematic notion that a Chicana’s identity is defined through action when words are amorphous. However, I wish to add that in connecting language to a physical identity, “Never Marry a Mexican” specifically portrays the narrator, Clemencia, as a woman attempting to redefine herself through words in order to come to terms with her position in a society that engages her anger and makes her question her agency. The physical and the emotional (namely anger) strive to converge in this story—perhaps doing so only through the sharing of stories that move beyond the page. In “Never Marry a Mexican,” Cisneros articulates Chicana subjectivity through a corporeal language that speaks outside the sentence. In The Decolonial Imaginary, Emma Perez offers Homi Bhaba’s idea of the “time-lag” as a location where Chicanas can “practice to import the decolonial imaginary, a critical apparatus that transcends the colonial to sit somewhere in that time lag between the colonial and the postcolonial” (55). It is in the interstices where agency can be found and where Perez writes that “words are practice” (55). Clemencia’s language in “Never Marry a Mexican” can be offered as that which sits between “what has been, what is, and what many of us hope will be” (Perez 127). Thus, as Chicanas practice language, it is constantly shifting within society—within that time lag. Clemencia resides in that time lag or la frontera, and is confronted with an invisibility that makes her amphibious to those outside the borderland—more specifically white feminists and men. She understands that she is characterized as a woman with a transitional identity, forced to experience and recognize the multiple identities assigned to her and that the rich, the poor, the men, and women will

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see what they want to see, or will mold her into what they need to see. As she describes her professions, Clemencia envisions how others perceive her (Cisneros 71). Her identity is socially manipulated as she becomes an object without a voice, giving her a strong sense of a colonized identity within la frontera. Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory entrenches the idea that becoming a burra3, buey4, scapegoat (“To Live in the Borderlands” 96) or a voiceless object for the dominant society is a complicated role to assume. Thus, Clemencia questions, “Why is it worse at night, when I have such an urge to communicate and no language with which to form the words? Only colors. Pictures. And you know what I have to say isn’t always pleasant” (83). Cisneros leaves the narrator inarticulate, and it is within this space that Clemencia perceives herself as “amphibious…a person who doesn’t belong to any class” (71). Additionally, she perceives herself as a woman whose voice and silence is transformed into alternative forms of communication such as action. Multiple identities are associated with Clemencia’s lack of voice; therefore, she adopts a nonverbal language throughout the narrative, especially when moments arise where she is unable to articulate her reasoning. The burra identity that Anzaldúa attributes to la frontera strips Clemencia of her intelligence, thus leading her and some readers to categorize her as schizophrenic, crazy, or at best, jealous. By moving past this simple interpretation and examining the underlying occurrences in the story, the reader can place Clemencia as one questioning her race, her gender, and her class as she struggles to bring her multiple divisions to a center without owning a language that makes this a possibility. What also comes to the forefront is that because she is left inarticulate when the dominant discourse fails her, she cannot find the words to describe who she is to another, even to herself. Therefore, Clemencia symbolizes self-colonization and a muted voice. By reflecting on Clemencia’s misconceptions, insecurities, and frustrations with men, Cisneros pushes for self-respect apart from the dominant ideology that surrounds Chicanas and which reclaims a voice for them. But this issue is complicated by social relationships, as Cisneros makes apparent when she explains I’m really mad at Mexican men, because Mexican men are the men I love the most and they disappoint me the most. I think they disappoint me the most because I love them the most. I don’t care about the other men so much.

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They don’t affect my personal politics because they’re not in my sphere whereas Latino men, and specifically Mexican men, are the ones that I want to be with the most. And they keep disappointing me […] How do they feel about themselves if they won’t go out with Mexican women, especially professional Mexican women? What does that say about themselves? They must not love themselves or, like someone said, “You must not love your mama.” You know? (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 289)

Cisneros’s story is neither condemning nor condoning miscegenation. Cisneros is positioning Clemencia’s identity in direct relation to the identities of Mexican men. Clemencia juxtaposes her own sexual relationships (a love affair with a white male named Drew and then his white son) to that of her mother’s failed marriage to a Mexican man (her father) and her subsequent love affair with a white male named Owen Lambert. Clemencia’s narrative tone is that of contempt for the mother and a refusal to see the Mexican male as a capable partner, which means that she does not envision herself as a reliable companion. The absence of an ideal Chicano figure speaks loudly and yet it is simultaneously a glaring silence in the narrative, and more importantly, in Clemencia’s life. There is a central moment in the text when Clemencia’s body and actions reflect her internalized insecurities. During this moment, the reader is privy to Clemencia’s anger at her mother’s relationship with Owen Lambert while still married to her ailing father. The reader also hears her contempt for white men, her love for her father, and her feelings of abandonment). At the scene of her father’s death, she remembers: the doctor scraping the phlegm out of my father’s mouth with a white washcloth, and my daddy gagging and I wanted to yell, Stop, you stop that, he’s my daddy. Goddamn you. Make him live. Daddy, don’t. Not yet, not yet, not yet. And how I couldn’t hold myself up. Like if they’d beaten me, or pulled my insides out through my nostrils, like if they’d stuffed me with cinnamon and cloves, and I just stood there dry-eyed next to Ximena and my mother, Ximena between us because I wouldn’t let her stand next to me. (74)

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Clearly, Clemencia is not able to verbalize her confusion about her father’s death or her hatred of her mother for privileging whiteness. Her father’s gagging is also experienced by Clemencia, leaving her unable to speak or yell. She stands there, “dry-eyed,” without the words that would give her the ability to articulate her place within the family of women that is left. Her thoughts, “not yet, not yet, not yet” (74), demonstrate that she recognizes her inability to muster the strength or knowledge to comprehend, justify, or acknowledge her mother’s presence. And not until she can do this will she be able to find a language to articulate her own position outside of her own shadow/la frontera. Ana Castillo’s description of “daddy’s girl” can be associated with Clemencia as she is defined by her father. Castillo illustrates how the father “affects her sexuality, her ability to relate to men, and her ability to pursue success in the world…The daddy’s girl gets power through seduction, that is, playing on her femininity. Daddy’s girl wants to be pampered but she rejects the Mother inside her and cannot give herself to her community as a responsible adult woman” (189). Castillo describes the Chicana’s attempt to locate a voice or identity within a patriarchal discourse. Cisneros’s protagonist, Clemencia, attempts to locate her voice when she recognizes that approval by her father is the first step toward articulation; unfortunately, he dies before she can learn to speak to her mother or herself. And because “Once Daddy was gone, it was like my mama didn’t exist, like if she died too,” Clemencia realizes that she needs to find her own way into articulation through dissimilarity, and her lover’s white patriarchal family gives her this opportunity to define her Mexican identity. Megan, Drew’s wife, ironically provides yet another mother figure that she can delineate, thus giving her entrance into the white feminist discourse that limits Chicana feminists. She takes on the motherly role when, in her mind, she asks Drew, “Your son. Does he know how much I had to do with his birth? I was the one who convinced you to let him be born. Did you tell him, while his mother lay on her back laboring his birth, I lay in his mother’s bed making love to you” (7475). She then points to Drew and states, “I’ve been waiting patient as a spider all these years, since I was nineteen and he was just an idea hovering in his mother’s head, and I’m the one that gave him permission and made it happen, see” (75). Nonetheless, Clemencia’s words, with images of black widows, do not reach Drew’s ears. There lacks a discourse of self-empowerment outside of violence and anger that these groups can simultaneously listen to and hear.

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Thus, the discourse of self-empowerment is not verbal and not easily accessed. Language on the borderland seems impenetrable, making sense to only those who utter the statements. So, because society has deemed that “actions speak louder than words,” action becomes a discourse that is simpler to understand. Therefore, the dominant discourse that everyone around Clemencia, including her family, does listen to begins to shape Clemencia’s person and identity. Since they listen to the stereotype that structures Clemencia’s person, she continues to represent herself as the stereotypical Mexican caricature, integrating both the negative male and female stereotypes of criminals and prostitutes: “I’ve been accomplice, committed premeditated crimes. I’m guilty of having caused deliberate pain to other women. I’m vindictive and cruel, and I’m capable of anything” (68). Clemencia’s shadow, or perceived self, absorbs the image of what she assumes the Mexican male sees, and reflects a Chicana who is not a member of the dominant society and whose position is always in transition. As she gains a definition of herself, she adjusts to what she recognizes as plausible to her existence as a Chicana. Clemencia becomes an interesting character, as she cannot put her emotions into words, but as a narrator, she has a desire to define herself to the audience and to herself. As a Mestiza, she responds to her Nahuatl origins, since “the Nahuatl believed that only the heart was capable of obtaining truth. Words were not enough: only through flor y canto (flower and song) can truth be obtained and communicated” (Rodriguez 8). Clemencia becomes a metaphorical woman, a myth that encompasses the many definitions of what roles women should fill. For Clemencia, defining what is in the heart versus what words are put there (such as marriage, white, and Mexican) lessens the power of her trust in language. She admits, “there was a time when all (she) wanted was to belong to a man. To wear that gold band on (her) left hand and be worn on his arm like an expensive jewel brilliant in the light of day” (68). Cisneros moves the light of day away from the band and onto the woman wearing the wedding ring because the body is the metaphorical site where language makes action possible; it is the woman attached to the hand that decides to wear the wedding band and in the U.S., it is usually that person who gives it meaning. The power of the signifier is given to Clemencia, but unfortunately, she does not have the power to alter its meaning in the dominant discourse. Instead, she reacts with emotion that makes the meaning of her words vague, lessening her credibility as a traditional reliable narrator whom the reader trusts. She

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reacts and exclaims, “So, no. I’ve never married and never will. Not because I couldn’t, but because I’m too romantic for marriage. Marriage has failed me, you could say. Not a man exists who hasn’t disappointed me, whom I could trust to love the way I’ve loved. It’s because I believe too much in marriage that I don’t. Better to not marry than live a lie” (69). Clemencia’s inability to fit into the role of wife is altered by the same words that have placed her into the role of whore, prostitute, or la Malinche. Words such as romantic, marriage, trust, and love do not articulate the way she perceives her reality and her self. So, in an effort to demarcate her identity, she positions herself against these words by turning this language on its head in an attempt to find her place within white feminist discourse. Cisneros disrupts feminist rhetoric by focusing on the intersections of gender, class, and race. She comments, “I guess my feminism and my race are the same thing to me. They’re tied in one to another, and I don’t feel alliance or an allegiance with upper-class white women” (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 288). Clemencia and her mother understand the existence of this lack of allegiance or alliance with white feminists. They both find it difficult to hold on to alliances with women or men who view them as outsiders, as the forbidden (when having an affair with Drew), or as the “other.” At certain moments in the narrative, Clemencia is portrayed as fitting herself into the definition that the dominant ideology has bestowed upon her. Her internalization of the gap between white women and Chicanas is one reason she decides not to marry. The other stems from listening to the unspoken ideas clearly given to her through the actions of her own family—given that class and race are focused on in Clemencia’s familial and then psychological world. She initially questions her mother’s choice of marriage to a Mexican man (her father) when she explains: I guess she did it to spare me and Ximena the pain she went through. Having married a Mexican man at seventeen. Having had to put up with all the grief a Mexican family can put on a girl because she was from el otro lado, the other side, and my father had married down by marrying her. If he had married a white woman from el otro lado, that would’ve been different. That would’ve been marrying up, even if the white girl was poor. But what could be more ridiculous than a Mexican girl who couldn’t even speak Spanish, who didn’t know enough to

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set a separate plate for each course at dinner, nor how to fold cloth napkins, nor how to set the silverware. (69)

Clemencia internalizes her family’s class and race issues, and, as she progresses through her own relationships, her choices directly reflect those of her mother. She recognizes that she doesn’t “see” Mexican men in the same way she sees white men, but she fails to understand how this translates into her actions of being attracted to upper-class, white men, thus distancing herself from the Chicano male. She refuses to acknowledge her fear of her own insecurities or how she has been taught to see her mother and her “self” as negatively-typed when she adamantly states, “I don’t care. I never saw them. My mother did this to me” (69). This clearly illustrates how Clemencia has lost the ability to consider herself and other Chicanas as important builders of the discourse surrounding race, class, and feminism. Ultimately, class, race, and a distrust of white women play into her silent actions which all focus on Drew’s wife, Megan, and herself but rarely on the men themselves. Once again, Clemencia allows the dominant ideology to maintain its integrity, but as the narrative progresses, she participates in acts that are difficult to describe with words. Clemencia articulates her desires, fears and insecurities through actions and silences, that if listened to could help change the dominant discourse. The reader begins to recognize Clemencia’s ability to articulate her identity through her actions as a woman who is positioned with, yet against the dominant community. Mary Pat Brady’s discussion of the feared public space (129) offers a way to explain Clemencia’s social location as she attempts to become a member of those feared environments she resists. Because her actions resound, she becomes the stereotype. Anzaldúa describes this position as that of the borderland, where “the only ‘legitimate’ inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger” (3). This virus enters Clemencia’s body, creating emotions of ambivalence and unrest. Because she lives in the interstices, which is not a place she chooses to reside willingly, she is not offered the security and safety that dominant ideology offers its citizens. While Drew’s wife sleeps snugly next to her husband, Clemencia’s “border” existence gives her the ability to slip into their matrimonial bed unperceived—a locale where her ambivalence leads to a sense of disembodiment and

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an attempt to speak. Her existence in the borderland mirrors the experiences of the white feminist community as a whole, by reflecting the images of their continual oppression that has become invisible to these same women who are comfortable with their achieved power. Interestingly, Clemencia remains invisible to Megan, as would an anonymous caller. She recognizes her invisibility and lack of words when she recalls: Once, drunk on margaritas, I telephoned your father at four in the morning, woke the bitch up. Hello, she chirped. I want to talk to Drew. Just a moment, she said in her most polite drawingroom English. Just a moment. I laughed about that for weeks. What a stupid ass to pass the phone over to the lug asleep beside her. Excuse me, honey, it’s for you. When Drew mumbled hello I was laughing so hard I could hardly talk. Drew? That dumb bitch of a wife of yours, I said, and that’s all I could manage. That stupid stupid stupid. No Mexican woman would react like that. Excuse me, honey. It cracked me up. (77)

Her words become disjointed and repetitive when attempting to articulate her feelings to Drew. This, in effect, fragments her identity and removes her from herself because as she attempts to articulate her true feelings for Drew and his wife, and, perhaps because he “sees” her for the first time, he ends his love affair with her shortly after this phone call. The relationship with Drew dissipates in the narrative once she attempts to voice and extend her emotions in words. The importance of this narrative moment is incorporated in the portrayal of Clemencia not having control of her language. She criticizes her job as a translator, where she is “paid by the word and sometimes the hour,” and her work as a substitute teacher, as not giving her the ability to articulate her position as a woman at this moment. Instead, she falls back on the attitude that, “Any way you look at it, what [she does] to make a living is a form of prostitution” (71). Clemencia brings the body and the voice together, recognizing that a woman is not supposed to break the traditional roles of wife, mother or prostitute. Her lack of language to help Megan recognize her existence, along with the fact that Drew will not see her outside of her role as a lover/prostitute, explains why Clemencia loses her ability

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to give voice to her multiple roles as a Chicana woman. In many respects, Clemencia is attempting to break out of her roles with language, but instead, what comes out of her mouth is profanity and laughter. This language and laughter translate themselves into attitude—an attitude that a Chicana woman adhering to social rules is not supposed to embody when she is the mistress. The mistress is usually not given the right to have a voice, as she is mostly viewed as a prostitute, a whore, or at the very least, a home wrecker. The power given to the latter resonates with the memory of the myth of La Malinche, an Aztec woman of nobility who was presented to Cortés upon his arrival in Mexico in 1519. Her talents, her knowledge of a variety of languages, and her diplomatic ability are believed to have helped in Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, and because she and Cortés are said to have had the first mestizo child, she is signified as traitor to her people; hence the term, “Viva Mexico, hijos de la chigada!” This story, which has been deeply ingrained in the mythology and nationalism of Mexico, holds an ironic twist that represents the lower-class brown woman as only acquiring a powerful position by acting the role of the seductress and having the power of language. In “Malintzin Tenépal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective,” Adelaida R. Del Castillo focuses on La Malinche as a woman who has had difficulty breaking out of the “macha” role: “Her submission is to her own convictions. Her actions in the conquest of México are the reification of those convictions. She and her faith in God are her own motivation to action. Although she does not imitate the crude behavior of her male companions, her courage is insurmountable. Yet few writers find her admirable” (140). Many Chicana authors have attempted to give voice to La Malinche’s convictions, but they come up against various readings of her position as a seductress first, then as an indigenous woman, and finally, as a translator—the source of her power to survive through Cortés’s conquests. In discussing how La Malinche has been used to give voice to a patriarchal history, Jeanette Rodriguez explicates, “it was not she who betrayed her people, but her people who betrayed her” (xiii). This quote is important when examining the question of voice and the ability of Clemencia to articulate her position outside of the borderland. There are moments in the text when Clemencia, labeled in much the same way as La Malinche, recognizes such archetypal figures as La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Llorona as two women whose actions have defined her, and she buys into these

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roles—including the one of herself as a seductress or an abandoned woman losing her mind. With these three roles in place, Clemencia is urged by her mother, her father, Drew, Megan, and the son to choose identity rather than recognize her own multiplicity. She recalls Drew’s definition of her: “My Malinalli, Malinche, my courtesan, you said, and yanked my head back by the braid. Calling me that name in between little gulps of breath and the raw kisses you gave, laughing from that black beard of yours” (74). With this identity firmly in place, and given to her by Drew, it is in fact, “her people who [have] betrayed her” (Rodriguez xiii). Clemencia’s internalization of Drew’s words and her mother’s words of what it means to be Mexican are brought into existence, made real through her actions against the meaning they impose on her. Nonetheless, she must recognize this and allow herself to articulate her actions, even when they cross boundaries and prove difficult to verbalize. Thus, Clemencia’s actions reverberate as she learns to give voice to emotions in the narrative. One clear moment illustrates how she transfers her silence into action: I don’t know how to explain what I did next. While your father was busy in the kitchen, I went over to where I’d left my backpack, and took out a bag of gummy bears I’d bought. And while he was banging pots, I went around the house and left a trail of them in places I was sure she would find them. One in her Lucite makeup organizer. One stuffed inside each bottle of nail polish. I untwisted the expensive lipsticks to their full length and smushed a bear on the top before recapping them. I even put a gummy bear in her diaphragm case in the very center of that luminescent rubber moon. (81)

Stephanie Wickstrom states it ascetically in “The Politics of Forbidden Liaisons: Civilization, Miscegenation, and Other Perversions,” when she writes, “Control of the sexuality of the target populations by those pursuing conquest is key” (171). Clemencia targets Megan’s personal hygiene items, controlling Megan’s sexuality and the items related to it. These actions are reminiscent of the complex relationship between La Malinche and Cortés, as they illustrate Clemencia’s subsequent betrayal of Drew and Megan when she seduces their son, but it also echoes Rodriguez’s words and illustrates how Megan, because her silence allows her husband to have

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this affair, has betrayed Clemencia as a woman. Through her actions, she names and defines Drew’s wife as disposable, material, and sexual. As she maneuvers around the house and places these gummy bears in very specific locations, Clemencia gives voice to her own existence and presence in the house, while crying out to Megan to take notice of her existence. Clemencia’s actions, like those of La Malinche, are misunderstood and easily taken to be rooted in pure sexually-tainted selfishness. My reading locates Megan as opposite to Clemencia; both are victims of the trap that language sets for these women. Women are categorized into three roles with racial implications: whore, mother, or virgin. Because Clemencia clearly adopts the mother and whore roles through her actions, she sees Megan, a white woman, as a virgin— opposite to her “self.” These ideas make themselves known through the placement of the gummy bears. The gummy bears speak for Clemencia, since she focuses her attentions on feminine products such as the makeup organizer, nail polish, lipsticks, and diaphragm. The diaphragm points to the unspeakable, the taboo, and what should not be discussed during a love affair. Clemencia positions her shadow, which she defines as her own body, against that of Drew’s wife. As she confronts her status as La Malinche in the relationship, Clemencia then forces another identity on Megan, that of La Virgen de Guadalupe. She states, “I think of that woman, and I can’t see a trace of my lover in this boy, as if she conceived him by immaculate conception” (82). Because Clemencia sees Megan as possessing virginal attributes such as goodness, purity, and caring, she assumes that a white woman has the power to give voice to a strong selfidentity and be strong enough to do away with the husband/father/male figure. However, in the narrative, Megan is described as having “chirped” (77), and given an expensively decorated house for self-definition. According to Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero, Clemencia thus perceives the Virgin as a symbol of failure, “as not active enough…she has failed to intercede for her people in the United States; she advocates acceptance and endurance not action” (191). Megan symbolizes the woman who, just like Clemencia, is gagged and hence does not actively intercede for Chicana women in the United States. By maintaining her relationship with Drew, and not voicing her anger at him for early morning calls from strange women, Megan is placed in a position of silence. Just like when Clemencia watched her father gag,

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she (as well as Megan) must again watch whiteness being overemphasized as they struggle through their irresolute speech. Clemencia’s narrow definition of Megan allows her to place gummy bears throughout the immaculate home, as she herself tries to inhabit the role of the Virgin. As the quiet dinner afterwards portrays, she understands that a woman must bear her emotions in silence to maintain her relationship with her lover. She attempts to show those basic qualities endeared to the Virgin, but fails. As represented by the baby babushka doll which she stashes in her pocket and replaces with a gummy bear, she needs a reminder that her actions cannot be suppressed like her voice. She feels empowered when she states, “then I put the dolls back, just like I’d found them, one inside the other, inside the other. Except for the baby, which I put inside my pocket. All through dinner I kept reaching inside the pocket of my jean jacket. When I touched it, it made me feel good” (81-82). But Clemencia’s actions do not stop when she finishes dinner. She has more to “say”: “On the way home, on the bridge over the arroyo on Guadalupe Street, I stopped the car, switched on the emergency blinkers, got out, and dropped the wooden toy into that muddy creek where winos piss and rats swim. The Barbie doll’s toy stewing there in that muck. It gave me a feeling like nothing before and since. Then I drove home and slept like the dead” (82). Drawing on the power of action as language, it is at this moment that Clemencia is most visible and articulate. It is also at this moment that Cisneros makes a clear reference to La Llorona, a legendary figure who is derived from both Spanish and Indian folklores. In the above quote, various images prevail: mothers murdering or abandoning their children; mothers killing themselves; and husbands leaving lower-class, darker skinned women for white, namely Spanish, women of the upper classes. The emergency blinker must be turned on for Clemencia. In Women Singing in the Snow, Rebolledo sees the connection between La Llorona and Malinalli, the identity Drew gives Clemencia: “In folklore, the images and mythology about La Llorona and Malinche merge until in many areas they are transformed into a unitary figure. The image is a negative one, tied up in some vague way with sexuality and the death or loss of children: the negative mother image” (63). La Malinche and La Llorona mesh through their gendered attributes, class distinctions and their connections to Nahuatl origins. For both of these women, articulating the Chicana female experience becomes complicated because, like Clemencia, they feel invisible to women they directly

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affect as well as to society as a whole. Clemencia takes control and understands that she inhabits more than one identity as she watches Megan’s baby doll swim in the muck of the arroyo. This allows her to sleep soundly and stop roaming the waterways looking for other women’s children to steal. But even with this action, her presence is not acknowledged. This is precisely why Cisneros meshes La Llorona and La Malinche. Both women ask to be recognized by other women. Cortés takes La Malinche’s son from her and transports him to Spain (some say he was killed by Cortés), while La Llorona drowns her children to spite her husband and then searches for them in her afterlife. She is also known to steal other women’s children because of jealousy or rage. Historically, both of these women remain invisible, while their actions are left for the community to explain and justify. To gain visibility if only for a moment, Clemencia steals the baby babushka doll and becomes the sexual mother of Megan’s son. She steals the son because she thinks that in order to speak to another woman, there are times when it is necessary to go through the children. This is a lesson learned by Clemencia and taught by the patriarchal discourse, with instructors such as Cortés and La Llorona’s husband. Clemencia falls into narrative once more as it is used to maintain power over women, but she is also aware of the meaning of her actions: I sleep with the boy, their son. To make the boy love me the way I love his father. To make him want me, hunger, twist in his sleep, as if he’d swallowed glass […] I can tell from the way he looks at me, I have him in my power. Come, sparrow. I have the patience of eternity. Come to mamita. My stupid little bird. I don’t move. I don’t startle him. I let him nibble. All, all for you. Rub his belly. Stroke him. Before I snap my teeth. (82)

The fierceness in this passage cannot be silenced; it is based on using sexuality and power to control Megan by controlling her son. In many ways, Clemencia becomes the mother, but she is a mother that could easily castrate the son. While she positions herself opposite Megan, the Barbie doll figure, she also distances herself from her own self. Clemencia defines herself by her shadow. Rebolledo reminds readers that “This Llorona does not search for her lost children, but rather for her lost female compañera/self” (81).

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It is difficult to understand where the power truly lies, especially during moments in the text when Clemencia questions her own sanity and identity. There are moments when she feels she could find something to articulate, but these moments, few and far between, come to her at two in the morning, times when the rest of the community is asleep and vulnerable. She states, “When the gravity of the planets is just right, it all tilts and upsets the visible balance. And that’s when it wants to [come] out from my eyes. That’s when I get on the telephone, dangerous as a terrorist. There’s nothing to do but let it come” (83). But what comes after this? The reader is not given that information, so Clemencia questions the reader: “So. What do you think? Are you convinced now I’m crazy as a tulip or a taxi? As vagrant as a cloud?” (83). This question is valid, as Clemencia may be seen as an off-centered woman to some individuals, including herself. This question is important as it addresses the motivations of a woman articulating her power through and outside of sexuality. Even at the end of the narrative, our narrator is not convinced that she is being heard or understood. At the conclusion of her story, her already invisible body transforms itself into the shape of a cloud, expanding her shadow, reaching out to “all humanity,” just wanting “to reach out and stroke someone, and say There, there, it’s all right, honey. There, there, there” (83). As a meshing of many archetypal women, Clemencia attempts to find an identity for herself, but her body and shadow continue to reside in the interstices. Residing in an interstitial space occurs because language systems are disjointed structures that she must navigate and use to define herself; this is the nature of communication. Yet action is also a prevalent sign system, and this active stance gives meaning to Clemencia’s disjointed, stuttered, sporadic, and emotional words. Anzaldúa points to the way language has defined Chicanas linguistically and structurally: “The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word “nosotras,” [the feminine pronoun for “we”] I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we’re male or female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse” (Borderlands 54). Women are often inarticulate when using the male language system, thus Clemencia uses her body and actions to convey her thoughts. Anzaldúa has given this fear of language systems the name of “linguistic terrorism,” which aptly lends itself to Clemencia’s doubts regarding her identity.

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Thus, Clemencia finds herself merging three identities, those of La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, and La Llorona, in order to find a category (constructed by a patriarchal discourse) that would define her. There is one word, an idea called disfrasismos, found in the Nahuatl language and not adopted by the Spanish colonizers, which fittingly describe Clemencia’s meshing identities. Rodriguez writes: The Nahuatl language used disfrasismos, a complementary union of two words or symbols which express one meaning, to communicate the most profound thought or feeling. Thus “the world” was expressed as “heaven-earth”; the human person as “face-heart” or presence and determination; and “God” was expressed as “night-wind,” the invisible and the untouchable. As Don Angel María Garibay has said, this places us before an “anguish” of meanings that attempts to see things from all possible angles. (8)

Action must be seen as language from all possible angles, and it is essential to consider the social systems that manipulate the articulation of Chicana populations. As the narrative ends, Clemencia struggles to wholly move outside of whiteness as a dominant ideology. Clemencia sees herself as a “Mexican” defined by others (hence, never marry a Mexican); thus her empowerment only comes in the shapeless form of a “vagrant … cloud” (83), reaching out to others as she shares this testimony as knowledge. If, as Rebolledo states regarding the weeping and wailing yet silent La Llorona, that “She will continue to stalk us and to haunt us until we come to terms with her” (Snow 80), Clemencia’s shapeless cloud figure will follow suit, listening to women’s actions until mutual self-definition becomes a reality. Dora Ramírez-Dhoore Boise State University Notes 1

A Spanish translation of Anzaldúa’s words is (in the feminine): Drowned, we spit out the dark./ Fighting with our own shadow/ The silence buries us. 2 Shadow 3 Donkey or ass—specifically referring to lack of intelligence. 4 Buey refers to a castrated ox and is often used as a term of camaraderie. It is often used in a derogatory way, but with endearment attached to it. It has been used like the term “dude” in American English.

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Works Consulted Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. ———. “To Live in the Borderlands Means You” in Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature. eds. Rebolledo, Tey Diana, and Eliana S. Rivero, Tucson: U Arizona P, 1993. (96-97) Brady, Mary Pat. “Sandra Cisneros’s Contrapuntal: ‘Geography of Scars’” in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Durham: Duke U P, 2002. (111-136) Castillo, Ana. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 1994. Hedges, Elaine, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds. Listening to Silences: New Essays on Feminist Criticism. New York: Oxford U P, 1994. Jussawalla, Feroza, and Reed Way Dasenbrock. “Interview with Sandra Cisneros” in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. ed. Alma M. Garcia. New York: Routledge, 1997. (287-289) ——. “Interview with Sandra Cisneros” in Interviews with Writers of the PostColonial World. eds. Jussawalla, Feroza, and Reed Way Dasenbrock, Jackson: U P Mississippi, 1992. (286-306) Perez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1999. Quintana, Alvina E. “Women: Prisoners of the Word” in Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class Race, and Gender. Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 1990. (208-219) Rebolledo, Tey Diana. “From Coatlicue to La Llorona: Literary Myths and Archetypes” in Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicano Literature. Tucson: U Arizona P, 1995. (49-82) Rebolledo, Tey Diana, and Eliana S. Rivero, eds. “Myths and Archetypes” in Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature. Tucson: U Arizona P, 1993. (189-195) Rodriguez, Jeanette. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women. Austin: U Texas P, 1994. Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. “Mujeres de Fuerza in ‘Women Hollering Creek” in Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: U California P, 2000. (103-124) Stanford, Ann Folwell. “It Tried to Take My Tongue: Domestic Violence, Healing, and Voice in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Women Hollering Creek,’ Bebe Moore Campbell’s Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, and Sapphire’s Push” in Bodies in a Broken World: Women Novelists of Color and the Politics of Medicine. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 2003. (109-136) Wickstrom, Stephanie. “The Politics of Forbidden Liaisons: Civilization, Miscegenation, and Other Perversions.” Frontiers 26.3 (2005): 168-198.

Toys, Tiny Candies, and Telenovelas: Popular and Material Culture as Storytelling Agents Author Dialogue Dora Ramírez-Doore: What I find most interesting about the essays in this section are the points made regarding Chicana subjectivity—in particular, how the individual is the connection between culture and the dominant popular culture of the United States. This connection is the point when self-definition takes place (positive or negative). In “Male and Female Roles in Mexican-American Society: Issues of Domestic Violence in ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’” Ana María discusses the way telenovelas mirror the cultural myth of La Llorona and the way Mexican women are situated between these two phenomena. Then specifically, she illustrates how Cleófilas’s personal identity is built through the emotional and physical violence she confronts. Although implied, the social abuse is also present to make it even more difficult for Cleófilas to fully grasp or take control of her situation. There was one point in the essay that I found particularly compelling, perhaps because of my interest in Environmental Social Justice. Ana María writes that depression can become an issue when emotional violence takes control. The ideas of cultural and linguistic isolation, abuse, cultural fractures, and submissiveness all play a part in leading to depression. Recently, I’ve noticed that the issue of health is becoming part of the theoretical conversation in Chicano/a Literature, but as most of us know, it is not new to the stories we have told as a culture (e.g., La Llorona). The PBS Series “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?” inspires the start of a new conversation. We often hear about racial and ethnic correlations to the incidence of diabetes and other health disorders, but the ties between race and mental health are also important to consider, especially since emotion can affect the total well-being of an individual and community. I feel that abuse is a consequence of social inequalities on many levels. The myth of La Llorona is connected to social issues (environmental, cultural, gendered, and economic) and thus makes La Llorona’s story that of Cleófilas and those of other women suffering abuse. The fact that this story shares the title of the book, Woman Hollering Creek, represents the issue of cultural primacy. I agree with

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Ana María’s reading of La Llorona and the telenovelas. These texts maintain the idea that women should be submissive and “mute feminine victims of male dominance.” Yet they also include a taste of humiliation which argues for a rereading of these myths/telenovelas/stories. In my essay I speak to the idea that when women are defined or labeled by popular culture figures, they sometimes buy into these roles—including those that are negative or submissive. Ana María draws on three women in the story “Woman Hollering Creek” (Felice, Graciela, and Cleófilas’s doctor) to illustrate the way stories can be retold to reflect women’s empowerment. Mary’s essay “Reading the Puns in ‘Barbie-Q’” also draws on the ideas that popular culture can have both negative and positive effects on a girl/woman’s ability to define herself. They can either define themselves through a positive, culturally-affirming lens or buy into the roles given to them (like Barbie). After reading Ana Maria’s essay, I began to see Barbie as a metaphor for emotional violence on the children that play with and idolize her. Mary’s essay points to the way impressions are made through play—through the Barbie doll as an object, idea, and metaphor. The fact that Barbie-Q is a darker shade because she was in a fire, has a melted foot, and is not purchased in a department store allows for a different perspective, based not in dominance, but rather in performance—or perhaps as a strategy for engaging the dominant society. Moving Barbie out of the category of dominant discourse opens up the possibility for a new type of performance for these young girls. Mary also opens up the very interesting possibility for a linguistic study of this chapter. Her reading of the use of Spanish/Spanglish in the text as a whole and then, most importantly, its absence in “BarbieQ” illustrates to me the lack of true cultural difference in the Barbie product line. “Mattel-English” says it all. There is a dangerous cultural undertone to Barbie dolls and the play that surrounds these English-only blond beauties. Mary says it best when she states that “Barbie’s triumph is so complete that neither the narrator’s imagination nor the author’s resistance can reverse it.” Barbie then becomes the erasure of culture and language for these young girls, but as noted at the end of the chapter, subversion is part of playing. The Barbie dolls take on the qualities and appearance of those that play with them; note the parallels regarding the extended family and the clothes, for example. I’m still curious, however, about the melted foot. Does this mean that there isn’t much one can do to escape the melting pot? Or does it mean that Barbie is also becoming part of the Latino

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culture? Both have interesting connotations. I might have to buy a Barbie and melt her foot for my office décor! Mary Comfort: I agree that popular culture—including Barbie dolls and telenovelas—can threaten the identity (self-esteem, racial pride, etc.) of its consumers. Although in “Barbie-Q,” the parents capitulate in delivering an oppressive icon to their children, Mexican-American culture nonetheless triumphs over the intrusive Barbie doll. In “Woman Hollering Creek,” self-identity triumphs over telenovelas. Based on these two “victories,” Cisneros seems to be celebrating the resilience of her characters. Dora comments on Ana's essay, noting that "stories can be retold for empowerment." Is community a prerequisite for retelling stories in Woman Hollering Creek? Do inverted images mark the beginning of community formation? Ana María frequently refers to the importance of community as a woman finds her identity, her voice. Cleófilas cannot find community with Dolores and Soledad because they have become “passive” and encourage conformity, yet she is empowered to revise stories in community with Felice and Graciela. Community enables Cleófilas to rebel against stereotypes as delivered through telenovelas—a struggle that will enable her to tell her own story. Ana María also observes that alone, viewers are likely to imitate the women in the telenovelas. With a group of friends, however, they are more likely to critique these stories. For example, an isolated television viewer, noting that a character's hair is dyed, might dye her own hair. Might a viewer-in-community (who goes to a friend's house or discusses the show with Felice and Graciela, as in Cleófilas’s case) decide that like the character's hair color, the nature of reality has been changed in these telenovelas? Ana Maria’s essay also juxtaposes the cars, kept from women to keep them “at home,” and the truck (purchased by women and mobilizing them). Does Cisneros invert images (husband's car/woman's truck) to emphasize change, to underscore empowerment? Smoke-darkened Barbie dolls suggest a Mexican-American community in “Barbie-Q,” and friends critiquing telenovelas become a community of women in “Woman Hollering Creek.” Is there a comparable emerging community in “Never Marry a Mexican?” Clemencia places the gummy bears where “she [Megan] would find them” (81). Does Clemencia want Megan to critique her art? When Dora notes that Clemencia is “crying out to Megan to take notice of her existence,” I wonder whether it is important to Clemencia that

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Megan take notice of her existence as an artist. And, since toys seldom have toys, does Clemencia's reference to the tiniest nested doll as the “Barbie doll's toy” (82), make Megan less of a toy herself, more human, even the beginning of a community of artists? Ana María Almería: In her comments about the articles on this section, Mary speaks about the importance of being part of the community to be able to articulate stories. But how essential is the pervasiveness of popular culture in these communities? What is the role played by myths, dolls, telenovelas and general folklore in the articulation and retelling of individual stories? How powerful are they? Different elements of popular culture seem to influence the different stages by which women go through in their lives. By the term “stages,” I’m referring to childhood, motherhood and the period where every woman achieves sexual fulfillment, that is, takes on the role of lover. In her article, Mary states that “this brief story of childhood [“Barbie-Q”] represents a crucial moment in identity formation” since girls dream of becoming Barbies themselves by accepting their voices, assuming similar tastes, and surrendering an entire cultural identity. What at first sight looks like an innocent game can end up endangering girls´ self-esteem and making them question their race and the social class in which they were born. Comfort notes that children at this stage of life remain naive and ignore the issues and rules that shape the world around them. Due to this ingenuousness, they become the perfect victims of the elements of a popular culture that sometimes originates in peoples´ fears and misunderstandings of their own behavior and at times is grounded in the socio-economic interests of the powerful Western nations, the latter being the case with Barbie. I agree with Dora that the Barbie can be seen as a kind of “metaphor for emotional violence on the children that play and idolize her,” but I will go beyond by saying that the Barbie is, in my view, a metaphor for emotional violence on all those societies that are placed outside the circle of the dominant one. But to what extent can dominant societies be blamed for this emotional violence? In most cases, by letting their offspring identify with the ideas and believes of the powerful communities and contributing to feed the children’s confusion (for instance. buying new dresses for their children´s Barbies), developing countries put their own essence and roots at risk.

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As shown in the other two stories we are dealing with here, popular culture not only influences children but its power remains always constant. In “Never Marry a Mexican” and “Woman Hollering Creek” we can also observe the influence of folklore. La Malinche and La Llorona/La Gritona comprise the emerging elements that seem to influence the stereotypes of Chicana women. As Dora writes in her article, “Both women [La Llorona and La Malinche] ask to be recognized by other women.” Here, I see a clear connection between the necessity of people to explain and justify the acts of these legendary figures and the importance to “Chicanas” of being recognized in either of these two. Despite the fact that Clemencia and Cleófilas know the negative connotations of resembling these figures, they feel the need to mirror them. Is this an attempt to demand their roots as Mexican or is this a form of selfpunishment because they feel "amphibious?” Do they help our protagonists retell their stories or prevent them from moving on? The same can be applied to telenovelas. These “soap operas” are without doubt another element exerting a great deal of influence over behavior. Nevertheless, we are left to interpret for ourselves whether they represent a means to redefine identity or serve as a burden when trying to revise and retell stories.

Images of Masculinity

“Are you my general?”: Revising Representation in “Eyes of Zapata” This essay explores some of the ways that Sandra Cisneros interrogates forms of authority and representation in her short text “Eyes of Zapata.” The essay offers a close reading of that text but it also considers it in relation to the broader thematic concerns and textual methods of Woman Hollering Creek as a whole. Cisneros’s reading of Zapata is considered here relative to earlier American representations of the American revolutionary, and those of John Steinbeck in particular, in his text “Zapata, the Little Tiger,” which provided the basis for Elia Kazan’s film Viva Zapata! (1952). Reading “Eyes of Zapata” alongside these earlier versions of this historic figure reveals interesting aspects of Cisneros’s profound engagements with American and Chicano/a literature and culture, but it also reflects the writer’s interest in popular culture.

Chapter 39 of Sandra Cisneros’s novel Caramelo begins with the lyrics of a song composed by the Mexican singer-songwriter María Grever (1894-1951). Arranged in two columns, in Spanish and English, the first verse includes the following lines: I swear I don’t understand why your gaze has me so fascinated. (182)

Eyes—agents of the fascinating gaze—are everywhere in Sandra Cisneros’s writing: even before one starts to read her books they seize the reader’s attention. Female figures drawn from the popular art of Jesus Helguera gaze at and beyond the reader from the covers of many of her books with a curiously unsettling intensity – beguilingly erotic and immediate in their colorful vivacity on the one hand but vaguely melancholy, mysterious and distant on the other. The eyes of the figure lying on a couch are masked in the reproduction of Terry Ybañez’s painting “La Panchanela con Acordión y Bailadora” on the cover of Alfred A. Knopf’s 1994 reprint of Cisneros’s 1987 collection of poems My Wicked Wicked Ways, but in the picture’s foreground an eyeless skeleton in a wide-brimmed hat decorated with flowers taunts the reader with a puzzling smile, as if s/he has stolen the reclining figure’s clothes.

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From the opening stanza of “Postcard to the Lace Man—The Old Market, Antibes” in My Wicked Wicked Ways, in which she writes: To tell the truth I can’t remember your name. It’s those Catalán eyes I can’t let go of (48)

to the first few lines of her poem “Unos Cuantos Piquetitos” in Loose Woman (1994) where she describes “the bull / ’s eye of my heart” (59), the eye is a fundamental and persistently fascinating motif for Cisneros. The profound importance of the eye (and eyes, in general) in Cisneros’s writing is further suggested by the note in the “Acknowledgments” to Loose Woman where Dennis Mathis and Drew Allen are described as the author’s “Eyes” (xiii), but it is perhaps in her novel Caramelo that eyes are most powerfully and pervasively evoked as images and symbols of manifold semantic and symbolic agency in her work. Literally embedded in the name of the family whose story Caramelo seeks to tell—la familia Reyes—the eyes and eyesight of individual characters are signalled out for special treatment and detailed description on many occasions in the novel, as the following selection of passages demonstrates: He picks up an old sepia photo of himself. Seated on a cane bench, a young man with the surprised eyes of someone who knows nothing of the world. (58) However, what was most striking about Narciso Reyes were his eyes—all darkness with hardly any white showing, like the eyes of horses, and it was this that fooled the world into believing him a sensitive and tender soul. (103). You have to watch where you’re going. There are huge, dangerous holes like underground caves, some with pieces of metal pipes snaking out. If you don’t look out, you could have an accident. I think this must be why almost every other person I see downtown has an eye patch, or a big gauze Band-Aid on his face. (259) Up until Ernesto, Father gave any boy who came near me that eye of the rooster he’s famous for,

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a sideways once-over as if he’d suddenly had a seizure and can’t look at you face-to-face. (368)

Taken together, the various images and phrases cited here and in the preceding paragraph suggest an intense interest in vision, seeing, eyesight and representations of various forms of sight in Cisneros’s work that could be the focus of a book-length study in itself. In this essay, however, my focus will be on “Eyes of Zapata,” the longest piece in Woman Hollering Creek, in which Cisneros envisions Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919), one of the most popular and at times controversial figures in twentieth-century Mexican and MexicanAmerican history and culture. Famously described by John Steinbeck as “a combination of father, symbol, spokesman, and actual projection of his people” (47), Cisneros implicitly acknowledges these aspects of Zapata in her text. However, she also interrogates conventional understandings of the Mexican revolutionary in the course of her narrative, exposing aspects of (his) masculinity that have perhaps been overlooked or taken for granted in earlier representations. In her engagements with the figure of Zapata, Cisneros offers readers a new way of seeing a particular historical personality, but she also reveals the private face that is sometimes masked or obscured by public forms of cultural and political authority and power. Her vision of Zapata revises earlier versions of him, but through the poetic re-envisionings of her prose, “Eyes of Zapata” also enables a more general critique of masculinity and gender relations to come into a perspective that opens out, finally, into a radical reappraisal of selfhood in the public as well as the private sphere. “Eyes of Zapata” is printed in the third and final section of Woman Hollering Creek, which is entitled “There Was a Man, There Was a Woman”. It is not the first piece in the book to scrutinize a popular male icon: an earlier story, “Mexican Movies,” describes a young child’s romantic view of Pedro Armendáriz and Pedro Infante (José Pedro Infante Cruz), actors who enjoyed success in Mexican and U.S. American cinema in the 1940s and ’50s. Of Pedro Infante the narrator in “Mexican Movies” says: I like the Pedro Infante movies best. He always sings riding a horse and wears a big sombrero and never tears the dresses off the ladies, and the ladies throw flowers from a balcony, and usually somebody dies, but not Pedro Infante because he has to sing the happy song at the end. (12-13)

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In Cisneros’s stories, of course, the Pedro Infante character is not always there “to sing the happy song at the end,” and the innocent world view of the young narrator in “Mexican Movies” is interestingly problematized in the following sentence from the story’s last paragraph: “Black and white, black and white lights behind our closed eyelids, until by now we’re awake but it’s nice to go on pretending with our eyes shut because here’s the best part” (13). The “best part” is when the children are lifted out of their parents’ car and put to bed, where they can dream of the worlds they have seen in the movies, but Cisneros’s description of the world “behind [their] closed eyelids” as one of “black and white” is suggestive of the simplistically bipartite view of reality that she subjects to more probing interrogations in the longer and decidedly more “grown-up” story “Eyes of Zapata.” For Cisneros, the “black and white” world of the movies is one in which the social, economic, and sexual realities of life are kept in abeyance, like the “fat velvet rope across the stairs that means you can’t go up there” which keeps the children out of the box seats in the theatre in “Mexican Movies”. The fatness of the rope in this image, however, as well as the description preceding it of “velvet curtains with yellow fringe like a general’s shoulders” (12), signal the narrator’s awareness of aspects of reality from which she happily retreats to the world of sleep: Mama and Papa lift us out of the backseat and carry us upstairs to the third-floor front where we live, take off our shoes and clothes, and cover us, so when we wake up, it’s Sunday already, and we’re in our beds and happy. (13)

The innocence of the scene is undercut by the sense that the children are happy primarily because they are being protected from a world beyond the smell of popcorn and the “black and white” images of the movies—the world of adulthood, where things are never as idyllic as they seem. The conversation recorded in “The Marlboro Man” (57-60)—in which the “real” identity of the man who appeared in cigarette advertisements between the 1950s and 1970s is discussed, represents an important movement within Woman Hollering Creek from the perception of male icons as romantic figures who belong to a world of innocence, as in “Mexican Movies,” to the more sustained interrogation of iconic maleness conducted in “Eyes of Zapata.” In

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“The Marlboro Man” it is suggested that the man who played this ruggedly male figure ended his days “working as an AIDS clinic volunteer” (58), a disease from which he is also said to have died. When one of the speakers in the story makes this claim, the other says: “No, he didn’t. He died from cancer. Too many cigarettes, I guess” (58). The first speaker then asks: “Are we talking about the same Marlboro Man?” (58). This question forms the basis for undermining the myth of “The Marlboro Man” that by the end of the story has the speakers questioning whether he ever existed: “But Dan Rather said he was the original Marlboro Man.” “The original, huh? ... Well, maybe the one I’m talking about […] wasn’t the real Marlboro Man…” (60). Interrogating the Marlboro Man’s realness, the speakers expose the division between fantasy and reality that the children in “Mexican Movies” are unable to accept, but even here there is a sense in which the world of the fantastic is preferable to the real: Well, all I know is he was called Durango. And he owned a ranch out in the hill country that once belonged to Lady Bird Johnson. And he and some friends of the Texas Tornadoes lost a lot of money investing in some recording studio that was supposed to have thirty-six tracks instead of the usual sixteen, or whatever. And he gave Romelia hell, always chasing any young thang that wore a skirt and … (60)

The speakers cannot quite accept that the “Marlboro Man” was/is a fabrication, and this passage describes the difficulty they have in reconciling him with their actual lives. Even when he is recognized by them as someone they might have known, he retains a kind of mythic strangeness that places him at a remove from the world they live in, with its attendant mores and responsibilities. As one of the speakers puts it earlier in the piece, “GOD! Don’t kill me. I used to dream he’d be the father of my children” (59). Both “The Marlboro Man” and “Mexican Movies” represent playful but nonetheless effective attempts at interrogating the relationship between myth and reality in relation to female understandings of maleness, and particularly in terms of the creation and propagation of myths of maleness in popular cultural forms such as cinema and advertising. The figure of Emiliano Zapata, of course,

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has frequently been represented in these forms, and Cisneros engages with a long history of representing the iconic Mexican revolutionary not just in Woman Hollering Creek but also in Caramelo. There we are told how Soledad Reyes: …saw the magnificent Zapata riding on a beautiful horse down the streets of the capital, and just as he crossed in front of her, he raised an elegant hand to his face and scratched his nose. These things she had seen with her own eyes! It was only later when she was near the end of her life that she began to doubt what she’d actually seen and what she’d embroidered over time, because after a while the embroidery seems real and the real seems embroidery. (135)

Here, Cisneros takes up the idea that runs through Woman Hollering Creek in regard to the perception of iconic maleness. In fact, the embroidery motif is suggestive of the way in which the mythic and the real are inextricably bound up with each other in her works. Soledad’s doubt about “what she’d actually seen” is supplanted by the reality of her hunger – “What she could vow was true was the hunger. That she remembered” (135): a hunger that her witnessing of “the magnificent Zapata” could not assuage. The point is explained in greater detail later in Caramelo, where we are told that: Women stood on balconies throwing kisses and flowers to the victorious [Pancho] Villa (18781923)] and Zapata, who marched in like caesars, and the city whooped again when it was [Venustiano] Carranza [Garza (1859-1920)], and just as sincerely for his rival, the one-armed [Álvaro] Obregón [Salido (1880-1928)]. It wasn’t that they were fickle. It was peace they were welcoming, not leaders. They’d had enough of war. (149)

For Cisneros, then, Zapata is one of a long list of Mexican “caesars,” men who were welcomed into the villages of ordinary women and men because they brought peace, not “leadership” as such, however that might be defined. The public version of history casts these men as major players (“caesars”) in a national drama of political resistance and liberation, but Cisneros is acutely aware of the choreographic strategies employed by politicians on all sides in propping leaders up into positions of power. As she puts it in an

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endnote to the passage just quoted—where the use of italics not only conforms to the book’s presentational style but also highlights the point’s particular importance: There were many revolutions within the revolution, so that at times certain factions were patriots and at other times were dubbed rebels, hounded by the same government they had once supported. Case in point, Emiliano Zapata, who led the indigenous forces from Morelos, the subtropical region just south of Mexico City, a group fighting for their ancient land rights. Pancho Villa was an outlaw turned rebel leader who controlled the desert border states. These two powerful chieftains, “the Attila of the South” and “the Centaur of the North,” and their followers met in a historic encounter in Mexico City midway through the war. In any good Mexican restaurant today you’ll see a sepia photo documenting the event—a cheerful Villa sitting in the presidential chair while a feral Zapata glowers suspiciously at the camera. (152)

Cisneros, meanwhile, “glowers suspiciously” at these and other images of Zapata, scrutinizing their historical and cultural transmission and transformation into texts that through her gaze are exposed as performances of precarious patriarchal authority. Caramelo provides many compelling examples of her exposition of Zapata’s “feral” or fundamentally untrustworthy (human) nature, but it is in “Eyes of Zapata” that she offers her most powerful and sustained interrogation of the figure she identifies as “Miliano” and “Milianito,” the big man down off his horse (literally and metaphorically), no longer glowering at anybody but with his eyes closed, snoring, “[e]yes creased from learning to see in the night” (86). As mentioned at the outset, eyes are everywhere in Cisneros’s writing, but they are nowhere more ubiquitous than they are in “Eyes of Zapata,” a text whose very title brings the Mexican revolutionary’s dark eyes to mind while at the same time suggesting a removal of those delicate organs from the head of the man who owned them. We do not like to think of the eyes as organs—like the kidneys, the heart, the liver—but their physical aspect is foregrounded at the start of Cisneros’s text in terms that emphasize their actual delicacy over any visionary power they may contain. The text’s opening sentences

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describe an intimacy between the speaker and the figure of Zapata that is tenderly evocative of two lovers lying side by side: one asleep, the other awake. At the same time, Cisneros’s prose is subtly suggestive of something sinister, the possibility that we are about to witness something violent, some violation of Zapata’s physical self, perhaps, as he sleeps: I put my nose to your eyelashes. The skin of the eyelids as soft as the skin of the penis, the collarbone with its fluted wings, the purple knot of the nipple, the dark, blue-black color of your sex, the thin legs and long thin feet. For a moment I don’t want to think of your past nor your future. For now you are here, you are mine. (85)

The passage may be read as a tender description of a woman—her name is Inés—examining her lover’s body while he sleeps, but the “purple knot” and “dark, blue-black color of [his] sex” together with the description of the sleeping Zapata’s “thin legs and long thin feet” simultaneously evoke images of violence and frailty, delicacy and bruising. A sense of possession and entrapment is also suggested— “For now you are here, you are mine”—which is reminiscent of a tradition in U.S. American short fiction that goes back to Edgar Allan Poe, depicting a form of Gothic writing in which the desire to contain the female other is bound up with an attempt to maintain patriarchal modes of interpretive authority and power. Cisneros turns this paradigm inside out in “Eyes of Zapata,” however, and subjects the male figure to the kind of scrutiny that demythologizes the man she describes as “the Centaur of the North” in Caramelo (152). No longer on horseback—no longer one with his horse—Inés describes how she examines Zapata’s body and clothes after he has had his “cognac and cigar,” “after [she is] certain [he is] asleep”: I examine at my leisure your black trousers with the silver buttons—fifty-six pairs on each side; I’ve counted them—your embroidered sombrero with its horsehair tassel, the lovely Dutch linen shirt, the fine braid stitching on the border or your charro jacket, the handsome black boots, your tooled gun belt and silver spurs. Are you my general? Or only that boy I met at the country fair in San Lázaro? (85)

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In “Eyes of Zapata,” eyes and the parts of the body connected to them—eyelashes, eyelids, eyebrows—are mentioned on several occasions, but Cisneros also devotes a great deal of space in the text to seeing, looking, gazing, watching, examining, activities that involve scrutinizing, such as the counting of the buttons on Zapata’s trousers described here. Inés is in fact described at one point as “wide-eyed” (87), and the text establishes an important distinction between the way she sees and what she sees and Zapata’s inability to see or his lack of vision. The power of Zapata’s eyes is emphasized in the text in the following terms: “Your eyes. Ay! Your eyes. Eyes with teeth. Terrible as obsidian. The days to come in those eyes, el porvenir, the days gone by. And beneath that fierceness, something ancient and tender as rain” (101). At another point Inés describes how, when she first met Zapata at the San Lázaro fair, he “wore [his] sombrero set forward— not at the back of the head as others do—so it would shade those eyes of [his], those eyes that watched and waited” (107). Though his eyes watch and wait, it is clear from the text that Inés possesses a kind of visionary power that surpasses Zapata’s in certain respects. “Ay, but now look”, she says, after she has observed his hands, hands which she says are “too pretty for a man. Elegant hands, graceful hands, fingers smelling sweet as your Savanas” (85-86). Zapata’s masculinity is called into question here: the famous horse-handler’s hands are more gentle in appearance than those of his female lover whose hands are “[n]icked and split and callused” with “skin as coarse as the wattle of a hen […] from the planting in the tlacolol, for the hard man’s work [she does] clearing the field with hoe and machete, dirty work that leaves the clothes filthy” (86). Inés sees things that her “Milianito” is either unable or unwilling to acknowledge, and her description of the distribution of labor in wartime—for this, she says, is “work no woman would do before the war”—calls into question traditional perceptions of gender in relation to socioeconomic customs and conventions. It is important to acknowledge, then, that “Eyes of Zapata” is a war story, a story about the effects of war on social and economic structures and, centrally, a story of the relationships between women and men. The story is clearly set during the Mexican Revolution, during which time Emiliano Zapata lived on the run, rarely sleeping in the same bed two nights in a row, moving from town to town as he led the rebel forces. Cisneros recognizes the bravery of Zapata’s actions, but throughout her work she seeks to clear a space for the women, and men, without whose support Zapata, Villa, and others could not have

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become the “caesars” or heroes they are often remembered as today. How Zapata is seen and remembered is a major concern for Cisneros, and her interest in earlier cultural representations of him is described in the following passage from Caramelo (another endnote in italics), where she discusses Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! (1952): For a Hollywood version of the Mexican revolution, see Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata. John Steinbeck wrote the screenplay. His choice for the lead role was none other than the Mexican movie star Pedro Armendáriz, featured in The Pearl. Armendáriz had the sexy, indigenous looks for the job, and, more importantly, the acting skills, but was unknown in the States. Kazan, however, wanted and got Marlon Brando for the part, who, in my opinion, looks ridiculous with his eyes taped slant trying to pass as Mexi-Indian. (152)

Brando’s posing as the “Mexi-Indian” Zapata in Kazan’s movie, however, is just one example of the kind of passing or selftransforming performativity that Cisneros seeks to expose in her writing, particularly in “Eyes of Zapata” where the hero’s “maleness” and the speaker’s “femaleness” are subjected to intense scrutiny. In the same way that Cisneros unmasks Brando in this passage from Caramelo—it is impossible to look at Kazan’s Viva Zapata! in the same light once one thinks the main character’s eyes are “taped slant”—“Eyes of Zapata” pushes the sombrero back on the historical Zapata’s head and forces us to look him in the eye through fresh eyes, as it were. Consequently, the eyes of the author engage us in an act of re-envisioning and revising received understandings and representations of this major Mexican icon. Cisneros is not just calling the authority of Zapata as a hero-figure into question in “Eyes of Zapata” by questioning his masculinity; she is also critiquing representation itself. This is not to suggest that her own text is unaffected by ideological forces in its (re)construction of “Zapata”; Cisneros’s work clearly engages with ideas derived from her readings in feminist political thought in particular. But through the manipulation of certain structural devices and techniques, and in the richness of her language, “Eyes of Zapata” destabilizes earlier visions of Zapata, such as those to be found in the work of Steinbeck and Kazan, and she also projects a version of Zapata into the future that is harder to identify with rigid systems of representation and control than

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earlier cultural appropriations. In the final paragraph of the text Cisneros writes: “My sky, my life, my eyes. Let me look at you. Before you open those eyes of yours. The days to come, the days gone by. Before we go back to what we’ll always be” (113). In the text’s timeframe, Zapata’s eyes have been closed in sleep, but the reader has been invited to look into them through the magic of Inés’s vision. Once she has experienced this magic she knows, as Inés does, that when he opens his eyes Zapata will go back to being himself, but readers have seen him in a new light, and the view of him will be altered forever by the transformative power of Inés’s insight. On the one hand, a reader may, with Inés, “go back to what we’ll always be”—women and men locked into social and cultural systems of understanding that are impossible to overturn in one night—but in the course of her narrative Inés posits the possibility that in “[t]he days to come” changes will occur that will mark the beginning of a new era, where things will be seen more clearly. This is presaged in the preceding paragraphs of the story, each beginning with the words “And I see…,” each one describing Inés’s movement between the harsh realities of her life and a new world of possibility and hope where, in the end, Zapata exists only as a memory: .

I rise high and higher, the house shutting itself like an eye. I fly farther than I’ve ever flown before, farther than the clouds, farther than our Lord Sun, husband of the moon. Till all at once I look beneath me and see our lives, clear and still, far away and near. And I see our future and our past, Miliano, one single thread already lived and nothing to be done about it. And I see the face of the man who will betray you. The place and the hour. The gift of a horse the color of gold dust. A breakfast of warm beer swirling in your belly. The hacienda gates opening. The pretty bugles doing the honors. TirriLEE tirREE. Bullets like a sudden shower of stones. And in that instant, a feeling of relief almost. And loneliness, just like that other loneliness of being born. (110-11)

Inés is represented here as a kind of witch, an outcast, and indeed she is treated as such by her family after she marries Zapata. She is also a woman who moves between worlds with a power that cannot be explained by the rational claims of party politics or even by herself, but the movement enables her to obtain an overarching perspective on

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the world that politicians lack. Her first realization of this power is described as “something beneath my eyelids [that] palpitated so furiously, it wouldn’t let me sleep” yet it enables her to “see perfectly in the darkness” (97); the world of night, she says, “becomes as clear as if the noon sun shone” (98). In this state Inés “scout[s] the hillsides, the mountains” and “[n]othing escapes [her]. No coyote in the mountains, or scorpion in the sand. Everything clear” (88). What is clear from the final section of the text, however, and particularly in the paragraphs just quoted, is that Inés represents one woman’s selfliberation from the powers of patriarchy in which she is expected to play a serving and subservient role. The house—the space within which she is to serve Zapata and provide a safe haven for him—shuts itself, she says, “like an eye,” and then she takes flight, fleeing the nets of family and faith “farther than our Lord Sun” until she reaches a place where even the death of her husband seems a “relief” now that things are “clear and still” (110). That place of clarity and stillness, crucially, is beyond the physical world in which the body is no longer a wall preventing men and women from achieving full understanding of each other. As mentioned earlier, “Eyes of Zapata” belongs to a section of Woman Hollering Creek called “There Was a Man, There Was a Woman” and this subtitle reinforces the sense of the divisiveness of traditional understandings of gender that Cisneros interrogates throughout her work. After the death of Zapata is foreseen by Inés, she writes: We drag these bodies around with us, these bodies that have nothing at all to do with you, with me, with who we really are, these bodies that give us pleasure and pain. Though I’ve learned how to abandon mine at will, when we lose ourselves inside each other. Then we see a little of what is called heaven. When we can be that close that we no longer are Inés and Emiliano, but something bigger than our lives. And we can forgive, finally. (89)

On one level, of course, Cisneros is trying to describe the pleasure of sexual togetherness here—“when we lose ourselves inside each other.” But she is also describing a kind of transcendence which is less dependent on the body than it is on an effort of the mind and the will, a visionary power that enables Inés to see beyond the trappings of gender to a place where she is no longer the “wife” of Zapata and he is no longer her “husband”—what she can only call “something bigger

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than our lives.” In the course of “Eyes of Zapata,” aspects of the lives of Inés and Emiliano are described in great detail, and Cisneros takes considerable care to give the reader a full and colourful sense of the world they inhabit. Nevertheless, “Eyes of Zapata” strives ultimately to suggest a space beyond traditional mappings of personality and place, beyond conventional ideologies of gender where categories such as “Man” and “Woman” are challenged by a mode of belief where things are, simply, “glad to be themselves”: And I see rivers of stars and the wide sea with its sad voice, and emerald fish fluttering on the sea bottom, glad to be themselves. And bell towers and blue forests, and a store filled with hats. A burnt foot like the inside of a plum. A lice comb with two nits. The lace hem of a woman’s dress. The violet smoke from a cigarette. A boy urinating into a tin. The milky eyes of a blind man. The chipped finger of a San Isidro statue. The tawny bellies of dark women giving life. (112)

The dream of the future described by Inés towards the end of “Eyes of Zapata” is not, of course, as simple as these images in their immediate palpability might suggest, and the juxtaposition of life and death in this passage indicates the complexity of achieving a unified vision which Cisneros refuses to provide for the reader of her work. On one level, “Eyes of Zapata” reinterprets the major representations of Zapata provided by artists such as Steinbeck and Kazan, but it would be wrong to suggest that Cisneros’s attempts at revision simply provide alternative or updated versions of this major cultural and political icon, as tempting as that might be for many readers. The poetic energy of her writing, as well as the largeness of vision suggested by Inés’s flights into the night as she assumes superhuman powers of perception, point towards a form of understanding and insight that ultimately resists the iconic classifications of conventional political forms, such as those that have fed representations of Emiliano Zapata since he was gunned down by Mexican government forces in 1919. Cisneros takes the myth of “Zapata” and brings it down to earth by situating “the Centaur of the North” in an intimate, domestic setting—unclothed, on his back, vulnerable and asleep. Her point, however, is not only to suggest that the “great man” had an ordinary, homely side—that his life was as

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personally complicated as it was complex in political terms. Instead, she is ultimately interested in exposing the strategies by which all men and women, those with power and those without, engage in processes of representation that determine who they are and how they exist in the world. “Eyes of Zapata” can be read in many different ways, and, in its textual indeterminacy, it demonstrates Cisneros’s desire to undo the strictures of representation against which all of her work is directed, from the short poems of Loose Woman and My Wicked Wicked Ways to the magisterial Caramelo. By focusing on the motif of the eye and the imagery of sight, this essay has attempted to explore some of the ways in which Cisneros revises our understanding of representation in “Eyes of Zapata” as well as in some of her other works. Cisneros’s writings demand to be read in this way: as an unfolding project of interrogating the nature of representation that continues from story to story within Woman Hollering Creek and from there for Caramelo and beyond. Like her Chicana contemporary, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros may be described as “a countryless woman”—a female writer who exists in “a world imbued with nationalism” on the one hand, but a world in which the terms “nation” and “nationhood” often mean different things for women and men. Flying from the earth, “the house shutting itself like an eye” behind and beneath her (110), the character of Inés in “Eyes of Zapata” represents the modern Chicana woman abandoning the mythic constraints of a largely male-ordered world, “in which from the day of our births,” as Castillo has put it, “we are either granted citizenship or relegated to the netherstate of serving as mass production drones” (24). Refusing to be placed within such a world, the character of Inés in Cisneros’s “Eyes of Zapata” represents the true spirit of liberated identity, by whose example male and female ideas of selfhood everywhere may achieve freedom from the stultifying mythologies and iconographies of the past. Philip Coleman Trinity College Dublin

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Works Consulted Castillo, Ana. “A Countryless Woman: the Early Feminista” in Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Plume Books, 1995. Cisneros, Sandra. My Wicked Wicked Ways. 1987; rpt. New York: Knopf, 2006. ———. Woman Hollering Creek. 1991; rpt. London: London: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. Loose Woman. 1994; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1995. ———. Caramelo, or Puro Cuento. 2002; rpt. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Steinbeck, John. Zapata, ed. Robert E. Morsberger, 1975; rpt. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Womack. John. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

Boys to Men: Redefining Masculinities in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Contemporary Chicana writers and scholars have reclaimed La Malinche and La Virgen as stalwart maternal and feminine figures. While Sandra Cisneros is recognized for her reclaimed and empowered female characters, she has also put forth new readings that humanize and expand bicultural definitions of maleness in her collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Through the lens of Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the perspectives of the late Western European intellectual historian George L. Mosse, this essay explores the spectrums of masculinities in five of Cisneros’s stories from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood: “Salvador Late or Early,” “Tepeyac,” “One Holy Night,” “Remember the Alamo,” and “Bien Pretty.”

In the last decade or so, there has been a host of ground-breaking feminist scholarship on re-presenting and reinterpreting the Chicana and the Mexican-American woman. Contemporary Chicana writers and scholars reclaim Malinal, Hernán Cortés’s translator and lover, and the Virgin of Guadalupe, a fusion of the indigenous Tonantzín and Catholicism’s Mary, as stalwart maternal and feminine figures. Examining what it means to be a woman straddling and recrossing borders, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) emerged over two decade ago to observe with fresh eyes the cultural, linguistic, psychological metaphor of the United States-Mexico border. In fact, a seminal text in encouraging these late twentieth—and now early twenty-first—century writers’ attempts to reread and respond to the degradation of la Malinche as la Chingada is Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude. While Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros is recognized for her reclaimed and empowered female characters, she has also put forth readings that humanize and expand bicultural definitions of maleness in her collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). This essay draws on Paz’s definitions of Latino maleness and the late George L. Mosse’s historical overview of male stereotypes in order to illuminate the spectrum of masculinities that Cisneros’s characters put forward. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a collection that offers an intriguing range of masculinities: a male child, a gender ambiguous narrator, a self-made mythologizing man, a performer/drag queen and a feminized Tarzan. In focusing on these five vignettes, this essay seeks to uncover the new, more humane spectrum of masculinities in Cisneros’s short stories, particularly

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when measured through the lens of Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the perspectives of the Western European intellectual historian George L. Mosse, particularly his work entitled The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (1996). In the 1950s, Paz published his El laberinto de la soledad; its English translation was not published in the United States until 1961 as The Labyrinth of Solitude. Paz, having spent time in Los Angeles, disseminates his ideas of the pachuco, macho, and the sons of la Malinche. He sees the former as a spiritual condition or lack thereof found in the juvenile gangs of post WWII North America (Paz 13). But Paz explains: “Even his very name is enigmatic: pachuco, a word of uncertain derivation, saying nothing and saying everything” (Paz 14). Moreover, this elusive definition seems to justify, from the essentialist perspective, why the pachuco cannot assimilate or be accepted by North American (Paz’s term for the United States) society. The pachuco has lost his whole inheritance: language, religion, customs, beliefs. He is left with only a body and a soul with which to confront the elements, defenseless against the stares of everyone. His disguise is a protection, but it also differentiates and isolates him: it both hides and points him out. (Paz 15)

Losing his inheritance of tongue, traditions, and way of life, vulnerable yet protected by disguise, he is a victim of colonialism’s legacy and its enduring cultural imperialism. Culturally orphaned, Paz’s pachuco is a walking contradiction who draws negative attention to his differences, which result in his persecution. If Paz’s pachuco is “an impassive and sinister clown,” (16) then his macho “represents the masculine pole of life”; the latter is the “gran chingón,” [sic] embodying “arbitrary power, the will without reins and without a set course” (Paz 81). In Paz’s taxonomy of the Mexican male, one can be either the emasculated pachuco or the masculine macho. Yet in the verisimilitude called fiction, Cisneros allows for Mexican-American gender variance—her characters can be both ambiguous like the narrator of “Tepeyac” and the hybrid masculinefeminine narrator of “Remember the Alamo.” However, the Mexican character according to Paz is a hermetic one: sealed, guarded and masked. Moreover, “[t]he speech of our people reflects the extent to which we protect ourselves from the outside world: the ideal of

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manliness is never to ‘crack,’ never to back down. Those who ‘open themselves up’ are cowards” (emphasis mine, Paz 30). While an idealization of stoicism and reverberations of combat sound in the previous passage, Paz states that: For other people, however, the manly ideal consists in an open and aggressive fondness for combat, whereas we emphasize defensiveness, the readiness to repel any attack. The Mexican macho—the male—is a hermetic being, closed up in himself, capable of guarding both himself and whatever has been confided to him. (emphasis mine 31)

Consistent with a nationalist legacy of colonialism, the male, the macho to be exact, repels and defends his inner self from external, imposing forces. However, while not essentialist, masculinity has long been tied to rhetoric and its construction of national identity. To examine this here, George L. Mosse’s seminal study of man, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, proves helpful. While Paz’s interest in a Mexican male character expresses a poetic longing for self and collective definition, Mosse’s study takes into account “the evolution of a stereotype that became normative” (Mosse 4). The stereotype becomes internalized and a model for self, which then justifies its selves as a stereotype. Exploring modern masculinity, Mosse observes that “[s]tereotypes came into their own with the modern age as part of a general quest for symbols in order to make the abstract concrete within the bewildering changes of modernity (5). Rendering the abstract concrete, the stereotype of masculinity serves the nation as a symbol for a goal and an ideal, attainable through the male body. Reexamining the Enlightenment, Mosse recalls Locke’s and Rousseau’s overlapping attitudes and theories of human nature and education: “[b]oth…thought that a physically fit body was essential for a proper moral posture” (27). Physical health and moral character exist in relation to each other. Perhaps Mosse clarifies how stereotyping aids in defining what a culture perceives as normative—collectively and individually. As a cultural and intellectual historian, Mosse reiterates the role of eighteenth-century art historian-essayist Johann Joachim Winckelmann in shaping modern masculinity. Winckelmann, known for his studies of young male athletes in Greek sculpture, asserts that

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in sculptural form “the male body is deified” (Mosse 32). Moreover, marking a transition from Enlightenment to Romantic thought, Winckelmann redefines the male aesthetic as one of balance, beauty of form, and restraint of emotions (Mosse 33). Such restraint echoes of Paz’s defensive “closed up in himself” macho. Through Greek sculpture Winckelmann could discuss an abstracted, ideal beauty. In other words, this idealization of the human form becomes conceptual: “the absence of any individual or accidental traits was essential to the beauty of Greek sculpture” (Mosse 33). Again, in the process of reinforcing a stereotype—the macho or pachuco—, Paz’s definitions abstract and strip the Mexican male of his individuality and his inability to be anything but a type. Furthermore, Winckelmann uses classical Greek sculpture, a three-dimensional art form, to render concrete an idealized but deliberately abstracted aesthetic; Mosse argues that through Winckelmann the male stereotype has been codified, “defining normative masculinity for the nineteenth century and during most of the twentieth” (Mosse 77). Ultimately, Winckelmann’s male stereotype was also manipulated and reinforced in the Great War, World War I. Mosse observes the following: Although the warrior image of masculinity had existed ever since the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the Great War further accentuated certain aspects of masculinity that of themselves did not have to be warlike but— like willpower, hardness, or perseverance—were qualities that peacetime society prized as well.” (115)

If war becomes a symbol for masculinity, then modern nationalism becomes the battle cry of the combat-engaged male. According to Mosse, World War I then “brought nationalism’s aggressiveness into sharp focus, and made man as warrior the center of its search for a national character” and eventually became not only an emblem, but symbolically an important vehicle and rite of passage into manhood (Mosse 110-11). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse on aesthetics segues into understanding twentieth-century interpretations of maleness through war, which engages and even collapses the moral and corporal character of the male. Although Mosse’s study reveals war’s role in creating an aggressive male, through a rite of passage, Paz’s essays implicitly invert the male as aggressor for defender in the colonized, “raped,” and thus emasculated

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Mexico. For our readings of Woman Hollering Creek, Paz’s reinforcement of archetypes and Mosse’s genealogy of stereotypes are undermined in Cisneros’s self-reflexive representation of masculine stereotypes and her characters’ deceptive idealization—even deification—of the individual male. Returning to the notion of the abstracted male body, Paz’s taxonomy of the Mexican male as a hermetically sealed being reduces him to a series of virtually unknowable archetypes: the pachuco, the macho, and finally the degraded, lost sons of la Malinche. Empowered or emasculated, Paz’s men are all the symbolic fruit of la Malinche’s violated womb. Instead of accentuating a mestizo heritage, as the sons of la Malinche, Paz posits the Mexican male as the sons of la Chingada, in milder translations, the traitor or violated one. Harryette Mullen, unlike Paz, offers a more contextualized explanation of la Malinche’s origins as Malintzin Tenepal in her essay, “‘A Silence between us like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” Mullen contends that Malintzin/ Malinche who became la Chingada or “the one who got screwed” acted as Cortés’s translator; however, she “is silenced in Mexican and Spanish histories despite the extraordinary linguistic abilities that made her an agent of historical and cultural transformation” (Mullen 9). Digressing into an intriguing culturally denotative discussion of the verb chingar, the root of la Malinche’s other epithet (la Chingada), Paz underscores the thematic aspect of failure, aggression, and opening in the verb. Paz comments on the male progeny of la Malinche: The hijo de la Chingada [the son of the screwed one] is the offspring of violation, abduction or deceit. If we compare this expression with the Spanish hijo de puta (son of a whore), the difference is immediately obvious. To the Spaniard, dishonor consists in being the son of a woman who voluntarily surrenders herself: a prostitute. To the Mexican it consists in being the fruit of a violation. (79-80)

Moreover, the essentialist position of relegating all men to unequivocal status of marred fruit seems to render self-actualization impossible. Again, Paz reinforces his dualist tendencies of man/woman as closed/open without ever assigning masculine responsibility to the violation of rape or both mythical and real

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conquests; simultaneously, he also fails to entertain the possibility of crossing over the border, or the slash of binaries, to find agency in the masculine and feminine. And in more contemporary parlance, Paz’s definitions of the Mexican male continue to reinforce a rhetoric of disenfranchisement. Again, Mullen’s more contemporary feminist interpretation of la Chingada as “the one who got screwed” rejects Paz’s emasculated representation of the Mexican in favor of la Malinche as the “mother of the new mestizo race and culture of Mexico” (Mullen 9). If sex and sexuality play a part in constructing maleness and masculinity, the male defined thus far has been the heterosexual male. Mosse, in retracing the eighteenth century ideals, acknowledges Winckelmann’s homosexuality, which was not closeted but recognized by his contemporaries, such as Goethe. Perhaps Goethe’s circle overlooked Winckelmann’s sexuality to revere the art historian’s “concept of manly beauty” which, in the male form, exalted the potential of the human body (Mosse 67). Mosse proposes that the nineteenth century could not tolerate or ignore the homosexual male, as it interfered with seminal ideas of modern masculinity. Moreover, the anti-Semitism of this epoch also conflated the Jewish male with both ugliness and homosexuality; the Jew and the homosexual, as Mosse notes, were “destined to be the foil of masculinity” (Mosse 67). These Western European ideas of homosexuality as an impediment to heterosexual masculinity were handed down across the Atlantic to the continent’s former colonies: Mexico and the United States. So where, in Paz’s schema of Mexican and North American masculinity, does the homosexual male fit in? Only briefly does Paz touch upon masculine homosexuality which “is regarded with a certain indulgence insofar as the active agent is concerned. The passive agent is an abject, degraded being. […] Masculine homosexuality is tolerated, then, on condition that it consists in violating a passive agent” (Paz 40). Paz’s naïve understanding of homosexuality renders the male homosexual body as both aggressive and closed; the “passive agent,” or the submissive male in this scenario, is reduced to a feminized body without agency and without power. Feminized, the male homosexual, in Paz’s world, bears more in common with the shamed Chingada. Paz’s foothold on defining, even essentializing, a singular Mexican and hyphenated Mexican-American identity, particularly of the feminine la Malinche, has been challenged

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by writers like Anzaldúa, Cisneros, Moraga, and Tafolla; furthermore, two books edited and written by Matthew Gutmann, Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin American (2003) and The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City (2006), encourage the examination of masculinities in the growing body of South American literature, and resist binary readings of maleness. Acutely aware of contemporary expectations, constructions of and biases toward gender and sexuality, Cisneros, in a way avant la lettre, humanizes and breathes life into all of her characters, male, female, and their ambiguous amalgamations. “Salvador Late or Early,” one of Cisneros’s stories of childhood, inspires pathos for the eponymous boy child whose litany of responsibilities include that he “shakes the sleepy brothers awake, ties their shoes, combs their hair with water, feeds them milk and corn flakes from a tin cup in the dim dark of the morning” (Cisneros 10), in return for his friendless, nameless invisibility at school. But Cisneros’s sympathetic narrator repeats the boy’s name three times in the singular sentence that comprises her opening paragraph, rendering him both unforgettable and visible to the reader; his name Salvador opens each paragraph in this prose portrait. Although, through imagery, he is associated with invisibility, motion, and eventual dissolution, the reliable Salvador perseveres—to borrow from Mosse—always attending school and arriving at the gate, late or early, where his brothers wait. While the responsible, overburdened elder brother is already old for his years, Salvador remains a timid child, “inside the throat that must clear itself and apologize each time it speaks, inside that fortypound body of a boy with its geography of scars” (10). He lacks a voice, the voice of a child that might giggle, holler, or sass back at a parent or teacher; instead he possesses a voice that must free its way and utter an apology as a precursor to self-expression. The boy who has not yet become a man endures already, we’re told, a “history of hurt” (10). In this young body that is “too small to contain the hundred balloons of happiness, the single guitar of grief,” Salvador has not experienced simple childhood pleasures, but remains in perpetual movement as he “scuttles” to “collect” his siblings (11). Although seemingly non-judgmental, Cisneros implies an ageist injustice: Salvador is still too young and too small with his forty-pound body and its short steps to have parental-like responsibilities. Through the synecdoche of “limbs stuffed with feathers and rags,” Salvador is depicted as a stuffed toy or scarecrow filled with remnants

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and scraps and as a soft body on which his mother and siblings can lean and depend (11). But inside that softness is an unrecognizable, overlooked heart, “in that cage of the chest where something throbs with both fists and knows only what Salvador knows” (emphasis mine 11). A vivid embedded metaphor of imprisonment, the chest houses a bound heart described as two throbbing fists, alone in knowing what it knows. Here, the narrator describes a conflicted child whose heart— as “something [that] throbs with both fists” (11)—offers up the imagery of hands that may seek retaliation, a fist fight, or escape from the cage of invisibility and adult responsibilities. Hinting at the boys men once were, the narrator suggests that since Salvador is “a boy like any other disappearing out the door,” he may become a man who takes on filial responsibility, stays timid, uses his fists, or escapes out the door of responsibility (11). The child who is father to the man may still determine the man he seeks to become. In creating Salvador, Cisneros may be building on Paz’s hermetically sealed stoic, but she enlarges the spectrum of masculinities; Salvador’s suffering and his maternal sensibility testify to his iconoclastic characterization. Cisneros offers another poignant child perspective in “Tepeyac,” which seems, in a way, to pick up where “Salvador Late or Early” leaves off with the imagery of the sky and its stars and balloons. In the first person, the narrator speaks of a memory of walking to his/her grandfather’s store to walk home with him “to the house on La Fortuna, number 12, that has always been our house” (22-23). The story’s nameless narrator waxes nostalgic about a childhood memory which, like Salvador’s running form, “dissolves into the bright horizon, flutter[ing] in the air before disappearing like a memory of kites” (11). In vibrant detail, the narrator recalls the mundane arrival to the shop, “one shoe and then the next, over the sagging door stone, worn smooth in the middle from the huaraches of those who have come for tins of glue and to have their scissors sharpened…” (22). Moreover, the youthful attachment and affection for the Abuelito are captured in the gentle moment in which the narrator takes affectionately the older man’s hand, “fat and dimpled in the center like a valentine…” (22). With a sentimental eye for detail, the narrator notes the historical landmarks on the pair’s walk home. While the narrator’s commentary personalizes the tourist attractions, it also fails to assume a clearly gendered voice. They pass the basilica where “Abuela lights the candles for the soul of Abuelito” (22), suggests the grandmother’s moral responsibility to care for her husband’s possibly mischievous,

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non-churchgoing soul. Next the pair passes the landmark of the Virgin’s miraculous apparition to Juan Diego, Tepeyac’s tourist and spiritual attraction, which “has drawn everyone, except my Abuelito, on their knees….” (22). Again, the narrator, in hindsight, hints at the grandfather’s religious skepticism and lack of faith. Naming the neighbors they pass, the child is then joined by the Abuelito in counting the twenty-two steps “out loud together” (23). But still counting the steps in his/her memory, he/she recalls, using the first person plural, that their togetherness does not cease behind the door as they “—diez, once, doce—fall asleep as we always do, with the television mumbling—trece, catorce, quince …” (emphasis mine 23). Alternating between English and Spanish, the narrator’s voice becomes even more sentimental, reiterating the temporal shift from the older self who has since grown, moved away and returned home again to find things have changed; perhaps the enumeration in Spanish hints at both the counting of steps and years that have passed since the childhood visits to Tepeyac, as Mary Pat Brady suggests in “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories” (Brady 129). Foreshadowing the United States-Mexico border crossings, the narrator’s reminiscence in two languages and the juxtaposition of older and younger selves exemplify what Katherine Rios, in her essay “‘And you know what I have to say isn’t always pleasant’: Translating the Unspoken Word in Cisneros’ [sic] Woman Hollering Creek,” calls “crossing over” which requires “risky negotiations” (Rios 202). A palpable sense of loss and mature understanding underscores this prose piece as a coming-of-age story. In the scene where grandfather and grandchild doze, the third person pronoun “he” is repeated twice to identify the Abuelito, or possibly the first-person narrator, “the grandchild, the one who will leave soon for that borrowed country…the one he will not remember, the one he is least familiar with…” (emphasis mine, Cisneros 23). Perhaps, the child will leave the grandparents for another place that never feels like home, “that borrowed country” and one he/she will not “remember” as he/she commits the sites and faces of Tepeyac to memory. In the present tense and in the first person, he/she describes a profound sense of loss in his/her return to a changed Tepeyac, years later, where the shop is “repainted and redone as a pharmacy” where “the basilica… is crumbling and closed” (23). Confessing this loss and hurt, the narrator rejects both the values of disguise put forth by Paz and the ideals of emotional restraint linked to Winckelmann. Refusing to concede conventional pronoun use, Cisneros declines to satisfy our curiosity

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and ascertain the narrator’s gender; as a result she playfully rebukes stereotyping. Perhaps the loss of childhood is exchanged for a memory of a provincial Mexico with the grandparents where the child felt he/she belonged. Yet that loss is accentuated poignantly when the reader learns his/her return may be for the Abuelito’s funeral. In a sort of apostrophe, the narrator addresses his/her older, now deceased companion, “you who took with you to your stone bed something irretrievable, without a name” (23). The gender ambiguous narrator has lost not only his/her grandfather but also something else he/she falters in articulating, if it can even be named. The older, now-wiser, narrator appears sentimental and surprised at his/her own sensitivity, perhaps unforeseen for a male child, when he/she says without bravado, “[w]ho would’ve guessed, after all this time, it is me who will remember when everything else is forgotten…” (emphasis mine 23). Rios astutely interprets this “me” as the transgressive subject (202). While this first-person narrative voice seeks to articulate its subjectivity, or self-reflexive process of becoming a subject, it refuses to limit itself or to delineate culturally or gender- defined borders and their evocative limitations. If the narrator of “Tepeyac” is indeed female, as Rios asserts, her transgressions imply a betrayal in her role as storyteller or guardian of memory; in Cisneros’s short fiction, Rios argues that the story “discloses the self-consciousness of the Chicana’s betrayal and transgression as she attempts to interpret, translate, and cross culture” (Rios 202). Furthermore, a Chicana’s or a Mexican woman’s self-consciousness of betrayal is analogous to Malinal’s role as Cortés’s translator for her people. Deliberately ambiguous, “Tepeyac” refuses to ascertain its narrator’s gender. From these perspectives of the early childhood years, Cisneros’s cast of male and gender ambiguous characters in adolescence and adulthood refuse to be relegated to the stereotype of the hermetically guarded macho or defensive pachuco. Bearing an open, confessional tone, “One Holy Night” begins with a fictional epigraph from the adolescent narrator’s first lover, Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. Chaq creates himself through narrative when he claims his legacy as a descendant of “an ancient line of Mayan kings” (27). While he calls himself “Chaq of the people of the sun, Chaq of the temples,” the locals on the street know him as Boy Baby because “he could speak a language that no one could understand, said his name translated into boy, or boy-child” (29). The young nameless

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female narrator adopts his mythology of self. But this fictional Mayan ancestry is not the only seed Boy Baby has sown. Accepting Boy Baby’s invention of himself as Mayan royalty, the naïve narrator also finds beauty and mystery in this man, “the same dark Indian one, the one who never talks to anybody” (31). Yet what she has described resembles a facet of Paz’s macho that remains sealed, silent and suspicious of others. While the girl consents to sex, Chaq aggressively pursues her and preys upon her youthful naïveté, helping her push her fruit cart into his garage. An eighth-grader, the narrator tells us she does not want “it” like the girls of a certain street who go with men into alleys, or “against the bricks or hunkering in somebody’s car” (28). She reveals that “it” is sex, but she describes it as love: “I wanted it to come undone like gold thread, like a tent full of birds. The way it’s supposed to be, the way I knew it would be when I met Boy Baby” (emphasis mine 28). Her ideas and fantasy of sex-as-love shift radically to a reality of “bloody panties” hidden in her shirt as she runs home to her grandmother and uncle “hugging” herself (30). Embracing and comforting herself, she rationalizes her initiation into womanhood without a woman’s awareness of Chaq’s transgression: statutory rape. Instead of acknowledging the reality or stigma of societal shame and single parenting, she perpetuates his mythical narrative: “So I was initiated beneath an ancient sky by a great and mighty heir—Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. I, Ixchel, his queen” (30). As a result of her physical relationship with Chaq, the narrator leaves one with a dismal take on love, comparing it to a neighbor who walked around with a harmonica in his mouth. He “[d]idn’t play it. Just sort of breathed through it, all day long, wheezing, in and out, in and out. This is how it is with me. Love I mean” (35). In these final lines of the story, as if an afterthought, she clarifies “this” and “it” as referents for love. Like Salvador, this young female narrator appears older than her years, but, as it is a first person narrative, she divulges a jaded, metaphor for love. When we learn that the narrator is “going to dar a luz,” or give birth, and that Chaq has disappeared, his character is called into question further (32). The young woman is pulled out of eighth grade and sent across the border to Mexico where she will carry out her pregnancy with cousins in San Dionisio de Tlaltepango. Part macho, Chaq, or Boy Baby, also resembles the pachuco, “an impassive and sinister clown whose purpose is to cause terror instead of laughter” (emphasis mine, Paz 16). While his character is a man who envisions

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himself better than the “bad neighborhood” he inhabits, he has transgressed and impregnated the narrator, an impressionable girl (Cisneros 31). The reader may be horrified by his violation of the young girl who says, “it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t any deal at all,” but is likely to be even more horrified by her nonchalance at learning his murderous past (30). The grandmother’s epithet for him as demonio seems justifiable when the girl recognizes Chaq, in the newspaper clippings linking him to the murder of “eleven female bodies…the last seven years…” (34). Instead of sharing the Abuelita’s righteous terror, the girl still loves the face she sees in the newspaper. The reader is no doubt horrified by Chaq’s predatory and murderous acts, but may even be more disturbed by the absence of horror in this pregnant eighth-grader. Cisneros unmasks the pathologically, sinister nature of Boy Baby through girl’s naiveté and the grandmother’s pragmatism. In a letter, Chaq’s, now Chato’s, younger Carmelite sibling unmasks her brother’s humble origins in the town of Miseria as the son of a knife sharpener and produce seller. Flatly, the pregnant girl states the truth of Chaq’s identity: “Boy Baby is thirty-seven years old. His Name is Chato which means fat-face. There is no Mayan blood” (33). Interestingly, the homicidal Chaq’s, né Chato, attempts at inventing a mythical, aggrandized sense of self does not celebrate an idealized Iberian conquistador ancestry, but a noble Mayan one. Chaq’s mythologized past contrasts greatly with Mosse’s and Winckelmann’s Euro-centric celebration of the sculpted Greek ideals of masculinity. In the western European tradition, the perfection of the Greek male form deifies the male body, rendering its beauty at once concrete (sculpture) and abstract (highly idealized, stylized). Paradoxically, Chato’s quest to self-represent puts forth a new indigenous aesthetic that mythologizes him. Here, Chato/Chaq implicitly echoes an aspect of the Chicano movement in the 1960s and 1970s that celebrated its indigenous Indian heritage and renounced its Spanish-colonial roots. Like so many of Cisneros’s characters, Chaq revels in weaving and authoring an indigenous past for himself. In sum, each of Chaq’s nicknames underscores his artful self-deception as he selectively designs his ancestry and distances himself from his crimes, and his psychotic deception of young girls—dead and alive. Both Chaq and the girl accept his psychosis of seduction through his narrative self-invention. In “Remember the Alamo,” the performer Rudy/Tristán, speaking familiarly, narrates and acknowledges the duality of his identity: “But

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I’m not Rudy when I perform. I mean, I’m not Rudy Cantú from Falfurrias anymore. I’m Tristán. Every Thursday night at the Travisty [sic]. Behind the Alamo, you can’t miss it. One-man show, girl” (63). Cisneros situates Tristán’s nightclub behind the masculine nationalist landmark of the Alamo, offering a tongue in cheek commentary on masculinity. Tristán, a dancer in his “one-man show,” performs in a club featuring gay men in drag. Perhaps naming the nightclub Travisty self-reflexively calls attention to and puns on prejudices of gender, which is socially performed. At the Travisty, men perform as women; at the Battle of the Alamo, Anglo, Mexican and Tejano men performed heroically as soldiers for their respective nationalist agendas. According to Brady, “Cisneros reworks the site [of the Alamo] as the place of homosexuality,” and by calling it the Travisty she “critiques conventional masculinity as symbolized by the Alamo’s constellation of war, death, courage, and violence” (Brady 131). “Remember the Alamo” not only echoes of the historical battle cry, but of Tristán’s personal struggles and anxiety as a bifurcated speaking subject; he is at once Rudy who speaks of the fearless Tristán, and Tristán who seeks to forget the young Rudy’s sexual assault. It is Tristán who would give “the low-rider types” “a look like the edge of a razor across lip” if they were to ask him, “You a fag?” (66). Brady reminds Cisneros’s readers that Rudy/Tristán is a “speaking subject [who] assumes two positions, and in the interstices between them we get a mini-portrait […] of the enforcement of homophobia through space” (Brady 130). A meeker Rudy may find himself afraid of these predatory “low-rider types,” but paradoxically, through the elegant, feminine Tristán, Rudy invents and imagines a fearless alter-ego who dares to confront such homophobic inquiries with a violent, sharp gaze. As a performer and dancer at the club Travisty, he is Tristán who “holds himself like a matador” (64). Identifying with the valiant Spanish bullfighter, Tristán differs from Chaq as he links himself to a usurper, European ancestry, and its attendant arrogance. Also, the word matador cloaks the verb matar, to kill, which unearths additional interpretive, yet aggressive, layers. The matador is not only associated with the muleta and skill, but with the final kill, or sword thrust in traditional bullfighting. A play on kill, battles, and death is elaborated when “Tristán leads Death across the floor” (64). Death, often personified in the feminine as la Muerte or Doña Sebastiana in

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Mexico, acts as Tristán’s sometimes dance partner. Taunting yet enticing, he mocks and dares Death: “Te quiero. Look at me. I said look at me. Don’t take your eyes from mine, Death. Yesssss [sic]” (65). Implied is Tristán’s autonomy as he represents himself in narrative and as he takes the male role of leading the feminine dance partner, death, across the stage floor. Moreover, Tristán/Rudy’s story is interpolated with a scrolling marquee of names, suggesting a twofold memorial of the dead lost to AIDS and in the Battle of the Alamo, as the title might suggest. But the location of the Travisty club behind the Alamo, the contemporary names of both men and women, and the book’s timely publication suggest the former—the darker days of HIV and AIDS of the early nineties. Out of the proverbial closet, Tristán confirms his homosexuality when he speaks of a ring he received from a male admirer. “See this ring? A gift from an art admirer and dance aficionado. […] Roses, roses, roses. Honey! Then he sent the ring, little diamonds set in the shape of Texas. Just because he was fond of art. That’s how it is” (emphasis mine 66). The familiar “see this ring” and “honey” suggest that Tristán is, in the process of this narrative, confiding in a friend or Cisneros’s readers. Neither in narrative nor tone does he endorse Paz’s understanding of the homosexual as a “passive agent.” Actively painting himself as well-admired artist, Tristán too reinvents himself—transformed from Rudy to Tristán. He hints further at his culturally taboo homosexuality and femininity when he says, “Tristán’s family? They love him no matter what” (65). The last three words suggest his lifestyle, gender, and sexuality put him at odds with his culture and family. He claims that his sisters take his advice on make-up; however, he explains that his father’s approval is newly gained: At first his father said What’s this? But then when the newspaper articles started pouring in, well, what could he do but send photocopies to the relatives in Mexico, right? And Tristán sends them all free backstage passes. They drive all the way from the Valley for the opening of the show. Even the snooty relatives from Monterrey. (65)

Rudy/Tristán depicts his father’s acceptance of his art and maybe even his lifestyle as a result of his son’s fame; his father, like his family, now loves him “no matter what.” Reaching from Mexico to the

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affluence of Monterrey, Rudy’s fame as Tristán is celebrated in the family because, by association, he raises their status a notch. Clearly, Cisneros’s portrayal of Rudy’s nightly rebirth on stage offers an alternative from Paz’s homosexual as a passive, possessed agent, to a man aware of how he chooses to live his life: “[p]assionate and stormy” (64). Art, through performance and dance, permits the ordinary Rudy to escape and hide as Tristán. Describing his looks, fashion, and glamorous life, he deliberately embraces the beautiful, refusing the ugly and ordinary; he also suggests his fearlessness as he dances on Thursday nights with Death. Perhaps the seduction of art serves as a distraction from and a justification for grittier truths of maladies, trysts, and loneliness: “Without ulcers or gas stations or hospital bills or bloody sheets or pubic hairs in the sink. Lovers in your arms pulling farther and farther way from you. Dried husks, hulls, coffee cups. Letters home sent back unopened” (67). Through his artful dance and narrative, Tristán’s beauty can be exalted, preserved and immortalized like Winckelmann’s idealized, stony Grecian male forms. Human creations do not usually seek to preserve the unrestrained havoc of viruses, illnesses or old age; Tristán seeks to memorialize his stage self in a flattering light. The process of renaming and performance allow Rudy to disguise and deceive himself: as Tristán he is different, beautiful, elegant, and fearless. Like so many of Cisneros’s characters, Tristán aggressively asserts a new mythology and identity for himself in America where he can express his art and sexuality. A performer, Tristán reinvents himself before an audience; he deceives the spectators into accepting him as Tristán, leaving backstage his Mexican alter-ego Rudy. Cisneros implies that he need not be part of or perpetuate the warring, violent masculine archetype associated with the nationalist Battle of the Alamo. As Brady points out, “the story puts into play multiple meanings of the Alamo and hence of the nation for which it pretends to be a synecdoche but may be simply a prosthesis” (132). Tristán does, however, hold himself upright as he seeks to be the image he creates for others and, more importantly, himself. In “Bien Pretty,” Flavio, like Tristán, is feminized; yet he is pretty and “short even by Mexican standards” (Cisneros 137). The story’s female narrator, Lupe, explains how she meets Flavio who comes to exterminate her “Coca-Cola” colored roaches (140). Her role as narrator is not only to relate their short-lived romance, but to execute her role in defining Flavio and his prettiness. According to Lupe, “Once you tell a man he’s pretty, there’s no taking back. They think

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they’re pretty all the time, and I suppose, in a way, they are” (137). Conversely, her girlfriends, having married “good-lookers,” “look twice their age now, old from all the corajes exploding inside their hearts and bellies” (138). The tricky art of defining and pinning down gender is further complicated in this sentence. In context, and at first glance, Lupe uses the Spanish word corajes to explain how the girlfriends have aged, but are they old from courage or anger? On yet another level, the diction—specifically Spanish—remains ambiguous—is it a denotative amorous (“hearts”) and sexual (“bellies”) courage? Harkening back to Mosse’s delineation of the twentieth century male as a figure of courage in warfare, Lupe’s description of the “good-lookers”—the men—hints at a violent battle where the valiant male courageously explodes inside the women’s bodies and impregnates them. Here, she also seems to reinforce stereotype of the conquistador-like man. But Lupe, an artist, also compares herself to a sailor, an historically masculine archetype: “Once I was solid as a sailor on her sea legs, the days rolling steadily beneath me, and then—Flavio Munguía arrived” (138). She, in the feminine body, inscribes a masculine aesthetic upon her own form. As noted earlier, the European-born historian Mosse recognizes the eighteenth century art historian Johann Winckelmann’s obsession with or codification of ideal male beauty through his study of Greek sculpture, particularly the male forms. While Cisneros’s narrator is not interested in Greek ideals or its Germanic revival of manly beauty, her narrator does reach back into the indigenous myths and traditions to define her ideal. She describes Flavio’s face as that of “a sleeping Olmec, the heavy Oriental eyes, the thick lips and wide nose, that profile carved from onyx” (144). The Olmec, a pre-Columbian people, flourished on the isthmus of Tehuantepec and left colossal heads behind. Although no known extant Columbian texts explain these heads, Lupe’s reference to the “heavy Oriental eyes” may not be politically correct, but it does allude to the “were-jaguars,” the Olmec man-jaguar mythology. These massive half-man, half-jaguar head artifacts are rendered with almond shaped eyes and fleshy lips; it is no wonder, then, that in the eyes of Lupe, twentieth-century Flavio takes on something of a mythical, pre-Columbian aesthetic. The artist as creator embellishes further—as if God himself had a hand in making this mortal Flavio: God made you from red clay, Flavio, with his hands. This face of yours like the little clay

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heads they unearth in Teotihuacán. Pinched this cheekbone, then that. Used obsidian flints for the eyes, those eyes dark as the sacrificial wells they cast virgins into. Selected hair thick as cat whiskers. Thought for a long time before deciding on this nose, elegant and wide. And the mouth, ah! (152)

Creating her own origin story for Flavio, Lupe’s art extends from the medium of clay and obsidian into her prose narration. She offers up a syncretic view of Flavio created by a singular Judeo-Christian God with an indigenous aesthetic; thus Lupe participates in creation and myth by reminding the reader of indigenous people as the “first” people, not the Europeanized Adam and Eve. However, as a painter, she will paint and not be painted. Specifically, Lupe as artist-narrator seeks to revisit and revise the Aztecan Prince Popocatépetl and Princess Ixtaccíhuatl volcano myth in a pastiche style painting with Flavio as her model. He would be “Prince Popo, half-naked Indian warrior built like Johnny Weissmuller, crouched in grief beside his sleeping princess Ixtaccíhuatl, buxom as Jayne Mansfield. And behind them, echoing their silhouettes, their namesake volcanoes” (144). Popo, whose full Nahuatl name means Smoking Mountain, is the colloquial appellation for the second highest peak in Mexico, an active volcano. The often snow-covered mountain of Ixtaccíhuatl translates as White Woman, while its four peaks mimic the reclining body of a resting woman, its other nickname: the Sleeping Woman. Moreover, Cisneros’s narrator blends her idealized, Olmec-Aztec roots with her twentieth century American Hollywood heritage. Olympian swimmer Weissmuller, known for his athletic prowess and minimal wardrobe, made a splash in his Hollywood debut as Adonis; it is humorous that as the deity Adonis in the film Glorifying the American Girl (1929), he donned a fig leaf. Lupe’s allusion reminds us too that Weissmuller’s fan base was largely female, comparable to the Adonis cult in ancient Greece. He would go on to define the cinematic Tarzan; from the silver screen, he would swing into the American market, modeling BVD underwear in the 1930s and 1940s. For Lupe, Weissmuller’s Adonean body merges with the Indian warrior to define her male ideal. Returning again to George Mosse’s assessment of Winckelmann’s work, “[t]he sculptures that Winckelmann analyzed as the paradigm were mostly those of young

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athletes who through the structure of their bodies and their comportment exemplified power and virility, and also harmony, proportion, and self-control” (29). Courageous in war, like many Western male archetypes, Popocatépetl of the legends survives his battles, and returns to marry his beloved only to find her dead by her own hand. But contrary to Winckelmann’s eighteenth century ideas of emotional and physical restraint, he too commits suicide and joins her in death. But once Flavio, a husband and father of four sons, confesses to his deception, Lupe radically revises the volcano painting: “Got a good idea and redid the whole thing. Prince Popo and Princess Ixta trade places. After all, who’s to say the sleeping mountain isn’t the prince, and the voyeur the princess, right? So I’ve done it my way” (163). In the final version of the painting, the male body is objectified by both the female artist’s and the princess’s gazes. Another way in which Lupe subverts Paz’s pachuco and revises Chicano lore is in creating a chiasmus of the conquistador Hernán Cortés’s and his indigenous translator Malinal’s—better known as La Malinche’s—story. First, the Berkeley-educated American Lupe recounts the story of her ex-boyfriend Eddie, whom she labels a traitor for picking a blonde: “He didn’t even have the decency to pick a woman of color” (142). Traitor, linked with whore, used to be Malinal’s scarlet label until she was reclaimed by Chicana writers as the mother of the Mexican people: a blend of the indigenous and European skin tones. Next, Lupe, subverting Cortés’s whiteness and Eddie’s betrayal, feels superior to both men because she has taken a Mexican lover from Michoacán “with burnt-sugar skin,” who made love to her in Spanish, a detail she idealizes (137). “That language. That sweep of palm leaves and fringed shawls. That startled fluttering, like the heart of a goldfinch or a fan. Nothing sounded dirty or hurtful or corny. How could I think of making love in English again?” (153); heartbroken and alone, Lupe asserts her independence and prioritizes her art while abstracting Flavio into a kind of beauty object with Aztecan authenticity, almost effacing his smooth Don Juan ways of the old Latino stereotype. While we must recognize and recall the importance of Paz’s archetypes and Mosse’s study of the evolution of the male stereotype, we must also acknowledge Cisneros’s stories as subversive, humanizing narratives that address self-invention and self-deception through several of its characters. For instance, the over-confident and fiercely independent characters of Lupe, Tristán, and Chaq participate

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in the potentially dehumanizing process of mythmaking, an act of creation through which they design their sense of belonging: to be longed for by another and to be part of human intimacy. Deception then becomes the artful shadow following the stereotype upheld by the body: as a character seeks to deceive others or himself/herself, he/she unmasks a human desire to be loved. Woman Hollering Creek is noteworthy for the author’s creation of characters and narrators who celebrate or bring to light unique individual qualities and repackage familiar male stereotypes. Cisneros, through her prose vignettes, presents characters and narrators who are idealized in their respective myth-making processes, but humanized in their desires, deceptions, and diverse mediums of self-invention—confessional narratives, personal mythologies, performance art, and painting. Pamela J. Rader Georgian Court University Works Consulted Brady, Mary Pat. “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.” American Literature 71.1 (1999): 117-150. Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991. Mosse, George. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford and New York: Oxford U P, 1996. Mullen, Harryette. “‘A Silence between us like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” MELUS 21.2 (July 1996): 3-20. Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Trans. Lysander Kemp, et al. New York: Grove, 1985. Rios, Katherine. “‘And you know what I have to say isn’t always pleasant’: Translating the Unspoken Word in Cisneros’ [sic] Woman Hollering Creek” in Chicana (W)rites on Word and Film. eds. Herrara-Sobek, Maria, and Helena Maria Viramontes, Berkeley: Third Woman, 1995. (201-223).

Images of Masculinity Author Dialogue Philip Coleman: In your essay, Pamela, I was particularly struck by the way in which you show that Cisneros's text engages in the complex critical and theoretical history of thinking about masculinity. Your reading of her work's (implied) dialogue with Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude is particularly insightful, and it is great to see the critical agency of Cisneros's writing foregrounded in the ways that you read it. At the same time, you make the important point that she “humanizes and breathes life into all of her characters, male, female, and their ambiguous amalgamations,” a point which I believe accounts in part for the astonishing popularity of a writer who also challenges conventional understandings of the possibilities/boundaries of literary narrative. Having read your essay, I now have a new way of thinking about how Cisneros does this, particularly in relation to what you describe as the way that “her art extends from the medium of clay and obsidian into her prose narration.” It is this ability to connect physical/material reality with the spiritual—the actual with the essential, if you will—that seems to me to give Cisneros's work so much of its aesthetic and, ultimately, its political power: the power to envision alternative realities that are, initially, grounded in her acute engagements with lived experience on so many levels. This latter point is partly what I attempted to tease out in my own essay and it explains my sense of Inés—and Cisneros herself, indeed—as visionary women, women who help us to revise and re-envision our sense of history and the self. “Eyes” is itself both the examination and application of a kind of theorizing about the self that is inextricably bound up with Cisneros's work as an artist. Like Anzaldúa, in some respects, or Ana Castillo, she is a writer for whom the work of theory (the work of the theorist) and the work of art (the work of the artist) are part of the same project which ultimately involves nothing less than the transformation of the self in all of its guises/disguises. How the self is defined—in the discourses of art, politics, popular culture, historiography, and literary/critical theory—seems to me to be a central preoccupation of Cisneros's writing, but the writings she has produced to date also contain within their narrative frames and symbolic/linguistic codes the essential tools with which we might understand and reimagine those “definitions.” This is an open project,

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one that resists closure, and it is this, I think, that makes Cisneros's work so rewarding for discussions like this—and, of course, for students at all levels. At the end of my essay, I suggest that “Eyes of Zapata” also presents an example of “liberated selfhood” with the potential to inspire readers everywhere, wherever “mythologies and iconographies of the past” have been frozen into narratives that contain those described in them and those for whom they purport to be inscribed. It is against such forms of cultural and social inscription, finally, that I think of Sandra Cisneros’s writing writing—writing as an active and ongoing critique of what it means to be written into a certain mode of being and how one might write oneself out of it. Pamela Rader: Philip, I see in our essays an interest in and a thread of iconic male figures in the Mexican-American context. Part of my intrigue with Octavio Paz's essays stems from his desire to explain and therefore humanize the Mexican male; yet, in doing so, he perpetuates the mythmaking process. In the story “Eyes of Zapata,” as you note, Cisneros “offers readers a new way of seeing a particular historical personality, but she also reveals the private face that is sometimes masked or obscured by public forms of cultural and political authority and power.” The eponymous character, an iconic masculine figure, is reimagined through the silent, internal, everwatchful lover, Inés. What I find particularly striking, after re-reading the story and your essay, is how Inés engages the mythologizing process. In the context of the short story, Inés holds and wields narrative power, in which she reveals her psychic or supernatural powers. She's reminiscent of Rudolfo Anaya's curandera, Ultima. Like La Malinche, Inés is something of a social pariah for her love outside marriage, for being one of Zapata's “pastimes,” and for being the daughter of a perra. If Inés's narrative restores Zapata to a human, “evok[ing] images of violence and frailty, delicacy and bruising” (as you aptly note), then Inés's ultimate rebellion is her narrative autonomy—imagined or real. She cannot be or refuses to be defined by—that is to say narrated by— a man. Cisneros seems to invent and proffer another outcast feminine figure in the form of Inés the curandera/bruja. But Inés, unlike La Llorona or La Malinche, is not a male-defined archetype. Named, she conjures up the litany of unnamed women in Mexico's revolutionary history, but through the agency of fiction, she speaks.

Images of Women: Role Expectations and Conflict

Resemantization of Chicana Motherhood and Sexuality Through the Virgin of Guadalupe Both in Mexico and in the United States, popular religiosity or folk Catholicism holds the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe as one of its most prominent features. In Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, Sandra Cisneros juxtaposes a highly metamorphosed figure with the rigidity of the ecclesiastical image. As a result of her critical glimpse, Guadalupe stands out in some of the stories in a resemanticized version that does not adhere to official dogmas. This paper analyzes whether, and if so how, in this collection the author achieves transcendence of the traditional dualism she herself refers to as “motherhoodputahood” through a feminist and decolonial perspective. To reflect the plurality of the Chicano community, this essay focuses on how Cisneros does not offer a monolithic response to this issue. Rather, she presents a multiplicity of ontologies ranging from the non-referentiality of the religious icon with regard to new generations of Chicanas, through alternative concepts of motherhood—either solitary of communitary, to the empowerment of Chicana women by means of a reconceptualization of sexual taboos in the Guadaloupian symbol. In the real as well as fictional world, Cisneros has transgressed the private sphere canonically assigned to the female, thus entering the public space where women of color have been lately inscribing their voices. This paper shows how this outer movement, experienced by some of Cisneros’s characters, subverts traditional and colonizing bounderies and revitalizes the meanings of “the feminine.”

Feminist re-interpretations of the Virgin of Guadalupe have allowed this symbol to survive temporal and spatial crossroads at the same time that they have revealed the falocratic line of thought Catholicism has traditionally used to determine gender roles, evaluate “good” behaviour, and censor female sexuality. More recently, writers such as Sandra Cisneros have introduced hermeneutic modifications in the Mexican/Chicano myth: instead of representing a strict control over women, the Guadeloupian icon now conceptualizes freedom as a possible horizon. Woman Hollering Creek transcends the traditional binary that classifies women into virgins or whores. Thus, the Chicana author assigns new meanings to maternity and sexuality by creating positive role models for Chicanas. The traditional Mexican/Chicano family is built on the father’s supremacy and the mother’s self-sacrifice. Paradoxically, women’s status in society does not mirror the female position within mythology. Their reproductive capacity is idealized in the figure of the Virgin Mary, a utopian archetype that contributes to women’s frustration, since they can never reach the level of perfection the sacred Mother symbolizes. Therefore, Chicana authors such as

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Cisneros reflect the sense of alienation brought about by their closest Marian image, the Virgin of Guadalupe. With the aim of deconstructing the patriarchal concept of motherhood, several feminist theoreticians have proposed a change of focus and now prioritize female experiences. Thus, they subvert the androcentric male parameters from which motherhood had been viewed as a social institution. In writings based on Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly and Sharon Abbey distinguish between two types of maternity: “motherhood” and “mothering.” The first of these two terms refers to the traditional patriarchal perspective, whereas the second defines female maternal experiences, adopting a gynocentric point of view (7). Instead of considering the Virgin of Guadalupe as a passive object, Cisneros assigns her a more active role. Surrounding the waist of the Guadeloupian icon is a sash, a piece of clothing that used to be worn by pregnant Indian women. So, in Woman Hollering Creek the brown Virgin inscribes mothering together with gender, race and class. Guadalupe’s pregnancy points to her capacity for regeneration, for instilling new life in a now transformed Chicana woman. Cisneros’s collection of short stories deconstructs the maternal ideal as a mythic identity by doing away with a falsely unitary and totalizing image that maintains that mothers have no desires of their own. Instead, the writer proposes that the Virgin of Guadalupe continues to be part of a spiritual matriarchy transmitted through generations. Cisneros presents her book as an offer to the “Virgen de Guadalupe Tonantzín” (x), as she says in “Los Acknowledgments.” The linguistic and religious “mestizaje” evidences Chicanas/os’ existential problem: the always troublesome decision either to perpetuate Mexican traditions or to acculturate in the USA, where many of them are recent arrivals. Two short stories in the collection, “Mericans” and “Tepeyac,” depict the Virgin of Guadalupe as part of women’s spiritual and cultural heritage. In the first of these, Cisneros portrays the cultural shock two generations of the same family go through. The grandparents have lived in Mexico all their lives, while the grandchildren go back to Mexico after having been brought up in the United States. By juxtaposing two feminine worldviews (grandmother’s and granddaughter’s), the writer is trying to elucidate at what point both positionings are reconcilable. On the one hand, the grandmother stands for continuity and, therefore, cannot understand the parameters that govern U.S. society, “that barbaric country with its

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barbarian ways” (19). On the other hand, the granddaughter mirrors the effect of incomprehension and thus refers to her elder as “the awful grandmother” whose prayers inside the Basilica of Guadalupe she perceives as a repetitive mumbling (17). Even though there is a markedly negative identification between both women, the story shows how certain elements of Mexican spirituality are passed on through generations. In fact, the young girl assumes that her grandmother prays for the emigrated relatives as well as for the dead and the living. In fact, the interaction between the supernatural and earthly life constitutes one of the peculiarities of Mexican/Chicano spirituality. The Virgin of Guadalupe intercedes in the same way the grandmother does on behalf of the family members who never attend mass because they have lost their faith. During her visit to Mexico City, the granddaughter becomes aware of the Virgin’s supremacy at the Basilica of Guadalupe: “La Virgen de Guadalupe on the main altar because she’s a big miracle, the crooked crucifix on a side altar because that’s a little miracle” (18). But Cisneros immediately juxtaposes this position of privilege, awarded her by ecclesiastical authorities, to the detrimental effects the grandsons’ remarks have upon her sister: “Girl. We can’t play with a girl.” Girl. It’s my brother’s favorite insult now instead of ‘sissy.’ “You girl” they yell at each other. “You throw that ball like a girl” (18). Male chauvinism, the dominant view in Mexican society, intensifies deeply entrenched prejudices to the point that the sole feminine condition may be considered the most despicable insult. It is not surprising, therefore, that the young girl in “Mericans” ends up associating femininity with sadness, suffering and abnegation. Her relatives’ stories address these character traits. Nevertheless, at the end of the short story Cisneros introduces a new kind of female character, an American tourist who does not share the rigid parameters of Mexican traditions and, consequently, does not obey certain norms, such as the prohibition of wearing slacks when going into churches. This observation allows the granddaughter to compare two divergent life styles and, eventually, take a stand regarding her own identity: “[we]’re Mericans” (20). The very spelling of the word implies a transgression of the graphic rules by which American society is governed. Such a transgression has, however, wider implications than the mere spelling rule—it resizes the notion of U.S. citizenry, making it more inclusive. The country, thus, embraces a variety of races and cultures, including Chicanas/os.

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A parallel spiritual transmission also takes place in “Tepeyac.” Here, the narrative voice moves back in time to her childhood memories, a time when she used to live with her grandparents in Mexico. Her remembrance of Mexico City also includes “La Basílica de Nuestra Señora” (21), devoted to Guadalupe, a place where her grandmother would light candles “for the soul of Abuelito” (22). Cisneros makes an intertextual reference to the story of the apparitions of the Virgin to the Indian Juan Diego on the hill of Tepeyac, considering it as the miracle that has drawn everyone to their knees, except the girl’s grandfather. The lack of faith connects him to his granddaughter, who belongs to a generation that lost some of the Mexican values because of their migration to “that borrowed country” (23). While the grandmother stands for cultural continuity, as in the first short story, her granddaughter is witness to a series of cultural transformations Chicanas have to go through to survive their inner frontiers. Far from silencing women, Sandra Cisneros not only demystifies their canonical parameters; she also gives them significant roles. These are the words of the narrator once her grandfather has died: “Who would’ve guessed, after all this time, it is me who will remember when everything else is forgotten, you who took with you to your stone bed something irretrievable, without a name” (23). Memory is essential in the construction of a Chicana subjectivity. Hence, it turns into a subversive tool when facing the homogenizing tendencies of the hegemonic society. Chicanas’ feminist revision of traditional mythology helps them gain confidence and self-assurance. Theologian Jeanette Rodríguez addresses the power accessed by these women in their dialogue with Our Lady of Guadalupe as the power of memory, which she constitutes and stands for, justice, solidarity with the oppressed, belonging, unconditional love, the power of expressed feelings and sharing (156). Cisneros’s narrative voice seems to have eventually inherited some of these powers. Both short stories contrast a Mexican cultural past with a U.S. present and from this confluence contradictions arise, as different cultural spaces cohabit within the individual. The new hybrid identity cannot easily establish a dialogue with older generations. Even when both granddaughters have experienced a spiritual matriarchy, their connection to the Virgin of Guadalupe remains feeble. It is interesting to note, however, that these two short stories are included in the first block of narrations, “My Lucy Friend Who Smells like Corn.” These are simple and shorter stories whose main character is a young girl.

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Cisneros seems to suggest that her female protagonists grow up to keep pace with advancing complexity in her stories. Cisneros also transgresses the concept of motherhood as a patriarchal institution when she proposes alternatives, such as oneparent families headed by women. Although this type of family is not in accordance with the Catholic prototype of the Sacred Family— made up of father, mother and son—the mothering experiences the Chicana author writes about are, however, as real. Instead of being trapped by universal essentials, Cisneros offers readers the full potential of the term “mothering.” Iconography usually depicts the Virgin Mary holding Jesus in her arms; however, the Virgin of Guadalupe stands on her own, in an autonomous manner. Therefore, those Chicanas who experience mothering on their own may easily identify with her. Either as a consequence of women’s lack of knowledge with regard to sexuality, a taboo issue in Mexican culture that is the ultimate reason for many involuntary pregnancies, or due to the subjugation and personal mutilation that marriage means for some, many women are forced to rear their children without the support of a husbandfather. Anthropologist Dolores Juliano explains that mothers transgress the patriarchal codes when they develop their mothering experiences on their own, a pattern of behavior that is not desirable if androcentric dictates are to be followed (84). In this view, Sandra Cisneros subverts the canonical familiar structure by giving strength to the main female character in her short story “Woman Hollering Creek.” Despite having moved from her home in Mexico to a foreign country (the United States), and notwithstanding the fact that she has already had a son with her husband and is pregnant again, Cleófilas decides to put an end to her ongoing story of physical and psychological mistreatment carried out by her husband. With the help of two other women who support her cause—Graciela, a doctor, and Felice, a driver—she finally returns to her home in Mexico. Both of these women also transgress the valid female model, as dictated by the patriarchal system. Cisneros’s short story questions the obligatory model, replacing it with more real and courageous ones. In fact, as a doctor, Graciela enjoys economic independence and has no need to give explanations to anybody since she is not married. The same is true for Felice. These two women’s resoluteness encourages Cleófilas as she seeks escape from her domestic violence scenes.

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The idealized version of love and marriage that Corín Tellado’s novels or Cleófilas’s favorite soap operas project have nothing to do with real life, at least not in her neighborhood in Seguin, Texas. Hence, her marriage brings about disappointment and, above all, she begins questioning the system that controls women’s attitudes. At this point, Cleófilas surpasses the neighbor ladies, Soledad and Dolores. Their own allegorical names suggest the opposite direction regarding the place where Graciela and Felice are headed. Neither Soledad nor Dolores has any hope of improving her life situation. They share a widowhood that in the case of Soledad may not be official, but probably due to her husband’s abandonment. Both are, therefore, women set apart from the social world, ostracized in a solitary confinement. Paradoxically enough, after having devoted their lives to taking care of others, they eventually find themselves alone, with no one who looks after them. Thus, it is not only that they haven’t been awarded a prize for being “good women,” but, on top of it, they have been punished. What Graciela and Felice view as autonomy is, however, interpreted as loneliness in their cases. Both submissively accept their fates—their social death and lack of identity, because they are neither mothers nor wives. On the other side, Cleófilas’s personal choice means a radical rebellion against this lack of agency. “Woman Hollering Creek” radically questions the basic assumptions of female cultural stereotypes. The very title makes reference to La Llorona, one of the three Mexican mothers according to Gloria Anzaldúa (30). However, this is not the idealized image of the mother; on the contrary, Mexican/Chicano society condemns her for having drowned her own children. That is the reason behind her ghostly roaming at night around water courses. In this short story, Felice plays the role of a contemporary Llorona who hollers every time she crosses the creek. Hers are rebellious screams, protesting against some oppressive female role models she will not accept. Her words are completely eloquent in this respect: Every time I cross that bridge I do that. Because of the name, you know. Woman Hollering. Pues, I holler. She said this in a Spanish pocked with English and laughed. Did you ever notice, Felice continued, how nothing around here is named after a woman? Really. Unless she’s the Virgin. I guess you’re only famous if you’re a virgin. She was laughing again. (55)

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Felice is entirely critical about what turns out to be an impossible maternity model, such as that of the Virgin Mary. She also maintains a censorious attitude with regard to women’s silencing resulting from a patriarchal idealized projection. Given the fact that Mexican/Chicano collective imagery ignores or distorts feminine elements, Felice inserts her voice, her hoot, within a renewed Chicana social textualization. Her own name is an evocation of the pleasure she gets from being independent. Chicanas/os’ uprooting from their cultural environment is the source of a feeling of alienation enhanced by their lack of protection. In fact, Mexican/Chicano neighborhoods are characterized by an inner sense of community that has nothing to do with U.S. individualism. To cope with “deterritorialization,” as García Canclini calls this sense of being out of place (238), miraculous apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the new territory contribute to perpetuate the old symbology, although adapted to a different social framework. Anthropologists Víctor and Edith Turner confirm that “faith is strengthened and salvation better secured by personal exposure to the beneficent unseen presence of the Blessed Virgin” (6). For Catholicism, miraculous apparitions are indeed feasible. As a spiritual mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe unites the Mexican community in the diaspora, allowing them to keep alive their nurturing culture. Chicanas/os see in Guadalupe a fountain of strength and hope, primarily due to the fact that she avoids the loneliness and yearning that emigration has produced in most of them. The inclusion of popular religiosity in Sandra Cisneros’s short stories reflects one of the cardinal points in the representation of Chicana/o identity. Miracles and apparitions reinforce the association between Guadalupe and the community. This is also true of Mariology: The regular connection between Mary, the laity, the poor, and the colonized, in the rapid development of pilgrimages from visions and apparitions of the corporeal type, and from related miracles, points to the hidden, nonhierarchical domain of the Church, with its stress on the power of the weak, on communitas and liminal phenomena, on the rare and unprecedented, as against the regular, ordained and normative. (Turner 213)

Both registers, popular and official, are juxtaposed in the “milagritos” Cisneros talks about in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.”

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The narration in this selection begins with a collage of prayers to different saints that culminates in a dialogue between Chayo and the Virgin of Guadalupe, later to be summed up as a prayer in the style of the previous ones. In fact, the narrative structure underscores the comfort the faithful find in Guadalupe, the “madre mestiza.” The petitions in the narrative range from “retablos” to express an overwhelming gratitude for having saved the lives of the Arteaga family in a bus accident; to Arnulfo Contreras’s invocation of the Virgin as the last resort to guarantee that his business prospers so he can continue sending money to his own family in Mexico; to the colloquial conversation maintained by Chayo De Leon with the Virgin of Guadalupe, who stands out as the communitary mother people can turn to either to ask favors or to say thanks for having heard them. This narrative collage contains other deities as well who do not, however, reach the same status as the Guadeloupian icon. Thus, Santo Niño de Atocha and San Martín de Porres intermingle with other “saints” who have never been canonized by the Church, but are comparably worshipped by the Mexican people, as in the case of Niño Fidencio, or by people in Texas as in the case of Don Pedrito Jaramillo. Apart from these very popular folk healers, several other petitions are addressed to the Seven African Powers, the Black Christ of Esquipulas, and even other miraculous Marian images such as the Señora de San Juan de los Lagos and the Virgen de los Remedios. The great variety of deities suggests the complexity of Mexican/Chicano spiritual reality. This folk religion Cisneros describes contradicts Catholic official practices, opening a door to an alternative mythology as represented in the essentially local notes of both superstition and folk medicine. B. Marie Christian refers to this popular praxis as “catholic”; her use of lower case letters implies its non-official nature (31). In all, Chicano popular Catholicism does not adhere to the restrictions imposed by the Roman Church or to the stipulations of the hegemonic church in the USA. As a definition, “Catholic” is more of a colonial legacy than a strict theological categorization of Chicana/o practices and beliefs. Until 1978, when the Freedom of Religion Act was passed in the USA, talks of miracles were conducted in a highly secretive manner (Broyles-Gonzalez 120-21). Hence, Sandra Cisneros achieves a decolonizing effect by inserting cultural elements from a peculiarly Mexican/Chicano body of myths and legends. The dialogue Chayo initiates with Guadalupe in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” is motivated by the Virgin’s appreciation of what she does as an artist. Chayo is immensely thankful because she feels

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alone, since she is not given any value at a social level. In her culture of origin she is unable to find role models of professional or independent women. Therefore, she gets loads of criticism and is the victim of a strong social pressure that orders her to become a mother. After all, it is motherhood that gives a Mexican woman her highest personal fulfilment. But, perhaps because Chayo does not want to become her own mother, a concept Adrienne Rich called “matrophobia” (235), she renounces her biological maternity: “I wasn’t going to be my mother or my grandma. All that self-sacrifice, all that silent suffering. Hell no. Not here. Not me” (127). She focuses on her creative ability to find a social alternative that will, in turn, contribute to her own revision of Guadalupe. By choosing to live on her own, Chayo breaks traditional patterns. Meanwhile, in view of the lack of valid external references, her creativity is shown in her search for solutions for and by herself. Since the Virgin is an essential element of the collective Mexican/Chicano imaginary, Chayo used to interpret this symbol as the maternal archetype her ancestors would imitate and model their lives on. As such, this meant female victimization so Chayo could not accept her, even though rejecting her meant her relatives’ lack of understanding together with insults for being a heretic, an atheist, a Malinchista, for acting as a “bolilla, a white girl” (127-28). In fact, treachery springs up as a patriarchal mechanism as soon as a woman of color initiates the struggle for her own rights. Keeping an open mind, Chayo goes further than merely reviewing her Catholic legacy; she transcends it. She realizes her self-definition is wider and, after reevaluating the figure of Guadalupe under a new perspective, she rediscovers the Aztec goddess Tonantzín: That you could have the power to rally a people when a country was born, and again during civil war, and during a farmworkers’ strike in California made me think maybe there is power in my mother’s patience, strength in my grandmother’s endurance. Because those who suffer have a special power, don’t they? The power of understanding someone else’s pain. And understanding is the beginning of healing. (128)

Chayo heads toward salvation and liberation once she is able to understand that Guadalupe contains Indigenous deities within herself who have been fully endowed with power, something that marks a

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difference from the Virgin Mary. The Indigenous name is further proof: “your real name is Coatlaxopeuh, She Who Has Dominion Over Serpents” (128). What’s more, Tonanzȓn is not the only goddess Guadalupe is linked to. Apart from this Earth and fertility goddess, she is connected to other Indigenous figures such as Tlazolteotl, Coatlicue, Coyolxauhqui, and Catholic images such as Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, and Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos (128). In all, Guadalupe acts as the mediator between past and present. In Cisneros’s narration she represents every deity from each religion in the world, because all faiths concur on eventual spiritual unity. A clearly cathartic effect comes out of it all— Chayo loves the Virgin of Guadalupe and thus she loves herself. The short story also ends in the form of a prayer, addressed to “Mighty Guadalupana Coatlaxopeuh Tonantzín,” with Chayo saying thanks and offering her a braid of her hair (129). Having her hair cut is a rebellious act against a patriarchal tradition that assumes that feminine beauty leads up to marriage. In fact, Chayo’s mother’s reproachful voice appears in the background: “Chayo, what have you done! All that beautiful hair. Chayito, how could you ruin in one second what your mother took years to create? You might as well’ve plucked out your eyes like Saint Lucy. All that hair! (125). But her daughter is determined to break the line of female oppression, so her symbolic gesture signals her personal metamorphosis into someone with a proper name who wants to own her existential and artistic paths in life. Rosario (Chayo) de Leon emerges from her family’s protection ready to overcome any obstacle, always with the help of the Virgin of Guadalupe. In Cisneros’s fiction the Virgin of Guadalupe is no longer a onedimensional figure. In fact, she has moved from a secondary role to the forefront of Chicanas’ lives. Among the new aspects the Virgin acquires is the expression of her own wishes and her capacity for pleasure, including sexuality, a feature that was entirely forbidden in past representations of Judeo-Christian tradition. Female sexuality also condemned women to social ostracism. Patterns of behavior that distanced them from Marianism were traditionally understood as abnormal and deviant. However, during the most recent decades Chicanas’ artistic productions have been trying to denature the saint/corrupt dichotomy, widening ontological possibilities for women. This inevitably has brought about revisions and reconceptualizations of sexual taboos. Some of these reinterpretations

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have provoked negative reactions. Such is the case of digital artist Alma López. After the exhibition of one of her images, Our Lady, in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2001, several Catholic leaders accused her of blasphemy for revealing the Virgin’s naked body. López quickly perceived that not all representations of the supreme Mexican mother were going to be accepted.16 Chicanas’ impossibility to become role models of Christian perfection has compelled them to resemanticize the Guadeloupian icon and the ideology behind this symbol. When Sandra Cisneros rediscovers the Indigenous goddesses hidden under the Virgin’s facade, she is giving back to her all the power Catholicism deprived her of. She tries to achieve what Suzanne Chávez-Silverman calls “fronterótica or borderotics,” i.e., the circumstances that allow the female body not to be fragmented or fetishized (215). These will make it possible for sexuality to be an integral part of a feminine identity. The fact that the Virgin’s fecundity is inscribed in her icon clearly demonstrates that women are sexual beings. As a source of spirituality, female bodies contradict the body/soul duality so deeply rooted in Catholicism and whose greatest exponent is the Virgin Mary. The miracle of her immaculate conception avoids her body’s tarnish. Real women, on the contrary, have to put up with guilt feelings since sexuality and motherhood are dissociated from a cultural perspective. Therefore, taking sexuality as an ideological construction, Cisneros’s goal is to deconstruct and re-formulate it through the figure of Guadalupe. In this sense, the Chicana writer opens up a space within a myth that is now capable of mirroring her own wishes and desires. The artistic articulation of Guadalupe’s corporeal features is not as alienating for women as her projection of “virgo intacta” (virginal). Psychoanalyst Silvia Tubert describes Mary’s role as secondary, given the fact that her main functions are those of receptacle and nutrient mother (165). Her body serves as a means through which male divine creation becomes manifest. Thus, women’s identity is lost halfway through. Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero believe that “[a]ll these transgressions on cultural taboos constitute a sort of guerrilla warfare” (30). Apart from the female body’s decolonization, Cisneros also tries to decolonize the mind, breaking away from the traditional Christian connection between sex and immorality.17 Once Chicanas perceive their bodies as

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instruments for power, they transgress sexual taboos and deconstruct the nexus that has traditionally linked male bodies with sexual neutrality, setting aside female bodies as the sexually marked ones. Using sexuality as a political ideology, Sandra Cisneros questions the limits of the Marian role model. “My Tocaya” shows how the Virgin is an inadequate role model for young girls today, even if religious education continues to foster her emulation. Patricia and the narrative voice go together to a nun’s school, Our Lady of Sorrows, where they get instruction on “The Blessed Virgin: Role Model for Today’s Young Woman”; “Petting: Too Far, Too Fast, Too Late”; etc. (38). The young girls are not at all interested in such transcendental matters. On the contrary, they are more into exchanges with the boys’ school; they have christened these “Sex Rap Crap” (38). The girls’ refusal to accept the virginal role model leads Patricia to her escape, a dramatic reaction to her daily boredom and lack of social life with a father who sentences her life to the family’s restaurant, and perhaps even hits her (37). She transgresses women’s script, written by the patriarchal law, since her going away does not represent passivity or subordination, two attitudes men expect of women. Her solution takes her to an eccentric position from which she confronts a feminicide. Violence against women in not uncommon, so for society this is a plausible ending, a sort of punishment for having strayed from the path of “virtue.” Even her parents identify the body in the morgue (40). However, Cisneros’s final twist in the story—her reappearance—gives voice to the girl, allowing her to take center stage. Not even Guadalupe avoids being categorized according to the virgin/mother–prostitute dualism. “Anguiano Religious Articles Rosaries Statues Medals Incense Candles Talismans Perfumes Oils Herbs” is another short story in which the representation of the Virgin as a sexualized object is not accepted. The narrator enters a religious store to buy a picture of Guadalupe only to find sexual hints in the Virgin: “[...] I didn’t like how La Virgen looked with furry eyelashes—bien mean, like los amores de la calle. That’s not right” (115). By decontextualizing the Guadalupean image, Chicana artists and writers expose their feminist conscience and rebel against a sexist ideology that classifies women in two opposing categories by virtue of their submissiveness to patriarchal codes. Sandra Cisneros’s revisions of the Virgin of Guadalupe redefine Chicana identity, expanding the paradigms of mothering and sexuality. Once this traditionally androcentric myth has been

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decolonized, contemporary women are finally able to see themselves reflected in the mirror Guadalupe symbolizes. Woman Hollering Creek emerges as a literary replica of the multiple responses the myth elicits from women who have received Guadalupe as part of their spiritual and cultural inheritance and have no wish to abandon her, but rather shed new light on one of the rare females in their transnational iconography. María Jesús Castro Dopacio Spain

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Notes 1

The artist’s website still makes reference to this issue in a section called “Our Lady of Controversy.” 2 Cisneros also opted to write from inside a woman’s body in her autobiographical essay “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess”, included in Ana Castillo’s collection Goddess of the America/La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. (46-51)

Works Consulted Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Broyles-González, Yolanda. “Indianizing Catholicism: Chicana/India/Mexicana Indigenous Spiritual Practices in Our Image” in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. eds. Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nàjera-Ramírez, Urbana: U Illinois P, 2002. (117-132) Chávez-Silverman, Suzanne. “Gendered Bodies and Borders in Contemporary Chicana Performance and Literature” in Velvet Barrios. ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. (215-227) Christian, Marie B. Belief in Dialogue: U.S. Latina Writers Confront Their Religious Heritage. New York: Other Press, 2005. Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1991. García Canclini, Néstor. Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2001. Juliano, Dolores. Excluidas y marginadas: Una aproximación antropológica. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2004. López, Yolanda. Our Lady of Controversy. 18 April 2001. On line at: (consulted 12.01.2009). O’Reilly, Andrea and Sharon Abbey, eds. Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment and Transformation. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Rebolledo, Tey Diana and Eliana S. Rivero, eds. Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature. Tucson: U Arizona P, 1993. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. Rodríguez, Jeanette. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women. Austin: U Texas P, 1994. Tubert, Silvia. Deseo y representación: Convergencias de psicoanálisis y teoría feminista. Madrid: Editorial Síntesis, 2001. Turner, Victor, and Edith L.B. Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia U P, 1978.

The Cries of La Llorona: Maternal Agency in “Woman Hollering Creek” If “female writing is somehow by nature infanticidal” as Barbara Johnson suggests, then Sandra Cisneros employs the legend of La Llorona to illustrate the benefits of infanticidal writing by women. By committing the taboo act of infanticide, La Llorona disrupts the expectations of the patriarchal society in which she lives, guaranteeing that her story will immortalize her as one who has chosen to claim her own agency. Somewhere between the words of the legend and the cries of the creek, Cleófilas, protagonist of Cisneros’s story “Woman Hollering Creek,” finds power in her maternal position. La Llorona serves as a maternal figure for the motherless Cleófilas who seeks refuge in the cries of her testimony, her narrative. It is her story and her cries that motivate Cleófilas to locate an alternative approach to womanhood and motherhood and to remove herself from the liminal space she occupies on the borderland.

The title story in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) presents a speech act that moves from a cry to a shout. In this text, a mythic trauma speaks to a young mother and empowers her to abandon her position of subjection. Cleófilas, a young bride-turned-mother from Mexico, seeks various forms of refuge from the abusive husband who has separated her from her family and her culture by moving her to the United States. A subscriber to the romantic fantasies of telenovelas, Cleófilas finds that her reality offers more suffering than the romance she imagines as her dreams of marital happiness in her new home in America give way to the reality of isolation in an abusive marriage in Seguín, Texas. In silent visits to La Gritona, literally “shouting woman” but translated as “Woman Hollering Creek,” Cleófilas imagines the legendary La Llorona, the weeping/crying woman of folklore, calling to her. Most variations of the Llorona legend imagine the situation in which a mother would kill her own child/ren; the legend can be traced to the 1500s and continues to be told today (Estés 325). In most forms of the tale, the infanticidal mother calls out along the banks of a creek seeking the children she has killed. Several versions of this legend suggest that the act of infanticide and its aftermath serve as punishment for the mother who marries outside social class boundaries. Some tales even promote environmental lessons, featuring children who are born with deformities because of contaminated river water. In each account that features infanticide, the mother commits murder in response to the father’s mistreatment of herself and her children and/or his mistreatment of the environment. She exercises her

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power over the life and death of her children, and, as a result, her spirit endures the pain following the traumatic act she has committed. Scholars who collect the legend note the diverse tellings that almost always center on a woman and a body of water. In Mexican Tales and Legends From Veracruz, Stanley Robe has collected eight versions of La Llorona, extending the stories to sixteen by presenting them in both Spanish and English translation (108-21). In “La Llorona as Social Symbol,” Michael Kearney divides the legend into two forms, one of which features the woman as a seducer of men and the other that features the mother “crying for her children” (199).. Although some versions cast the hollering woman as a shape shifter who entices men, usually the legend features the wails as those of a woman who has lost or killed her children. Of the eight versions collected by Robe, three tell of maternal infanticide, and one describes the mother as a prostitute; in the versions of the legend that postulate infanticide, the mother “wails for her children” after she has “disposed of [them], either in a river or in a well” (119). Those who narrate the legend recount the mother’s cry or wail, but they never suggest whether the mother is wailing for her children or for her fate in punishment. The nature of the mother’s wail is unclear as the stories generally do not indicate guilt or remorse. Thus, both the legend and the wail of the mother in the legend are subject to interpretation. The audience of the legend must provide a context for understanding; it is the requirement of audience participation in the interpretation of this legend that makes it available to Cleófilas as the narrative through which she comes to understand her own suffering. Readings of the legend reveal religious, social, and political messages in its various forms. Often, the spirit of La Llorona is denied access to heaven without the safe return of her abandoned child or the bodies of the children she has killed. However, it is not always the irresponsible or horrific mother the legend warns against. In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés retells versions of the legend in which the wailing woman takes political stands. In three such adaptations, La Llorona takes the form of a “female protagonist in a union-busting war,” “an antagonist involved in the forced repatriation of Mexicans from the United States in the 1950s,” or a “prostitute with AIDS” (Estés 300-01). The politically-charged version that most disturbs Estés characterizes the father of the killed children as the wrongdoer. In this updated form of the legend, the father of the babies owns factories and rejects La Llorona because she is of a lower social class than he. The infanticide the mother commits

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is a direct result of his professional success and simultaneous environmental irresponsibility; it has little to do with him leaving her: “Her babies, twin boys, were born blind and with webbed fingers, for the hidalgo had poisoned the river with the waste from his factories” (302). Because the children are born with deformities, she kills them. In a reading of this environmentally-conscious version, Estés launches into a discussion of female creativity, drawing on the symbolism of the legend. She says of the legend, “it is a tale about the river of life that became the river of death” (Estés 300). The river symbolizes the lush creative capacity of a woman who faces the obstructions of man and industrialization as she attempts to create freely. Estés suggests that the twin boys who are first deformed and subsequently sacrificed represent the work women create cautiously in a society that impedes their subjectivity. The legend of La Llorona recasts the river of death as the river of life; the body of water takes on a dual meaning, representing the waters of life and the force of death at once. The coexistence of the forces of life and death in the act and story of La Llorona becomes important in “Woman Hollering Creek” as Cleófilas listens to the cries of La Llorona and locates agency in the story she remembers from childhood. Because Cleófilas remembers “all the stories [of La Llorona] she learned as a child” rather than one version of the legend (51), she locates her own creativity in interpreting the legend. She “listens” and “she thinks” about the “good-size alive thing…with a voice all its own” (51). She recognizes the life in the voice of the creek, in the voice of La Llorona, as she hears “La Llorona calling to her” (51). Cleófilas maintains freedom in attributing meaning to the creek and the act of infanticide and, most importantly, to the cries of the mother. Is the variability of the legend, its own occupation of the liminal space, the key to ceasing Cleófilas’s subjugation? Cleófilas lives along the creek that she equates with the legend, and with her son spends much time listening to the “thing with a voice all its own”; she listens to the creek “all day and all night calling in its high, silver voice” (51). It is in this voice, indeed this creek, that Cleófilas finds solace in her isolation. Away from home, Cleófilas seeks friendships but is unsuccessful in “this town of dust, despair” (50). She does not speak the language; she cannot drive; she does not understand the way of life portrayed in telenovelas that she attempts to emulate. She lives in isolation with her son as she awaits the arrival of her husband home from work each day. When he does return home,

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he “demands [that] each course of dinner be served on a separate plate like at his mother’s, as soon as he gets home, on time or late” (49). Such standards of domestic perfection deny Cleófilas the love and passion she expected in marriage. Eventually, her husband becomes violent, initially abusing her verbally and mentally, but then the abuse becomes physical. She contemplates the voice of the creek as she endures her abusive husband without the help of friends. Pregnant and desperate for relief, Cleófilas finally finds an escape from her isolation by insisting that Juan take her to the doctor to check on the unborn baby. Once at the doctor’s office, Cleófilas meets Graciela, who considers Cleófilas to be like the victims in telenovelas and arranges for her to meet Felice, Cleófilas’s eventual conduit to freedom. Although the voice of the creek inspires the young woman to contemplate reenacting the pattern of agency found in the legend of La Llorona, it is only through Felice’s interpretation of La Llorona’s cries as triumphant that Cleófilas can imagine the deadly actions of this mythic mother as liberating. In this Cisneros text, infanticide serves as an agent of change, but because the infanticidal moment in “Woman Hollering Creek” does not occur within the action of the story, the narrative of infanticide demands more consideration than the murderous act itself. The story of La Llorona, through interpretation, promotes alternative views of womanhood in “Woman Hollering Creek” as the testimony of one mythic infanticidal mother reaches multiple witnesses, who then interpret the various accounts of her act and her subsequent wordless cries. The audience of the legend includes men who regard La Llorona as horrific and children who dare not encounter her. Many of the women either distance themselves from any comparison to La Llorona or simply retell her story neutrally to incite fear in their men and children. The female characters in “Woman Hollering Creek” serve as witnesses to La Llorona’s traumatic experience: Cleófilas finds comfort in her presence, and Felice hears her voice as liberating. The La Llorona legend testifies to the experience of suffering, and each witness interprets the legend according to her experience. Those who hear the legend of La Llorona provide the context through which the cries of the infanticidal mother are translated. Scholars suggest that the cries of La Llorona carry different meanings to different listeners/readers, many of whom ignore the meaning of her holler or prefer not to hear or speak of such a woman, though a few find her voice liberating. Cisneros verifies this in her characterization of the ways in which those who live near the creek choose to listen to or

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ignore the “holler” of the eponymous woman. I argue that La Llorona’s story and voice speak to Cleófilas in her visits to the creek as she endures the absence of alternative views of womanhood. Without such alternatives, Cleófilas wonders about the nature of La Llorona’s “holler” and listens intently to a voice that seems to tell her she can choose her own path. Finally, through the shout of Felice as she crosses the creek in her mission to carry Cleófilas and Juan Pedrito to safety, the story and voice of La Llorona empower Cleófilas to respond to her own experience. 1. Contrasting Narratives of Influence In “Woman Hollering Creek,” the infanticidal narrative coexists with numerous stories that inform the lives of women on the borderland. Each witness’s ability to hear the testimony of La Llorona in the context of the narratives that influence her own existence determines her understanding of the potentially traumatic event. Competing narratives about life on the border, romance, womanhood, and motherhood greatly influence the lives of women in “Woman Hollering Creek.” For example, Cleófilas and Chela, her maid of honor, know the dream of American life without ever articulating it; the idea of living “en el otro lado” (on the other side of the border, and hence on the other side of the social rules, traditions, and community of one’s upbringing) determines the young bride’s willingness to leave her father, her home, and her traditions for a life that she believes to be better. Throughout youth, telenovelas and romance novels provide Cleófilas and the women she knows with ideas of beauty and passion and love while they ignore the bitter realities of disappointment and pain conveyed by these texts, only to discover them through harsh experience. Through the lens of the telenovelas, Cleófilas imagines her life in Texas to bring the “tinkle of money” and to provide the opportunity to “wear outfits like the women on the tele, like Lucía Méndez,” the star of Tú o Nadie (45). What she finds in Seguin, Texas is that women “have to depend on husbands” or “stay home,” isolated with “no place to go” (51). In contrast to the fantasies of telenovelas, the journalistic reports of murdered women speak succinctly for those who have found life en el otro lado less than glamorous and have failed to speak for themselves. These incomplete narratives, when understood as the fragments of larger stories, caution women about the brevity of life and the dismal reality of marriage. Unfortunately, many who hear or read of such

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women who die too soon fail to seek the entire story. Cleófilas’s perception of life depends upon these narratives that surround, engage, and envelop her. Her dependence upon cultural narratives follows a progression that moves from girlhood fantasy toward female agency as she experiences the marginal woman’s reality on the border. Telenovelas and the idea of what is en el otro lado together create in her as an adult (as they did in her youth) the expectation of an ideal future. Nonetheless, her idea of married life filled with the passion in telenovelas gives way to the reality of womanhood and motherhood in an unfamiliar town. As she attempts to feel at home in Seguín, Cleófilas finds that other women do not provide the community (or the gossip) that she grew accustomed to as a young girl in Mexico: “In the town where she grew up, there isn’t very much to do except accompany the aunts and godmothers to the house of one or the other to play cards” (44). As she prepares to marry and leave this community, the women gossip, creating their own narrative of what is in store for Cleófilas as a married woman: “Poor thing. And without even a mama to advise her on things like her wedding night. Well, may God help her” (45). The gossip about Cleófilas turns to the wedding and what the gossiper will wear, conversation which naturally foregrounds a major narrative of influence for these women, the telenovela. The gossiper refers to what the mother of the bride wears in “last night’s episode of The Rich Also Cry” (46), unconsciously calling attention again to the fact that Cleófilas has no mother. While the gossip defines Cleófilas as a motherless daughter, it makes clear that in Mexico she does have a community of women upon whom to depend for company and conversation. In Seguin/on the other side, Cleófilas discovers that she is expected to understand and abide by codes of conduct and rules even as the women offer sparse narratives, if any, that would help her understand and adjust to the culture and its customs. Yet, Cleófilas must abide by these rules especially because she is not native. The laundromat attendant, Trini, is particularly impatient with Cleófilas, repeatedly correcting her for “putting too much soap in the machines,” “for sitting on the washer,” and “for not understanding that in this country you cannot let your baby walk around with no diaper and his pee-pee hanging out” (46). Cleófilas is an outsider who discovers that there is no camaraderie among the women in this borderland community. She cannot even relate to the gossip in Seguin because in contrast to the “whispering on the church steps each Sunday” that she

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experienced in Mexico, the gossip in Seguín belongs mostly to the men and “begins at sunset at the ice house” (50). This gossip portrays women as threats to masculinity when it does not characterize them as mere sexual objects. Most troubling to Cleófilas, the women remain mute, especially about abuse and other unpleasant realities of their lives; consequently, they suffer their fate silently and alone. Cleófilas, too, is expected to endure silently, and she does until prompted to act by the voice of the creek. “The neighbor ladies, Soledad, Delores” (whose names mean solitude/loneliness and sorrow/pain, respectively), like the other women of Seguin, are not concerned with the woman of the creek who is hollering, nor do they seem to be concerned with one another (47). Soledad is a widow, but “how she came to be one was a mystery. Her husband had either died, or run away with an ice-house floozie, or simply gone out for cigarettes one afternoon and never came back” (46). Soledad does not tell her own story; she relies on the label “widow” to suffice. Equally silent about her experience, Delores devotes her home and her life to the “memory of two sons who had died in the last war and one husband who had died shortly after from grief” (47). Their own painful memories consume Soledad and Delores. As one who subscribes to the narratives of passion and fantasy in telenovelas and romance novels, Cleófilas falls victim to the idealistic expectations of what must be “en el otro lado—on the other side” (43). She leaves her father’s house expecting a happy marriage and a good life in America, but instead discovers that marriage offers her only a life of loneliness and a motherhood that emphasizes the strength of the father’s love she left behind. Although life in Texas contradicts the fantasy she has imagined, the plots and characters of telenovelas and romance novels continue to inform her understanding of how love and marriage should be. Cleófilas considers the title of one of her favorite shows, Tú o Nadie and decides that “one ought to live one’s life like that….You or no one. Because to suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow” (45). In the safety of her father’s home, Cleófilas can imagine the sweet pain of passion, but in her marriage she comes to know the reality of what it means to suffer for love. Telenovelas had given her the idea that she would run away if ever a man were to strike her, but the telenovelas do not adequately prepare her to locate the strength she needs. In Seguin, romance novels replace telenovelas which are unavailable in the United States. The tangible version of her romantic fantasies becomes a weapon used by Juan Pedro who throws her book at her, resulting in a “hot welt

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across the cheek” (52). She does not respond as she imagines, enduring rather than fleeing her husband’s blows. She can forgive this act of violence and the physical injury to herself but not the personal, psychological violence: “the fact it [is] her book, a love story by Corín Tellado, what she love[s] most now that she live[s] in the U.S., without a television set, without the telenovelas” is what hurts most (52). Life on the other side reveals just how painful a fantasy life can become. Without a community of women to provide support, Cleófilas falls victim to the story of the abused wife and becomes more silent than she ever expected. After Juan Pedro strikes her with her romance novel, the narratives to which she subscribes lose their influence— “she didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things in the telenovelas (47). Instead, Cleófilas becomes “speechless” as she can “think of nothing to say, [says] nothing” (48). She becomes just like Delores and Soledad, who continuously suffer in silence. Eager for a different story, Cleófilas asks the women of her new community about the nature of the woman’s “holler” for which the creek behind her house is named. Cleófilas discovers that “it was of no concern to their lives how this trickle of water received its curious name” (46). They claim that the creek’s name is simply a name, “a name no one from these parts questioned, little less understood,” and they could not confirm “whether the woman had hollered from anger or pain” (46). When Cleófilas asks the neighbors, Delores and Soledad, about the name of the creek, neither knows because “[t]hey were too busy remembering the men who had left through either choice or circumstance and would never come back” (47). Yet they remember/know enough to warn her of the creek: “Don’t go out there after dark, mi’jita. Stay near the house” (51). The warning embodies two actions forbidden a wife: leaving the house and doing so at night, amid darkness. While they do not retell the story of La Llorona, they warn Cleófilas of the harm of acting against social expectations, telling her, “No es bueno para la salud. Mala suerte. Bad luck. Mal aire. You’ll get sick and the baby too” (51). Going near the creek is deemed hazardous simply because the wife/mother is expected to remain at home where she can perform her domestic duties and take care of the baby. Because the creek is forbidden, they do not imagine the creek as a source of female refuge. Thus, they fail to recognize the importance/relevance of the legend of the creek. Because the women have not considered why La Llorona hollers, they also do not consider the other details of the legend. The women

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to whom Cleófilas turns remain silent, consumed by narratives that allow them to suffer in solitude. Their responses to Cleófilas do not satisfy her—perhaps this is why she finds such comfort in the creek. Because no one offers her an interpretation, she can simply listen, and she can hear the cries as they relate to her own story. Her first impulse “as a newlywed” had been to laugh because she thought of La Gritona as “[s]uch a funny name for a creek so pretty and full of happily ever after” (47). However, as her “happily ever after” turns sour and she seeks solace in alternative narratives, she begins to listen more intently to the holler of the creek. When no one can tell her the origin of the creek’s name, Cleófilas equates the woman of the creek with the legend of La Llorona. She recalls the mother of the legend as she contemplates the nature of the woman’s cries, privately retelling the legend, “remembering all the stories she learned as a child” (51). She listens to the creek and wonders, “Is it La Llorona, the weeping woman? La Llorona, who drowned her own children” (51). This listening and retelling guarantees that she will laugh a second time as she understands and finds strength in the message she hears in the voice of the creek. Alone with Juan Pedrito most of the time, Cleófilas finds a companion in La Llorona, represented in the voice of the creek. As she contemplates the voice of the creek and the mythological narrative, she “[w]onders if something as quiet as this drives a woman to the darkness under the trees” (51). “This” solitude, this quietness, is her reality, a reality that does not live up to the passionate narratives of the texts to which she subscribes. Cleófilas thinks about how she imagined her life would be “like a telenovela, only now the episodes got sadder and sadder” (52). As she sits “with the baby out by the creek behind the house” she knows there is “no happy ending in sight” (53). She begins to understand that the narratives through which she has long dreamed provide no resemblance to the reality she occupies nor even to the reality she desires. Unlike the neighbor women who are not listening, Cleófilas listens intently to all of the stories involving women and violence or abuse (the legend, the ramblings of the men at the ice house, the newspaper reports, etc.). She thinks of the “same grisly news in the pages of the dailies” and wonders what really happened to the women who have been unable to tell their own stories (52). No longer consumed by the fantasies of the telenovelas, Cleófilas begins to place her experience in the context of these stories of other women who have suffered. The

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traumas of other women reveal to Cleófilas the inevitable suffering awaiting her as a mother on the borderland. 2. The Liminality of La Llorona and Her Audience According to trauma theory, posttraumatic testimony follows the period of silence in which traumatic memories hold the victim/agent captive in a self-perpetuating lack of understanding. At this point, verbal testimony serves the survivor as she seeks to formulate a way to exist following a traumatic event, effectively removing her from the liminal space by the mere act of telling the experience. In the process of articulating her story, the victim/agent comes to an understanding of the event. Like the personal narrative, this testimony reveals the post-trauma identity of the storyteller as she relates her unique experience. However, in the legend of La Llorona, the identity of the victim/agent of trauma remains fluid even in testimony. “Woman Hollering Creek,” the story of Cleófilas, depends upon dual meanings and multiple ways of understanding as it exists just beyond the liminal space where old interpretations transform into new meanings. For Cleófilas, the cultural narratives that define womanhood and motherhood on the borderland are replaced with the voice of La Llorona, who drowned her own children and can still be heard calling out along the banks of the creek. Because of the absence of words in the cries of La Llorona, her narrative is open to interpretation depending upon the experience of the listener. The text’s numerous versions of the story of the infanticidal mother effectively counter traditional cultural narratives of love, happiness, and pain and call attention to the true stories of women and mothers who have suffered the realities of the borderland. The lack of words and the opportunity for interpretation open the possibility for countless interpretations of experience. Thus, the legend of La Llorona occupies the liminal space as its variants prevent the reading of one single message. Repetitive memory typically forces the survivor of trauma to remain in a liminal space where she continues to experience trauma but is unable to understand its impact on her current existence. While the victim or agent of trauma has survived the event, she continues a life immediately following the event in a state that resembles death; she neither continues to live as she did before nor adopts a new way of existing. In versions that tell of her inability to enter heaven without locating her children, the mother in La Llorona faces life in limbo; though dead, La Llorona continues to exist as a ghost who searches

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for the children she has killed. Immortalized by the legend, she occupies the liminal space of being both dead and living. This duality/ambiguity not only keeps La Llorona alive in the legend; it also perpetuates the cultural existence of her narrative, maintaining her influence in the consciousness of the people who know her story. Because the legend exists as a component of the cultural narrative, Cleófilas recalls the stories of La Llorona she knows as she listens to the voice of the creek. The testimony of La Llorona is repeated from a different perspective each time a new witness tells it, and, consequently, the infanticidal mother of the legend has no control over the witnessing of her testimony, her trauma. La Llorona’s testimony, due to its variations and the lack of words in her cries, necessitates audience participation in the effort to locate understanding and meaning for each listener and for the community in which the legend is told. The requirement for audience participation creates the opportunity for Cleófilas to connect the legend with the actual creek running near her house; the lack of words in the cries of the legendary La Llorona permits Cleófilas to hear the voice of the legend in the voice of the creek that provides companionship for her. In the delay following the trauma of physical and emotional abuse, the wordless cries of La Llorona serve to promote Cleófilas’s understanding of her own situation. Because the legend of La Llorona engages the audience in interpretation, the legend cultivates the idea of multiple alternative experiences of womanhood/motherhood. Cleófilas, like the legend of La Llorona, can be defined as liminal—she is both married and alone; she is now neither Mexican nor American as she lives on the borderland; Spanish and English both serve as barriers to communication. She spends many evenings alone, awaiting Juan Pedro’s company only to be greeted by his abuse. And although Cleófilas now resides en el otro lado as she has always dreamed, the realities of the borderland diminish the fantasies of her youth. She has left her childhood home, but is trapped in her house with no transportation, no friends, no language. To the community in which she lives, Cleófilas is almost nonexistent. Even her name denies her individual identity—Cleófilas translates as “the daughter of Cleo.” A marginal woman and mother with little or no power, caught on the border between two cultures, Cleófilas seeks to understand other women who have cried out without being heard. She listens to the stories of La Llorona and of each woman who has failed to survive the abuse of “her ex-husband, her husband, her lover, her father, her brother, her uncle, her friend, her co-worker” (52).

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In “Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’” Jacqueline Doyle asserts that this story opens a “borderland space where old myths take on new resonance and new forms and where new stories are possible”; Doyle finds Cleófilas “haunted by the legendary wail of la Llorona” and seeking “a language to articulate her own story and the stories of the mute feminine victims of male violence in the newspapers” (54). These victims, immortalized through their deaths, attract Cleófilas because their liminal silence echoes her own voiceless position. The traditional ways of telling have not worked for these victims who, like La Llorona, remain silent as stories are told about them. Their stories are told in “whispering [which] begins at the ice house” (50), in the conversations of the men for whom “there are tears at the end of the long night” when they are unable to “get some peace” (48). Cleófilas listens to these men, including “Maximiliano who was said to have killed his wife” (51), and wonders if she is “just exaggerating as her husband always said” when she imagines the truth behind the unexplained deaths of so many women (52). As a wife and a mother, indeed as a woman, Cleófilas seeks to hear the untold stories of these women. Because of the liminality of these victims and her position as abuse victim, Cleófilas has the ability to imagine the stories the women would tell if only they could. This listening eventually leads her to remove herself from the liminal space of the borderland where she is merely a victim. While Cleófilas finds meaning in these sparsely worded stories, it is the wordless cry of Felice, the woman who drives her to the freedom of the bus station, that prompts her to speak. Like Cleófilas, Felice might also be described as a liminal character. Felice, who serves as the vehicle for Cleófilas’s escape and represents the feminist portion of the local community in “Woman Hollering Creek,” manifests stereotypically masculine characteristics in her womanhood. First, she is part of the community in which she and Graciela support Cleófilas and, presumably, other women in need of their help. While Felice is a woman, she contradicts conventional definitions of womanhood. Felice does not have a husband, and she drives a truck, proclaiming her choice of vehicle as “a real car” unlike “[p]ussy cars” similar to the one she “used to have” (55). In “On Not Being Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’” Jean Wyatt argues that the “indeterminacy of the creek’s name, as of its sound, enables Felice to define ‘woman’ for herself”

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and notes that that “she appropriates for women the privileges of freedom and mobility usually associated with masculinity and comically exaggerated in Tarzan’s hypermobility and freedom from all social constraints” (258). She has removed herself from the restraints of cultural expectations that dictate the type of vehicle she may drive; more importantly, she moves freely, going where and as she pleases. Felice is neither stereotypically male nor female but combines the characteristics of the two that work for her. Such liminality fosters the opportunity for a woman to define herself according to her own terms rather than the constraints inherent in society’s definition of womanhood. Felice contradicts all that Cleófilas knows of the women. As a result, “this woman, this Felice, amaze[s] Cleófilas” (55). In addition, Felice’s discourse takes the form of a liminal language. She is a woman whose speech is as crass and full of shouts as any man’s. She uses words like “pussy,” and she yells “as loud as any mariachi” (55). Further, Felice speaks a composite language of “Spanish pocked with English” and laughter, a language that requires translation and denies simplistic understanding (55). This bordercrossing language empowers Felice to communicate with all who occupy the liminal space of the borderland—men, women, American, Mexican. She relishes the idea that she frightens Cleófilas and her son and offers an apology, “Sorry,” and an explanation, “Because of the name, you know. Woman Hollering. Pues, I holler” (55). This language, characterized first in her “holler” and then in her “Spanish pocked with English” and laughter, leads to Cleófilas’s own laughter. The liminality of La Llorona and Felice serve to promote change in Cleófilas as Felice’s response to the name of the creek and, by extension, the folktale, empowers La Llorona’s voice. While Cleófilas had originally imagined that the woman of the creek must holler from “pain or rage,” Felice’s “holler like Tarzan” prompts Cleófilas to continue to discover new ways to interpret the voice of the creek/the legend (56). This new possibility results in shared laughter. At first Cleófilas hears the laughter as Felice’s. She realizes that this time the laughter is “gurgling out of her own throat” (56). This laughter “like water” seems to enliven Cleófilas as she joins the community of alternative womanhood provided by Graciela and Felice (56).

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3. Testimony in the Liminal Space: Interpretations and Understanding Because the audience of the legend of La Llorona typically resides along the borderland, both the legend and those who hear the testimony and the legend occupy the liminal space of the border. Hence, these individuals experience dual cultures and languages and, arguably, no culture, no language. Thus, the legend requires interpretation/action on the part of the audience. Stanley Robe illustrates the border crossing characteristic of the legend in his collection, classification, and study of its variations by offering each version in both English and Spanish. The multiple versions of the legend and the wordless cries of La Llorona result in testimony that is available to various/multiple audiences with various/multiple interpretations. Thus, the act of one, La Llorona, promotes action in the audience of her testimony. It is important that the legend endure so that the testimony might find meaning. The legend is passed on in its various forms with various plots. Like repetitive memory, the story reproduces the traumatic event, but because this repetition is in narrative form, it serves as a testimony to the trauma. In contrast to repetitive traumatic memory that haunts the victim, prolonging the victim’s inability to understand, the repetition of the La Llorona narrative creates understanding rather than its delay. The repetitive cultural memory kept alive in the legend of La Llorona provides an enduring vision of a woman who acts. As such, the narrative serves as a constant reminder of alternative approaches to the suffering of the borderland. Listening to this legend changes Cleófilas’s future. For Cleófilas, one literary representative of those women who find themselves subject to abusive husbands and dismal situations in an unfamiliar cultural setting, the master narrative that is associated with the creek, the story of La Llorona, becomes an inspiration to create change. The more time she spends listening to “La Llorona calling to her” (51), the more certain Cleófilas is that the creek is not “mala suerte” (bad luck) as the neighbors would have her believe. La Llorona, a mythic character, reveals that power is available to Cleófilas in unimaginable ways. The legend offers a narrative of choice that serves to create understanding for each listener, but the witness to the testimony must be listening to all of the narratives that inform her reality to understand what the legend can offer her.

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Through the reception of the fictional listener, Cleófilas, “Woman Hollering Creek” explores the various understandings of maternal infanticide. While La Llorona is unable to offer testimony, Felice’s reading of her cries extends the power of this infanticidal legend to Cleófilas, who represents the marginalized women seeking to redefine their lives. No longer is Cleófilas subject to the position of abuse/submission she experiences in the house of Juan Pedro; she now recognizes and seizes the possibility to control her future in the actions and voice of another suffering mother who continues to cry out after removing herself from her own dismal position. While Cleófilas is merely moving from one man’s house (Juan Pedro’s) to another man’s house (her father’s), it is significant that she is liberating herself from the constraints of the telenovelas and romance novels and their plots of pleasure and pain. By listening to the cries of La Llorona, Cleófilas effectively eludes the master narrative that controls her life. No longer subject to the visions of beauty and passion espoused by the telenovelas and romance novels that occupy the lives of most women she knows, she now finds strength in the possibility of an alternative existence that emerges from the cries of a legendary woman who killed her children to effect change in her own reality. The lack of words in these cries allows Cleófilas to envision her own version of womanhood, although this means a return to her childhood home. The cries of La Llorona empower her to return home in spite of the inevitable gossip by the community that expects her to suffer through abuse in exchange for the opportunity to be a bride in America. She considers returning home “a disgrace” and wonders “[w]hat … the neighbors [will] say” (50). She chooses, however, to trade abuse for talk. With this decision to act, Cleófilas can maintain her silent position long enough to escape; she had promised Juan Pedro that she would maintain silence if the doctor asked about her bruises (her second vow to Juan). Unaware that the vow of marriage, her first promise to Juan Pedro, relegated her to a silent position, she makes the second vow to break both obligations. She embraces the silence she has promised for her final act toward liberation. She acts without speaking; she leaves without telling Juan Pedro she is going. This temporary extension of her silence means for Cleófilas that Juan Pedrito and her unborn child will survive somewhere, not within the liminal space of the borderland where she knows no home, no language, and no community. She crosses the border, returning to her

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motherland and her father’s house where she imagines that she will finally speak. 4. The Mother Speaks: Locating Agency in the Maternal However silent Cleófilas and La Llorona might be, their acts suggest that their stories must be told. The legend of the infanticidal act of La Llorona confirms the power of marginal mothers. Not only does the mythic mother kill her children, she also reaches far into the future and across borders to speak to men, women, and children, inciting a variety of responses depending upon each listener. While Cleófilas silently leaves Juan Pedro, her actions speak volumes of the power she locates in the narrative of La Llorona. Cleófilas is no longer “speechless, motionless, numb” (48); she does “fight back” with her decision to take her son and leave the disappointment and abuse of married life in America. She removes herself and her children from danger and imagines telling her father and brothers about Felice and her “hollering.” Significantly, Cleófilas does not imagine telling her family about Soledad or Delores or the house in which she lived; she envisions herself relating the experience: “when we crossed the arroyo she just started yelling like a crazy” (56). Because Felice facilitates her continued interpretation of the voice of the creek, Cleófilas will tell the story of the woman who defies culturally-controlled classification. Cleófilas returns home (her childhood home, her father’s home) where she intends to tell her story, breaking the silence of el otro lado as well as the painful acceptance of positions of weakness. In the narratives that tell of La Llorona, the marginal mother chooses to act, subverting society’s expectation of her silent endurance of the borderland. The possibility of the mother’s testimony to her action suggests the recasting of the maternal position as one of agency rather than victimhood. The maternal figure of La Llorona, in conjunction with Cleófilas’s own maternity, presents the opportunity for Cleófilas to tell her story. While La Llorona does commit infanticide, her act does not negate her maternity. Because of the infanticidal act, La Llorona’s voice and narrative endure in the folklore and lives of the men, women and children of the borderland. More importantly, the infanticidal act of the mythic mother provides the occasion in which La Llorona fosters acting and speaking by Cleófilas, a literary marginal mother who chooses to abandon the silent position to which she is subject. The

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cries and the legend of La Llorona are enduring reminders of the act of infanticide, an act against the patriarchy in that it is taboo, in that it breaks with cultural expectations and disrupts the bloodline. This act and the legend and cries of the infanticidal mother provide the opportunity for Cleófilas to find the ability to act and speak. If “female writing is somehow by nature infanticidal” as Barbara Johnson suggests (705), then Cisneros employs the legend of La Llorona to illustrate the benefit of infanticidal writing by women. By committing the taboo act of infanticide, La Llorona disrupts the expectations of the patriarchal society that expects her to silently suffer the life of subjection, guaranteeing that her story will immortalize her as one who has chosen to claim her own agency. Somewhere between the words of the legend and the cries of the creek, Cleófilas finds power in her own maternal position. Because Cleófilas has no community of women to whom she can turn, La Llorona provides maternal influence; indeed, La Llorona serves as a maternal figure for the motherless Cleófilas who seeks refuge in the cries of her testimony, her narrative. Her story and cries motivate Cleófilas to locate an alternative approach to womanhood and motherhood and remove herself from the liminal space she occupies on the borderland. La Llorona’s infanticidal act does not negate the maternal. Ironically, this act cultivates maternal renewal. The idea of motherhood figures largely into the way Cleófilas survives and eventually refuses to live in the liminal borderland space. After becoming a mother, she remembers “her father’s parting words” on her wedding day as he promises his love: “I am your father, I will never abandon you” (43). Symbolically, she remembers these words “by the creek’s edge” and understands that “when a man and a woman love each other, sometimes that love sours. But a parent’s love for a child, a child’s for its parents, is another thing entirely” (43). As a mother, Cleófilas hears the cries of the creek as the voice of La Llorona. She listens to the “high, silver voice” and wonders, “Is it La Llorona, the weeping woman? La Llorona who drowned her own children” (51). As she equates the voice of the creek with the legend she learned as a child it becomes clear that La Llorona is calling out for her children, confirming the strength of the maternal bond. Representative of creativity, the motherhood of both La Llorona and Cleófilas is the means through which Cleófilas finds her voice, her agency. Symbolically, Cleófilas makes the connection between the voice of the creek and the legend of La Llorona in the spring when

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nature is in its renewal phase. Suggesting that maternal creativity depends upon the seasons and the circumstances, Cisneros contrasts the creek’s presence in the summer when it is “sometimes only a muddy puddle” with its presence in the spring when “because of the rains, [it is] a good-size alive thing, a thing with a voice all its own, all day and all night” (51). In the spring La Gritona is alive, like a woman, with a fertile voice. It is significant that in the story, Cisneros equates the creek’s being alive with having a voice. Those women whose stories appear in the newspaper and gossip are dead and never had a voice. Cleófilas’s life depends upon her finding her voice before spring turns to summer and the inspiration to create vanishes. This spring voice that belongs to the creek and, by extension, the legend, inspires in Cleófilas a new maternal listening which leads to her maternal language. Jacqueline Doyle suggests that Felice facilitates Cleófilas in her speaking, asserting that “Felice’s joyous holler as she and Cleófilas cross Woman Hollering Creek releases new mother tongues” (54). Felice interprets the voice of the creek, the woman’s holler, as triumphant and echoes it with her own liberated shout. My reading posits that as Felice speaks along with the voice of the creek, Cleófilas hears a new message to which she responds with laughter. An unconventional response to the act of infanticide, Cleófilas’s laughter breaks her silent suffering and marks the birth of the language which she has been seeking. With this language, Cleófilas can express the suffering of the marginal mother on the borderland. La Llorona and Felice disrupt patriarchal expectations in the act of infanticide and the subsequent shouting. Such disruption creates the opportunity for narration and, ultimately, for the creation of a language with which Cleófilas can transcend and express the suffering of the borderland. As a motherless daughter, Cleófilas is not bound by the “old single-grooved mother tongue” (399), which Hélène Cixous claims restricts the creative capacity of women. The voice of the creek and the legend she equates with this voice take the place of the absent mother for Cleófilas. Because the legend and the cries of La Llorona require interpretation, Cleófilas transcends the conventional understanding both of infanticide and of the position of the marginal woman. With the act of infanticide, La Llorona provides the circumstance in which Cleófilas might “invent a new language” which Luce Irigaray deems necessary to the assertion of true female creativity (214). The legend and cries of La Llorona cultivate in Cleófilas a new mode of thinking; through infanticide La Llorona renews maternal agency—she gives birth to a new way. No longer is

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Cleófilas concerned with the gossip of either “town of dust, despair” (50). Nor does she find that narratives inform her existence—she is now creating her own way as she intends to tell her story “later to her father and brothers” (56). With “Woman Hollering Creek,” the story of the mother is no longer untold. Cleófilas intends to tell her story with her voice, in her language. Cleófilas understands her own ability to act and speak through the testimony of La Llorona. Because of the narrative of La Llorona, Cleófilas circumvents further trauma on the borderland. The trauma of infanticide serves as the basis of a legend that is told across borders, languages, and cultures. To some, the legend serves as traumatic testimony, allowing for communal understanding on the borderland. In “Woman Hollering Creek,” the legend promotes the understanding of the witness’s position and her ability to change it. Cleófilas responds to the legend with action that will preserve her life and the lives of her children. In the legend of La Llorona Cleófilas locates her voice, her narrative, and her agency. Her interpretation and response to the legend of La Llorona proves that in committing infanticide women are not necessarily killing the maternal. As a mother and a pregnant woman Cleófilas seeks to abandon the dismal liminal existence she finds en el otro lado. Those mothers, like Cleófilas, who break the constraints of cultural expectation via actions and/or language, call attention to the maternal and its power even within the patriarchy. Brandy A. Harvey Lone Star College Works Consulted Anaya, Rudolfo A. My Land Sings: Stories From the Rio Grande. New York: Harper Trophy, 2001. Cisneros, Sandra. “Woman Hollering Creek.” Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. (43-56) Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa” in The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. ed. Mary K. DeShazer. New York: Longman, 2001. (391-405) Doyle, Jacqueline. “Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 16.1 (1996): 53-70. Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Random House, 1997. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca, New York: Cornell U P, 1985. Johnson, Barbara. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. eds. Robyn R. Warhol and

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Diane Price Herndl, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers U P, 1997. (694707) Kearney, Michael. “La Llorona as a Social Symbol.” Western Folklore 28.3 (1969): 199-206. Robe, Stanley. Mexican Tales and Legends From Veracruz. Folklore Studies 23. Berkeley: U California P, 1971. Wyatt, Jean. “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14.2 (1995): 243-271.

Voicing Taboos in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories In both her poetry and fiction, Sandra Cisneros has consistently portrayed the forces that shape the Chicana’s life. In Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), Cisneros enriches the text with a complexity of voices and points of view (Ganz 25) while raising issues of bi-culturalism, bi-lingualism, and even genrecrossing (Kingsolver 4). This essay explores an area ignored by criticism: the presentation of taboos including adultery, homosexuality, rape and abuse in Cisneros’s stories. Society requires taboos to be delimited by silence, and thus, characters in these short stories are left voiceless. To overcome this silence, characters must find their voices through different mechanisms to assert their identities, despite societal pressure to repress them.

Sandra Cisneros is one of the most prominent writers of Chicana and Feminist literature. Along with such authors as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Cherrie Moraga, Denise Chávez, and Pat Mora, Sandra Cisneros allows the Chicana’s voice to be heard. Central to this nascent voice is the concept of Chicana identity. As Yvonne YarbroBejarano asserts, “The chicana…writer finds that the self she seeks to define and love is not merely an individual self, but a collective one” (141). This sense of self within the communal context is what led Cisneros to pen The House on Mango Street (1984) and later Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. In the latter collection, twenty-two short stories demonstrate the growing identity of the Chicana from an early stage of her life to maturity. All of the stories in Woman Hollering Creek and other Stories are interconnected and represent a broad spectrum of feminine experiences. As Payant has noted: “The stories can be grouped into three types: those concerning preadolescent girls; those dealing with adolescents who undergo some kind of initiation, and the third group of longer stories describing the efforts of adult women to break away from culturally determined roles” (97). In this collection, Cisneros depicts women who are limited by financial resources and forced into controlling and often violent relationships with men. Criticism, however, has ignored the topic of taboos that are found in Woman Hollering Creek and other Stories. This is surprising, as a great variety of taboos is presented in this text, including adultery in “La Fabulosa: A Texas Operetta,” “Never Marry a Mexican,” “Eyes of Zapata,” and “Bien Pretty”; homosexuality in “Remember the Alamo,” “Marlboro Man,” and “Little Miracles, Kept Promises”; rape in “One Holy Night” and “Eyes of Zapata”; and abuse in “Woman Hollering Creek” and “Mi Tocaya.” These taboos impose upon the character the “code of

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silence” which renders them voiceless. From this voicelessness, each character develops eventually her/his articulation in a wide variety of manners. During this development, it becomes evident that these portrayals of taboos affect each protagonist’s concept of identity and determines the image of “self” that is projected. In the case of the female characters, the women constructed by Cisneros have a concept of “self” which does not correspond to the societal views of them as daughters, wives, prostitutes or witches. Instead, these characters rely heavily on external forces to define themselves. Such definitions are based on prescribed norms created by society, are assimilated from indigenous or Catholic religious figures, or develop from the pop culture of telenovelas. The specific taboos represented by Cisneros in Woman Hollering Creek are varying permutations of adultery, homosexuality, rape, and abuse, all acts which are proscribed by society as improper or unacceptable. It is expected that this prohibition will reassert the values of society and maintain the established order. Clearly the majority of these codes center on sexuality and what constitutes licit and illicit behaviors. Thus, since the basis for most societies is the marital contract, any sexual practice beyond the bounds of this relationship is condemned or forbidden. Michel Foucault has pointed out that: The history of sexuality supposes two ruptures if one tries to center it on mechanisms of repression. The first, occurring in the course of the seventeenth century, was characterized by the advent of the great prohibitions, the exclusive promotion of adult marital sexuality, the imperatives of decency, the obligatory concealment of the body, the reduction to silence and mandatory reticences of language. The second, a twentieth-century phenomenon, was really less a rupture than an inflexion of the curve: this was the moment when the mechanisms of repression were seen as beginning to loosen their grip; one passed from insistent sexual taboos to a relative tolerance with regard to prenuptial or extramarital relations; the disqualification of ‘perverts’ diminished, their condemnation by the law was in part eliminated; a good many of the taboos that weighed on the sexuality of children were lifted. (115)

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As we have seen, a great number of taboos are presented in this text. For example, as María Beltrán-Vocal has pointed out, Cisneros does not shy away from presenting sexuality and violence in her texts: …nos presenta a mujeres quienes son objeto de abuso, desde el punto de vista físico y mental, por parte del hombre…. [L]a cultura, las costumbres y los individuos han hecho que el poder del hombre sea absolutista en el hogar y la mujer se convierta en la esclava que no tiene derecho a protestar” [She presents us with women who are objects of abuse, from a physical and mental perspective, by men…. The culture, customs and individuals have made men’s power absolute in the home and woman has become the slave that doesn’t have a right to protest.] (147)

Moreover, Concepción Bados Ciria asserts that Cisneros creates characters that “would like to understand their growing sexuality, have control of their sexual desires, and not to be just sexual objects” (36). Although any mention of sexuality has always been surrounded by taboos, Cisneros writes of it as an empowering experience for women. Her characters do not admit to shame for their sexual feelings, and some even learn to use sexuality as a weapon. 1. Adultery The theme of adultery is present in many of the short stories in the collection, including: “La Fabulosa: A Texas Operetta,” “Never Marry a Mexican,” “Eyes of Zapata,” and “Bien Pretty.” Cisneros’s use of adultery as a topic is not especially innovative, since many adulteresses have inspired writers through the ages. In his book Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression, Tony Tanner contends that marriage is central to our social structure and that “in confronting the problems of marriage and adultery, the bourgeois novel finally has to confront not only the provisionality of social laws and rules and structures but the provisionality of its own procedures and assumptions” (15). For women, society has assigned severely restrictive and oppressive roles which depict marriage and motherhood as the only fulfilling vocation. Unfortunately, cultural stagnation has supported this view and has not allowed sexuality to

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occur outside the frame of marriage for women, while men have enjoyed a double standard of comportment. “La Fabulosa: A Texas Operetta” narrates the love triangle protagonized by Carmen Berriozabal, a twenty-year-old legal secretary. The story is told by an extradiegetic narrator, presumably a woman who knows Carmen, who retells the juicy gossip she has heard. By adopting this narrative voice, Cisneros is able to play with the perceptions that are held of women. This short story, as others in the collection, focuses attention on society’s preoccupation with female appearance. In her initial presentation, Carmen’s attractiveness is due to the fact that she is well endowed. Men seem to only focus on this attribute: “Big chichis. I mean big. Men couldn’t take their eyes off them. She couldn’t help it, really. Anytime they talked to her they never looked her in the eye. It was kind of sad” (61). The narrator’s interjection of “how sad” presents a commentary that the judgment of women’s outward physical attributes leads to their reduction to stereotypes and encourages the devaluation of women.1 Thus Carmen, who understands the sexual economy, adopts a male role in her adulterous relationship by keeping a handsome corporal named José Arrambide. Breaking the stereotypical mold of the woman who is subjugated to the male, the narrator asserts that “José wasn’t Carmen’s LUH-uv of her life. Just her San Antonio ‘thang,’ so to speak” (61). Her “take-it-or leave-it” attitude does not conform to men’s need of a woman who will be “washing their feet and drying them with your hair” (61). This imagery projects total subjugation while simultaneously evoking the image of Mary Magdalene, the notorious biblical figure who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears of repentance and dried them with her hair. Cisneros’s appropriation of such symbolism indicates that men’s desire for a repentant whore is not always possible. In this fictional construct, women no longer have to plead for forgiveness for their desires. Indeed, Carmen has a very modern view about sexual relationships, and she sees her relationships with men as casual alliances. Therefore, she is not bothered that José has a “high school honey back home who sold nachos at the mall, still waiting for him to come back to Harlingen, marry her, and buy that three-piece bedroom set on layaway” (61). Always looking for other “opportunities,” Carmen begins to see another man, a married Texas senator, Camilo Escamilla, who sets her up in her own apartment. When José learns of her infidelity, he goes crazy; he “[t]ried to kill her. Tried to kill himself” (62). This melodramatic reaction to the infidelity parodies

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the hysterical response normally expected from jilted women. The scandal, however, is silenced because it could be detrimental to the senator’s career: “Camilo kept it out of the papers. He was that important. And besides, he had a wife and kids who posed with him every year for the calendar he gave away at Christmas. He wasn’t about to throw his career out the window for no fulanita” (62). Once again, Carmen’s worth is devalued as she is only a “fulanita,” not worth ruining a career much less a marriage to an advantageous wife. The narrator provides multiple conclusions to this love triangle as each variant is recounted. In one version, José deforms Carmen’s greatest attribute by carving “his initials across those famous chichis with a knife” (62). The act of permanently inscribing one’s initials into skin carries the message that this woman is his possession alone, and it reduces her to a mere object. The deformation also implies a punishment, which deprives her of her beauty so that no one will want her. Among the possible rumored endings to this tale, the narrator shares the reality: Carmen had moved on to another man, King Kong Cárdenas, a professional wrestler from Crystal City. Laura Gutierrez Spencer notes, “Not only is she not punished for her freewheeling ways, but she flourishes and thrives” (282). Cisneros does not castigate the character, but instead offers the reader a variety of possible conclusions. The reader can select the romantic conclusion of José becoming a bullfighter to die like a man or a feminist ending where Carmen moves on to another conquest. In this story of only two pages in length, Cisneros does not hesitate to bring Carmen’s identity into question. In the opening lines of the story it is stated that Carmen “likes to say she’s ‘Spanish,’ but she’s from Laredo like the rest of us—or ‘Lardo,’ as we call it” (61). Here Carmen forms part of a collective of Mexican-American women who due to their mixed cultural heritage have a problem defining themselves in reference to their nationality. Placed in juxtaposition to this cultural identifier is that of a gender slur at the end of the story when Carmen is perceived as a “fulanita” by men of her own heritage. The entire economy of the nomenclature of identity is destabilized and reduced to a duality where women can only be labeled as virgins or whores. Also, Carmen’s membership in a collective denotes that women of color are devalued not only by the dominant culture, but by men of their own culture as well. Societal expectations require women to participate in activities and relationships which will lead to marriage.

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Another look at adultery is provided in “Eyes of Zapata,” in which Inés Alfaro retells her life as the lover of Emiliano Zapata in an interior monologue. In this story, the narrator repeats various episodes of her life in a circular fashion, each time elaborating on a different facet to the story and adding details cumulatively. Alternatives to Western-European linear narrative formats have been studied by Linda Danielson, who finds that indigenous texts often resemble a spider web, where stories are interconnected from a center (332). Pivotal events in the narration are repeated, including Inés’s and Zapata’s meeting at San Lázaro’s county fair, her father’s dislike of Zapata, their rendezvous under the avocado tree, the earrings Zapata gives her, his campaigning, and her nighttime flights, among others. These all are interwoven through the story of their life together and the process of the maturation of their children. Inés’s relationship with Zapata falls outside the traditional boundaries of marriage since he is already married to María Josefa of Villa de Ayala (99). Inés also acknowledges that she has no type of exclusivity with him, as he has interests apart from his wife and her. Inés knows of Zapata’s infidelities with other women which she euphemistically calls his “pastimes” (96). However, she rationalizes his treacherous behavior as the result of the belief that it is for “the greater good of the revolution” (100). As the “other woman,” she has to content herself with only temporary visits from her lover, Zapata. Even though he has fathered children with these other women, her knowledge of his affairs does not abate her love for this heroic rebel. She takes great pride in the progeny she has produced for him, holding them up as examples of her love for him. It is not until later in the narration that the reader is able to discern that Inés is a witch who practices sorcery. The circular journeys she takes at night, presented as dream sequences, are when she must transform herself into an owl, a predator of the night. The owl is a creature associated with wisdom, which is portrayed in Inés’s ability to see the future and the past during her nighttime flights. The transformation that occurs when she returns home and resumes her corporeal form is captured at various times in the narrative. The circular motion of her night flights, besides reflecting the circular structure of the narration, also repeats the circle laid out by the witch to cast her spell. Zapata’s continual return to Inés, besides mimicking the circle, also emphasizes her magical abilities.

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According to Katherine Payant, in “Eyes of Zapata” Inés is repudiated by the community because she rejects the patriarchal authority (99). By living with Zapata against her father’s wishes, not placing importance on marriage, and refusing to reject her adulterous mother as the village did, she defies the norms of the normative society. Many villagers call her a “nagual” or a “bruja,” and they blame her for the bad things that happen, including the death of Maria Josefa’s children, the hailstorm, and the ruined crops. The villagers want to blame and punish the “witch” for the things that are occurring. Silvia Bovenschen reports that according to lore, witches had “the most significant characteristic power to defy the laws of nature (levitation, psychokinesis, influencing the weather and other natural phenomena; the hexing of illness, accident or death; metamorphosis into animals; exerting magical influence over the processes of sex, birth, etc…)” (97). Thus, the feminine, a gender label that has traditionally been associated with nature, undergoes a transformation into “witch” and is granted the power to control nature. Therefore, “the years the harvest was bad and the times especially hard, they wanted to burn me with green wood. It was my mother they killed instead, but not with green wood” (104). After Inés vomits up worms when her mother dies, she is ostracized from the community: “It wasn’t until I was well enough to go outside again that I noticed the crosses of pressed pericón flowers on all the village doorways and in the milpa too. From then on the villagers avoided me, as if they meant to punish me by not talking…” (104). In the end, the family has to move to her aunt’s village to escape persecution. In “Eyes of Zapata,” Inés Alfaro accepts her role as the “other woman” to Zapata’s wife and other concubines, because she feels she has assumed a special role since she was his first love and has borne him children. She accepts this as she accepts that the villagers believe her to be a witch. She knows that they speak of her: “…now when they murmur bruja, nagual, behind my back, just as they hurled those words at my mother, that I realize how alike my mother and I are. How words can hold their own magic. How a word can charm, and how a word can kill” (105). She is comfortable with being the other woman and a witch and doesn’t really care what others think of her. That is why she affirms, “If I am a witch, then so be it, I said. And I took to eating black things—huitlacoche the corn mushroom, coffee, dark chiles, the bruised part of the fruit, the darkest, blackest things to make me hard and strong” (106). It is no wonder that Jeff Thomson sees the protagonist as self-assured:

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The ostracism by the community does not affect Inés nor does it deter her from committing adultery. Another short story dealing with adultery, “Never Marry a Mexican,” tells of Clemencia, who has an affair with her married professor, Drew, and then takes up with Drew’s son. According to Mary McCay: [t]he sexual relationships between men and women are paradigms of larger social tensions within the barrio and between the barrio and the larger world. ‘Never Marry a Mexican,’ a caustically funny story of love and betrayal, best illustrates how a woman in the barrio negotiates some sexual independence despite the traditional prejudices of the male. (320)

This tale of adultery focuses on the aspect of vengeance. From the beginning of the short story, the narrator is quite honest about her role in adulterous affairs: I’ve witnessed their infidelities, and I’ve helped them to it. Unzipped and unhooked and agreed to clandestine maneuvers. I’ve been accomplice, committed premeditated crimes. I’m guilty of having caused deliberate pain to other women. I’m vindictive and cruel, and I’m capable of anything. (68)

She states her preference for this way of life since it allows her to enjoy the best part of men: “Just the cream skimmed off the top. Just the sweetest part of the fruit, without the bitter skin that daily living with a spouse can rend. They’ve come to me when they wanted the sweet meat then” (69). Her emphasis on enjoying the carnal side of relationships, instead of the companionship and friendship marriage

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can yield, portrays a different vision from that of the traditionally demure portrait of the feminine. In this story the female protagonist, Clemencia, adopts a male role in relationships, becoming the dominant figure and establishing a masculine pattern of power. Her rejection of marriage is based ultimately on the fact that she hasn’t found a man who meets her high expectations for a mate. Clemencia recognizes that not only is passion part of love, but so is pain. Therefore, when Clemencia gets hurt, she plans to retaliate. Spurned by her lover, Clemencia plots a sweet revenge, “…waiting patient as a spider all these years…” (75). She adopts the position of the spider, sitting in the middle of the web waiting for her prey to fall in her treacherous trap and be destroyed. Once Drew decides to end their affair, they meet one last time to spend several days at his house. She walks through the rooms looking over the wife’s things, curious as to what his spouse is like. Eventually, however, she decides to leave the wife an indication that she existed, as if to subvert Drew’s rejection or erasure of her from his life. She places gummy bears in objects around the house that belong to the wife: “I got a strange satisfaction wandering about the house leaving them in places only she would look” (81). The locations are progressively more personal, from make-up items, to her diaphragm, and finally the smallest doll of a babushka set. The intrusion is symbolic as it indicates to Drew’s wife what Clemencia is willing to lay claim to: from a simple kiss from her husband to later sexual relations with her son. Jean Wyatt believes this action of replacement of the inner doll is an appropriation of Megan’s maternity, since Clemencia, who is childless, will subsequently take their son, giving her direct power over the parents (252). It is significant that it takes years until she has her revenge. In Clemencia’s voice, Cisneros writes: “I sleep with this boy, their son. To make the boy love me the way I love his father. To make him want me, hunger, twist in his sleep, as if he’d swallowed glass” (82). But eventually the protagonist of “Never Marry a Mexican” uses the boy to get back at her ex-lover and at his “white” wife. Clemencia represents her power over their son as if it were total: “I can tell from the way he looks at me, I have him in my power. Come, sparrow. I have the patience of eternity. Come to mamita. My stupid little bird. I don’t move. I don’t startle him. I let him nibble. All, all for you. Rub his belly. Stroke him. Before I snap my teeth” (82). The elements of this predatory seduction point to her final desired outcome: to punish not only the boy, but his parents as well.

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In “Never Marry a Mexican,” Cisneros portrays Clemencia’s adulterous relationship with Drew as all-consuming. She explains her relationship as a fusion with the masculine: “I leapt inside of you and split you like an apple” (78). In this recollection, she positions herself in a dominant position as the penetrator and the one who causes pain. This imagery also evokes the mythological birth of Pallas Athena, the goddess traditionally associated with wisdom, who leapt from Zeus’s head when it was split open by Hephaestus. Such a close interrelationship with her lover suggests a potential fusion of separate entities but unfortunately only precipitates an identity crisis when they part ways. When Clemencia was growing up, her mother warned her never to marry a Mexican or a foreign national. Because of this warning, Clemencia engages in affairs with married men which cannot lead to any type of long-term commitment. Her conflict is crystallized when she states, “I admit, there was a time when all I wanted was to belong to a man. To wear that gold band on my left hand and be worn on his arm like an expensive jewel brilliant in the light of day. Not the sneaking around I did in different bars…” (68). Obviously, Clemencia’s identity crisis stems from her inability to designate herself as either Mexican or American. Her mother replaces her father with a white man and allows his white children to dispossess Clemencia and her sister Ximena: “After Daddy died, it was like we didn’t matter…My half brothers living in that house that should’ve been ours, me and Ximena’s. But that’s—how do you say it?—water under the damn? I can’t ever get the sayings right even though I was born in this country” (73). In this tirade, Clemencia reveals her feelings of rejection when her mother chooses a “white man” and his children over her “foreign” offspring. Her anger is superimposed onto her inability to adhere to the “white” linguistic code, even though she belongs to this culture. Her misusage of “dam” and “damn” further reflects what she wants to say; she is cursing her sad fate. María González believes that in this story, “Cisneros portrays the mother as a destructive emotional force, alienating and condemning her daughter to repeating her own mother’s destructive power. Told from the daughter’s perspective, the story blames the mother for the failed relationships they have had with men” (164). Clemencia and her sister reject that which the mother holds of value, the “white world,” and embrace the other culture by moving to the Mexican side of town. The identity Clemencia has forged during her childhood is further challenged when she is in the relationship with Drew. When they are

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together, he calls her “Malinalli,” “Malinche,” and “mi doradita” while he plays the role of “Cortés” (Gonzalez 156). The figure of the “Malinche” has played a controversial role in Mexican history. Malinche, an Aztec princess sold into slavery, is known as Cortés’s New World translator and advisor, who later became the explorer’s lover and the mother of his son. Wyatt states, “While the dignity and competence of the historical Malintzin were apparently respected by both Indians and Spanish, after independence Mexican storytellers pinned the blame for the Conquest on her complicity with Cortés and more specifically on her sexual complicity” (248).2 Clemencia draws her identity from Drew through this positive view of Malinche. He sees their differences and glorifies them: “My dark skin against yours. Beautiful, you said. You said I was beautiful, and when you said it, Drew, I was” (74). She relies on him to define her as beautiful, which is why she is devastated when he breaks up with her: “Hadn’t I understood…he could never marry me. You didn’t think…? Never marry a Mexican. Never marry a Mexican” (80). As her positive Mexican image transforms into a negative one, it becomes an impediment to their union. Just as Cortés violated and abandoned Malinche, so too Drew will use and dispose of Clemencia since he cannot marry a woman of color. The word “Mexican,” which had previously designated a foreign national, here shifts in meaning to refer to ethnicity. Drew not only rejects her, but her identity and cultural heritage as well. This causes such rage inside of Clemencia that she develops a need to be in control, a necessary component if she is to overcome her feelings of powerlessness. She is able to “paint and repaint him” in any way she sees fit in her memories and paintings. Her adoption of the role of creator constitutes an attempt to assume power: [y]ou’re nothing without me. I created you from spit and red dust. And I can snuff you between my finger and thumb if I want to. Blow you to kingdom come. You’re just a smudge of paint I chose to birth on canvas. And when I made you over, you were no longer a part of her, you were all mine. (75)

In an effort to erase Drew, she plots her ultimate revenge: if she can’t have the father, she will take the son. A final example of adultery in Woman Hollering Creek can be evidenced in “Bien Pretty.” In this selection, Lupe Arredondo accepts

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a job as an art director at a community center in Texas to get away after her failed relationship with Eduardo, who preferred a “white” woman to her. In Texas, she falls in love with Flavio Munguía, a pest exterminator from Mexico who is married. She learns she is committing adultery at Taco Haven, when he casually announces to her that he has to return to Mexico because of his children and reveals that not only does he have a wife, but also a mistress. He then explains his philosophy on love to the stunned Lupe: “Loving one person doesn’t take away from loving another. It’s the way with me in love. One has nothing to do with the other” (156). This blasé attitude toward fidelity appears to be inherited from his grandfather as it is related in the grandmother’s story, which foreshadows Lupe’s own fate. The grandmother one day catches her husband cheating on her: “That’s when she looks down the street, and who does she see but her husband kissing a woman. It looked as if their bodies were ironing each other’s clothes, she said. My grandmother waved at Fito. Fito waved at my grandma” (148). The possible deaths narrated for Fito are most ironic since they represent poetic justice for women; Cisneros writes: “Fito died in 1935 of cancer of the penis. I think it was syphilis. He used to manage a baseball team. He got hit in the crotch by a fastball” (149). All of these fates focus on the destruction of his treacherous member. The grandmother’s story underscores society’s double standard, where it is acceptable for males to establish extramarital relationships while females who do so are condemned. Lupe, to mend her heart, tries various tactics, which she believes to be native Mexican remedies, to expunge Flavio’s memory from her mind, which she believes to be native Mexican remedies. She uses “rose-quartz crystal” to create the aura of “healing energy,” burns spices to purify her home, and listens to indigenous music, though all she wants to do is to “bash in his skull” (157). Even her trip to the Mexican voodoo shop to buy powders with the names “Te Tengo Amarrado y Claveteado” and “Regresa a Mí”3 are unsuccessful (158). When this fails, she burns his poetry in her grill to rid herself of his memory. Left with nothing but a void, she becomes addicted to watching telenovelas and internalizing the characters’ problems. Her reaction to the soap operas’ stories is not one of passive acceptance: “in my dreams I’m slapping the heroine to her senses, because I want them to be women who make things happen, not women who things happen to” (161). The violence in her dreams reflects her need for an active rather than passive resolution to her problems. At the drugstore, while

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buying magazines and novels of Corín Tellado, she encounters a woman who numbly accepts her reality. According to Susan Griffin, Lupe realizes that the telenovelas and Tellado’s writings, which reinforce the stereotypical perceptions held of women, are of no use to her (93). Only able to save herself through the creative process, she begins to paint again; her change of perspective is evident in her artistic rendition of the Popocatépetl myth. According to Aztec mythology, Popocatépetl is a warrior in love with Iztaccíhuatl. Her father sends “Popo” to war in Oaxaca, promising him his daughter’s hand in marriage when he returns. When he leaves, the father tells “Izta” that her groom died in battle; she dies shortly thereafter from grief. When Popo returns and finds Itza dead, he commits suicide. Moved by the tragedy, the gods transforms the lovers into mountains and covers them in snow. Izta’s mountain is called “La mujer dormida” because it resembles a woman sleeping on her back, while Popo became the volcano which erupts, spewing his rage for the loss of his beloved. Lupe, however, re-envisions this myth and switches the places of the man and the woman, situating the woman in a dominant position: “Prince Popo and Princess Ixta trade places. After all, who’s to say the sleeping mountain isn’t the prince, and the voyeur the princess, right? So I’ve done it my way. With Prince Popocatépetl lying on his back instead of the Princess” (163). Lupe bestows upon the female an active role, while the male is relegated to a passive one. From the initial lines of “Bien Pretty,” it is clear that Lupe suffers from an identity crisis. When she sublets a house from the Mexican poet, she seems in awe of the couple who rent her their home. This is noted when she enumerates the objects that are in the home as if these elements defined their owners as Mexican. Moreover, she arrives in Texas with a series of objects that show no cultural cohesion, representing her inability to define her own identity (Payant 105). Susan Briante believes that this tale “is fundamentally a story of selfidentity. Just as the narrator’s poet friends authenticate their mexicanidad through a material display so the narrator Guadalupe searches for her own identity and worth in the eyes of the man she loves” (261). Lupe even takes Aztec dancing lessons, believing that will aid in the construction of her bi-cultural identity. Her lack of selfdefinition crystallizes when she is dancing with Flavio and states that she would prefer to dance native dances, as if knowledge of what is indigenous confirms her identity. When she later teases Flavio about his assimilating into the American culture, he retorts, “I don’t have to

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dress in a sarape and sombrero to be Mexican….I know who I am” (151). He points to the fact that self-definition comes from within and not from external validation. By mentioning this stereotypical portrayal of the Mexican identity, Flavio notes the invalidity of Lupe’s desire to “become Mexican.” According to Alesia García, this recalls Renato Rosaldo’s theory that culture should be analyzed from a “subjective” rather than “objective” position, “seeking cultural meaning from within rather than imposing dominant ideologies onto Native cultures” (6). Lupe’s concept of what is Mexican comes from an outsider’s view just as her entire knowledge of Mexico comes from her American lovers: [t]here was crazy Graham, the anarchist labor organizer, who’d taught me to eat jalapeños and swear like a truck mechanic, but he was Welsh…And Eddie, sure. But Eddie and I were products of our American education. Anything tender always came off sounding like the subtitles to a Buñuel film. (153)

Feeling inauthentic, Lupe is drawn to Flavio as he helps her to authenticate herself as a “Mexican.” When he leaves her, she must face the fact that she is neither American nor Mexican. It is not until she re-envisions and recreates the myth of Popo that she assumes her identity, a fusion of both cultures. This fusion is a liberating experience for the woman in its break with the traditional boundaries. The final scene, of the magpies arriving in droves, is a positive sign for Lupe. According to mythology, the magpie is a symbol for harmony and balance; therefore their presence foretells happiness and good luck. Also, in the Jicarilla-Apache native tribe, the magpie is a symbol of fearlessness. Lupe now must bravely face her future as a woman and creator who does not need to rely on a man to define her.

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2. Homosexuality In addition to exploring the challenges of Chicana women’s quest for identity through the taboo of adultery, Cisneros also addresses the identity conflicts of Chicano homosexuals within the pages of Woman Hollering Creek and other Stories. Male homosexuality is brought to light in several stories of the collection: “The Marlboro Man,” “Remember the Alamo,” and “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.” Homosexuality, the enduring sexual and romantic attraction towards those of the same sex, has long been condemned in Western society. Although accepted as part of cultural norm in ancient Greece, this act was later prohibited by law and the church. The church established sodomy as a transgression against divine law, and since it was believed to be practiced by choice, it was reasoned that commission of the act should receive severe penalties. Due to this action of condemnation, many homosexuals have been subject to prejudice and discrimination. However, recent critics such as Judith Butler reject the constructs of a heterosexual gender identity: Consider not only that the ambiguities and incoherencies within and among the heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual practices are suppressed and redescribed within the reified framework of the disjunctive and asymmetrical binary of masculine/feminine, but that these cultural configurations of gender confusion operate as sites for intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifications. In other words, the ‘unity’ of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. (31)

As Butler states, there has always been a desire by society to make all individuals conform to “heterosexual” tendencies and dismiss all others. Thus a great deal of pressure was exerted on these “deviant” individuals to assimilate into the dominant culture. In the simple plot of the “The Marlboro Man,” two girlfriends gossip about another friend Romelia and her boyfriend, who was allegedly the Marlboro Man of the cigarette advertisements. In the recorded dialogue of these two women, one reveals details about Romelia’s relationship, while the other disavows the boyfriend’s identity by stating that the Marlboro Man was gay. The friend asserts

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her claim because it was televised on 60 Minutes: “Dan Rather interviewed him. The Marlboro Man was working as an AIDS clinic volunteer and he died from it even” (58). The other woman refuses to accept this fact since she is certain the commercial icon died of cancer from the cigarettes he promoted. In “The Marlboro Man,” the reactions of the women are of disbelief. One says she had a crush on him: “GOD! Don’t kill me. I used to dream he’d be the father of my children” (59). The other, who can’t accept it either, remembers that “…he gave Romelia hell, always chasing after any young thang that wore a skirt” (60). An American icon, The Marlboro Man was responsible for projecting the ideal image of male virility to an audience so that they would consume tobacco. He became the image of a rugged western cowboy, portraying a man who could tame wild horses and herd cows in an unforgiving terrain. Cisneros, however, systematically deconstructs the image of the macho man who fuels women’s fantasies. This is achieved with one voice asserting that the Marlboro Man is a homosexual and another claiming that he liked to strip in public. This identity of the virile male is challenged as the Marlboro Man is either gay or an exhibitionist, both deviants that society does not accept. Bisexuality is addressed by Cisneros in “Remember the Alamo.” In this story the young man Rudy Cantú becomes Tristán the transvestite, a dancer at the Travisty night hall in San Antonio, Texas. As Michael Carroll and Susan Maher have pointed out, interspersed throughout the narrative in italics is a list of men and women who have been his sexual partners (74); the lengthy list of lovers also includes the repeated phrase, “A dance until death” (66), a new meaning, since his promiscuity is exposing him to deadly sexually transmitted diseases. Interesting is the fact that Rudy/Tristán adopts two different names corresponding to the different worlds he must navigate. Rudy is his name for the heterosexual dominant world, while he adopts Tristán for his artistic identity. If, as Judith Butler posits, gender is not a sexual distinction, but “a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (139), Rudy would be able to extract his true identity through his act. Most of those close to Rudy are tolerant of his bisexuality since they view him as an artist. His family accepts him and “love him no matter what” (65). His father, who was initially a little apprehensive

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about his son’s dancing, resigns himself to his son’s identity because of his fame. In Hispanic society, male roles are as confining as those for females, and homosexuality is viewed as absolutely unacceptable for men. Objecting to his bisexuality, the “low-rider types” yell out to him, “¿Eres maricón? You a fag?” (66). Nevertheless, Rudy does not become flustered at the taunting; instead, he “[g]ives them a look like the edge of a razor across lip” (66). Secure with his sexuality, he does not feel any need to vocalize a retort and silences the defense of his identity. The dichotomous nature of Rudy’s identity is echoed in the title of the short story: “Remember the Alamo.” This cry, utilized by American culture to evoke the spirit of nationalism, holds another meaning, as Florencia Cortés-Conde and Diana Boxer have stated: “There is the image of the Alamo, a monument to Anglo bravery and self-sacrifice. Behind the Alamo is the Mexican side of the story; and behind both the Mexican and the Anglo vision there is also the gendered perspective of Tristán dancing with death” (144). This geographic area, which denotes a cultural confrontation between the Anglo and the Mexican cultures, is reformulated to demonstrate another cultural clash between heterosexuality and homosexuality personified by the bisexual Tristán. Homosexuality also plays a thematic role in the short story “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.” Structured as twenty-four ex-votos left at a religious shrine, the story includes one petition of particular interest. Ex-votos, promises made in exchange for a favor to a saint or virgin, are often accompanied by hair, clothing, or jewelry. This practice is very important to the religious life of Latino communities. Through the voice of the narrator Chayo, the reader is able to perceive the petitions placed on the altar. “Benjamin T.” from Del Rio, Texas writes to the Black Christ of Esquipulas to grant him a petition. The petition is written in an encoded form with numerical substitutions for the vowels in the words. Many would overlook this petition due to the time needed to decipher the message. Benjamin asks the Black Christ to protect Manny Benavides, who is traveling overseas and with whom he is in love. Ellen McCracken has noted that by writing the entire message in code, Benjamin “engages in the practice of ‘hiding in the light’ which …characterizes youth subculture. The character’s sexual transgression both displays and hides itself in this public space, puncturing the sacred aura of the Church setting with its poignancy” (172). In this case, the writer of the note is unsure of his feelings: “I don’t know what to do about all this love, sadness, and shame that fills

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[sic] me” (122-23). Benjamin views his homosexuality with shame because of the repression from the dominant heterosexual culture regarding “deviancy.” The fact that the message is in code serves as a reminder that for centuries, these homosexual feelings were forced to remain hidden. Silence, shame, and secrecy often constitute the stances maintained by victims of another taboo addressed by Sandra Cisneros, which is discussed next in this paper. 3. Rape The topic of rape is treated in two distinct ways in two stories in Woman Hollering Creek. It is presented in “One Holy Night” as statutory rape, and in “Eyes of Zapata” as gang rape. Rape can be defined as using force or coercion to secure intercourse without consent. This displacement of power or physical force onto sexuality thereby creates the polar roles of aggressor and victim. The act of rape has, for many years, not been viewed as a crime against the victim, but instead a usurpation of power over another male’s property. This is directly related to the marital status of the victim, as Catherine MacKinnon notes: Virtuous women, like young girls, are unconsenting, virginal, rapable. Unvirtuous women, like wives and prostitutes, are consenting, whores, unrapable. The age line under which girls are presumed disabled from consenting to sex, whatever they say, rationalizes a condition of sexual coercion which women will never outgrow. (46)

In this power struggle, the female incurs losses on many levels since the blame usually is attributed to her. The act of taking another man’s property has enshrouded the taboo with silence since the female’s power over her own body and the male’s authority over his possession have been violated. In “One Holy Night,” the protagonist is a young girl who sells produce from a pushcart and is seduced by a drifter who lives in the back of an auto mechanic’s garage. Told in a confessional first person narrative voice, the reader learns the resolution of the story at the beginning, since the young girl recounts what happened eighteen weeks after the events: “what I’m telling you I never told nobody, except Rachel and Lourdes, who know everything” (27). What has

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occurred is easy to surmise since she has been sent away by her family. She confesses that other “girls have gone bad from selling cucumbers. I know I am not the first. My mother took the crooked walk too” (27-28). Teenage pregnancy is reiterated through the generations due to poverty and lack of education. According to Michael Carroll and Susan Maher, the tension of the story relies on the narrator’s usage of myths, which make the girl’s experiences that of the entirety of females (72). The rather naïve young girl is easily taken in by the smooth-talking drifter, Boy Baby. He begins his seduction slowly by first buying produce from her pushcart—mangoes, lime juice, chili powder, and cucumbers. All of the items he purchases have sexual connotations associated with them.4 In subsequent weeks, he brings her some KoolAid to symbolically and literally quench her thirst. He continues to entice her with his deceitful stories of his Mayan ancestry, which purportedly link him to the kings of the Yucatán. This false myth is a source of empowerment for Boy Baby to seduce the girl (Payant 98). However, since she trusts his promise to “love me like a revolution, like a religion…” (27), the young girl equates him with a prominent element in her life: her faith. Her Christianity is displaced by the imposition of Boy Baby’s Mayan lore. His seductive pronouncements share the rhetoric of church sermons that offer a promising future: “The stars foretell everything, he said. My birth. My son’s. The boychild who will bring back the grandeur of my people from those who have broken the arrows, from those who have pushed the ancient stones off their pedestals” (29). These words, echoing previously heard stories of Christ’s birth, allow the young girl to believe that she can participate in the prodigiousness of the myth. By submitting to him sexually, she believes she will be transformed from lowly pushcart vendor to majestic queen: “So I was initiated beneath an ancient sky by a great and mighty heir—Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. I, Ixchel, his queen” (30). In ancient Mayan culture, Ixchel is the name given to the goddess of midwifery and medicine. Represented as a jaguar, Ixchel corresponds to Toci Yoalticitl, “Our Grandmother the Nocturnal Physician,” an Aztec earth goddess who is related to Cihuacoatl, another Aztec goddess invoked at birth. In Boy Baby’s back room at Esparza and Sons Auto Repair shop, the young girl is raped. She does not realize the gravity of the act, even as he tries to coerce her into not mentioning to anyone what he does to her. The act itself is briefly described by the narrator as follows: “something inside bit me, and I gave out a cry as if the other,

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the one I wouldn’t be anymore, leapt out” (30). In the carnal act, the young girl loses part of herself and considers herself initiated into the world of womanhood. To her, The truth is, it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t any deal at all. I put my bloody panties inside my Tshirt and ran home hugging myself. I thought about a lot of things on the way home. I thought about all the world and how suddenly I became part of history and wondered if everyone on the street, the sewing machine lady and the panadería saleswomen and the women with two kids sitting on the bus bench didn’t all know. Did I look any different? Could they tell? We were all the same somehow, laughing behind our hands, waiting the way all women wait, and when we find out, we wonder why the world and a million years made such a big deal over nothing. (30)

The silence that surrounds sexuality in society is perpetuated in order to limit information to nubile females and to decrease the temptation to have intercourse. In the end, this attitude has only fostered a desire in young girls to experience things that are only spoken of in whispers. When the young girl is exiled to Mexico for her moral slip, she encounters young cousins who are starving for information: “What they want to know really is how it is to have a man, because they are too ashamed to ask their married sisters” (34). Her information is treated as dangerous to the other girls, and for this reason, she is partially ostracized. The older ones know it is taboo to speak of such subjects whereas the younger ones do not. In “One Holy Night,” different reactions are registered for the sexual transgression of rape. The young girl knows that she should feel shame for losing her virginity, but she does not. Sex is an act forbidden outside the marriage contract, and society imposes guilt and humiliation upon those who transgress. She states, “I know I was supposed to feel ashamed, but I wasn’t ashamed. I wanted to stand on top of the highest building, the top-top floor, and yell, I know” (30). Ironically, instead of silencing her disgrace, she wishes to publicize it. Her wish to break the taboo that silences such experiences would not allow the shame to be perpetuated. Although this sexual awakening for the girl satisfies her natural curiosity about sexuality, her family does not view it in the same light. This is no doubt due to the fact that in Hispanic society women constitute the guardians of the family’s

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honor, and the virginity of females is paramount to the family’s social standing in the community. Cisneros employs contextual symbolism to illustrate this point; the pushcart must be burned because it is emblematic of the family’s humiliation. Since no one is willing to accept responsibility for the girl’s “crime,” the blame of what has happened is passed around the members of the family. The grandmother recriminates the uncle: “Abuelita says it’s Uncle Lalo’s fault because he’s the man of the family and if he had come home on time like he was supposed to and worked the pushcart on the days he was supposed to and watched over his goddaughter, who is too foolish to look after herself, nothing would’ve happened…” (28). The uncle, as the only male relative, is considered responsible for guarding the honor of the female family members. However, the uncle blames the corruption of the foreign culture in which they live: “… if they had never left Mexico in the first place, shame enough would have kept a girl from doing devil things” (28). Ultimately, the family’s disgrace is doubled since not only is the girl raped, but she is pregnant, a shame they cannot hide. Therefore, her relatives try to minimize the damage to their honor by forcing the aggressor to offer marriage and take responsibility for his transgression. When the family tries to locate the man who committed the “crime,” they are unable to find him. His sister, a nun, writes to the family, and reveals pertinent information about him including his true identity, Chato; his age, thirty-seven years old; and his unfounded claim to Aztec ancestry. At this point, the reader realizes that Boy Baby is not a teenager, but a man, and what transpired between the two constitutes statutory rape. Yet the horror does not end there, since Boy Baby is arrested for killing eleven female girls and disposing of their bodies in a cave over the last seven years; the protagonist was slotted to be the twelfth victim. Another type of rape recorded in this collection can be found in the previously analyzed “Eyes of Zapata,” where Inés’s mother is accused of being a witch by the townspeople. In the belief of the duality of the body and soul, witches are depicted as the incarnation of sins of the flesh and female sexuality (Bovenschen 103). For these sins, her mother will pay with her life. When Inés takes one of her nightly journeys, she comes upon the scene of her mother’s rape. In it, she first sees her mother “in a field of cempoaxúchitl flowers with a man who is not my father” (111). After they fornicate, he signals other men who are hiding to come forth: “the others descend…. How each

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waiting his turn grunts words like hail that splits open the skin, just as before they’d whispered words of love. The star of her sex open to the sky” (111). After gang-raping her, these men repeat the transgression by spearing the victim with cane stakes. As Suzanne Wofford has noted, weapons can replace the penis and the wounds inflicted are where “…the violation of the female inner space is literalized. The menacing nature of this act of violence is conveyed by the almost pornographic (or voyeuristic) interest in the detailed account…” (207). The disfigurement of the skin made by the spears serves as additional punishment. This violence, which inflicts mortal wounds, also disfigures the female so that her beauty is not registered as if it were the reason for her fall from grace. The act of rape and disfigurement is a punishment for transgressing society’s acceptable boundaries. This rape is committed as a warning to all other women not to overstep their bounds in society. Her response is recorded indirectly as only “[h]er sharp cry” (111), suggesting that the pleading falls on deaf ears. They leave her, “…braids undone, a man’s sombrero tipped on her head, a cigar in her mouth, as if to say, this is what we do to women who try to act like men” (111). Indeed, the society, which frowns upon female infidelity yet turns a blind eye to male adultery, must correct any misstep lest other women find this practice acceptable. Blind eyes and deaf ears are often turned to victims of the fourth taboo discussed in this essay and addressed by Sandra Cisneros in two Women Hollering Creek selections. 4. Abuse The subject of abuse is touched upon in “My Tocaya” as well as the title story, “Women Hollering Creek.” In patriarchal society, males are the sole authority over social, political and domestic affairs. The patriarchy thus does not accept the acts of domestic abuse as violence due to the belief that “[b]attery is often precipitated by women’s noncompliance with gender requirements” (MacKinnon 49). Besides demonstrating patriarchal oppression, such violence degrades women and reduces them to mere objects or possessions. According to Emily Detmer, abusers resort to many tactics to control and dominate their victims, including isolation, intimidation, emotional abuse, economic manipulation, sexual assault, linguistic dominance, and denial of basic needs (283). The final representation of female

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victimization encompasses an entire range of suffering in these short stories by Cisneros. “My Tocaya” centers on Patricia Bernadette Benavídez, a thirteenyear-old girl. Told through the eyes of one of her classmates, the story details her disappearance and reincarnation. Ironically, both the narrator and the protagonist share the same name and seem to be doppelgangers. The narrator first exhibits contempt for the younger Patricia who is only useful to her as a go-between with her love interest, Max Lucas Luna Luna. The narrator’s disdain for Benavídez stems from the latter’s not accepting her Hispanic cultural heritage. Benavídez wears glittery earrings and high heels, adopts an Americanized version of her name, and alters her voice to fit in: “Says her name’s ‘Tri-ish.’ Invented herself a phony English accent too, all breathless and sexy like a British Marilyn Monroe. Real goofy. I mean, whoever heard of a Mexican with a British accent?” (37). Trish, more so than other characters in the collection, has adopted what Castillo has designated the “Subjunctive Mood” (292). In other words, Trish has adapted her “expression of self” by embracing multiple conflicting value systems to conform to the context.5 Trish is attempting to define herself as an individual in the widely different milieu she must navigate. Relegated to filling in for her brother at the taquería, a place which defines her ethnically, she fulfills her duty to the family. As a younger student, she is trying to define who she is while straddling both cultures so she adopts a “persona” that will allow her to assimilate. The abuse is not directly portrayed in the text since the narrator does not witness it. Instead, Trish’s disappearance from home acts as an indicator that something is amiss. When Trish runs away from home, the narrator first presents it as just dissatisfaction with her life; she “[d]isappeared from a life sentence at that taco house. Got tired of coming home stinking of crispy tacos. Well, no wonder she left. I wouldn’t want to stink of crispy tacos neither” (37). The physical abuse is not portrayed directly but only inferred by the narrator’s description of the existent familial relationships. Her father is described as being “mean” and having a difficult relationship with his children, especially her brother (36).6 The narrator then reveals the following: “Who knows what she had to put up with. Maybe her father beat her. He beat the brother, I know that…It was one of those fist fights that finally did it—drove the boy off forever, though probably he was sick of stinking of tacos too” (37).

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Here the narrator displaces the reason for the brother’s leaving from the violence he endured to the smell of the food. Therefore, the words “stinking of tacos” become a euphemism for the silenced truth, the abuse and beatings endured by the children. The fact that the children are forced to work in the family’s food service business is not unusual for first-generation families. In the taqueria, Trisha in her uniform is complying with the culture’s unwritten rules for a female: she should prepare food. She works there, “after school and every weekend, bored, a little sad…” (36). Through this familial control, her family hopes to squelch her desire to embrace the dominant culture. This sort of mistreatment, a norm for women characters in Cisneros’s work as reported by Maria Szadziuk (6), prompts Trish to run away from home just as her brother had before her. The parents, distraught at Trish’s disappearance, send the young girl messages through different media. When an unidentified body is found in a ditch, no one seeks to verify the body’s identity since this is what happens to women who leave the patriarchal home. Trish is then instantaneously reconfigured into a murdered virgin pitied by everyone. The outpouring of emotion at the school is observed at a distance by the narrator, who is jealous of the attention Trish is receiving. Shortly thereafter, Trish appears at a police station because as a young woman she does not have the resources to survive on her own. In contrast to the concern exhibited by the family and classmates, the narrator displays only scorn for Trish. The narrator assures the reader that Trish’s trouble is due to her flamboyance: “A girl who wore rhinestone earrings and glitter high heels to school was destined for trouble that nobody—not God or correctional institutions—could mend” (36-37). It is interesting that the narrator emphasizes only the girl’s negative attributes and disregards her positive traits such as her industriousness and intellect: “…she got double promoted somewhere and that’s how come she wound up in high school before she had any business being here” (37). Through the diction and negative attitude displayed by the narrator, it seems evident that she is projecting her own frustration onto Trish. Trish presumably is an alter ego for the narrator, since Trish has used her diligence and intelligence to become successful, whereas the narrator has not (Payant 99). The narrator’s jealousy stems from the fact that Trish is assimilating into the culture more successfully than she is. In “Woman Hollering Creek,” the title story, spousal abuse is also portrayed.7 This narrative centers on a young woman named Cleófilas

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Enriqueta de León Hernández, who weds a young man, Juan Pedro Martínez Sánchez, and goes to live in Seguín, Texas. When Cleófilas first arrives in Texas she is excited to move from her dusty, boring Mexican town to Seguín, because it had “A nice sterling ring to it. The tinkle of money. She would get to wear outfits like the women on the tele, like Lucía Méndez. And have a lovely house, and wouldn’t Chela be jealous” (45). All her girlhood hopes and dreams for future prosperity are crystallized in this passage. Yet, when she arrives in Texas, she finds it is no better than the place she left: This town with its silly pride for a bronze pecan the size of a baby carriage in front of the city hall. TV repair shop, drug store, hardware, dry cleaner’s, chiropractor’s, liquor store, bail bonds, empty storefront, and nothing, nothing, nothing of interest. Nothing one could walk to, at any rate. Because the towns here are built so that you have to depend on husbands. Or you stay home. Or you drive. If you’re rich enough to own, allowed to drive, your own car. (50-51)

In this passage, the enumeration of the businesses in town is devoid of verbs and emphasizes the restriction placed upon mobility. Also, the list progresses toward increasingly seedier establishments, intensifying the desperation felt in the town. Therefore her home town of “dust and despair” is no better than this “town of gossips” (50). Ana María Carbonell notes that “[Cleófilas’s] illusions … fall apart one by one. America does not represent the land of prosperity she had envisioned; her luxurious dreams of fine clothing and a new home are shattered...” (66). Her dreams dashed, Cleófilas feels trapped in her new surroundings. Cleófilas’s feelings of confinement are compounded by her lack of vital relationships. In Texas, she is limited to socializing with her neighbors: “There is no place to go. Unless one counts the neighbor ladies. Soledad on one side, Dolores on the other. Or the creek” (51). These women represent the possibilities emblematized in the life they lead: Soledad, who was abandoned by her husband; and Dolores, who tragically lost her family. They serve as a further oppressive force in Cleófilas’s life as the advice that they give her reinforces patriarchal norms. They repress Cleófilas with their warnings: “Don’t go out there after dark, mi’jita. Stay near the house. No es bueno para la salud. Mala suerte. Bad luck. Mal aire. You’ll get sick and the baby too. You’ll catch a fright wandering about in the dark, and then you’ll

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see how right we were” (51). She has no one to talk to, no outlet, and the only other female she knows, Trini from the laundromat, scolds her for doing things wrong. In Mexican culture, as Pilar Rodriguez Aranda notes, the conception of appropriate behavior for women is limited and thus quite oppressive (66). Cleófilas has nowhere else that she can go but to the creek. The creek is an important element in Cleófilas’s life from the very first moment she comes to the town. Initially, it sets the boundaries of her new life when she arrives and later will become a repressive element as time passes. The gurgling of the creek calls out to Cleófilas, thereby invoking the myth of La Llorona. There are several versions existent of the Mexican Llorona myth, but it is basically centered on a mother who sacrifices her children and is drawn to the river to weep the tragedy. Cisneros re-envisions this myth, propelling Cleófilas into action to rebel against her fate (51).8 Teresa Fiore sees the creek as an “enchanted source” that gives Cleófilas the answers to her questions, a “liminal place where the protagonist can sit and meditate on the past in order to better understand the present” (69). This claustrophobic atmosphere where Cleófilas lives only gets worse when her husband starts to beat her. The battery is recorded in the text as follows: “…he slapped her once, and then again, and, again, until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood, she didn’t fight back, she didn’t break into tears, she didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things in the telenovelas” (47). Since she has not witnessed this type of behavior before, she does not know how to react. When Juan first hits Cleófilas, she adopts a passive posture that does not “fight back” (47). This physical abuse further imprisons her and renders her silent as simultaneously it robs her of her words: “She could think of nothing to say, said nothing. Just stroked the dark curls of the man who wept and would weep like a child, his tears of repentance and shame, this time and each” (48). The end of this passage notes that this mode of comportment is repeated by Juan, and consequently the cycle of beating, repentance and shame becomes a ritualistic pattern of behavior. The cyclical ritual of the beatings establishes a pattern of violence which relies on female passivity toward males’ activity (Griffin 89-90). The beatings serve as punishment and imply that the victim has done something to merit them. The black and blue marks on Cleófilas’s body leave testimony to her husband’s physical superiority.

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Since it is taboo to talk to anyone about domestic violence, Cleófilas loses her voice. From this point forward, Cleófilas is reduced to mechanical reactions, not daring to utter a word when she visits the ice-house with her husband. According to Leonore Walker in The Battered Woman, nearly all incidents of domestic violence occur in the home, most in the shared living areas: If at home, where about 80% of the battering incidents started, the abuse was most likely to begin and end in the living room or in the bedroom. Less than 20% of the reported incidents began in the kitchen…This is interesting as al-most every battered woman reports some fights over her partner’s expectations of her meal preparation. It may be that the woman has more control in her kitchen or the man believes she does per the traditional image of a homemaker. (31) Many of the victims are killed by their husbands or boyfriends in a cycle of battery that imitates the rhythms of heterosexual sex. Such a fatal ending befell Maximiliano’s wife who was shot when she confronted her husband at the ice-house (51). Cleófilas realizes that these beatings will continue to end in tragedy because of the incidents published in the press “the newspapers were full of such stories. This woman found on the side of the interstate. This one pushed from a moving car. This one’s cadaver, this one unconscious, this one beaten blue. Her ex-husband, her husband, her lover, her father, her brother, her uncle, her friend, her co-worker. Always. The same grisly news in the pages of the dailies” (52). As portrayed in the newspapers, domestic violence reduces women to a position of insignificance, disposable like an object by the perpetrators of the crime. The abuse Cleófilas endures is mental as well as physical. She internalizes Juan Pedro’s temper tantrums, blaming herself for the abuse she receives. Recorded in indirect discourse, she notes: Not that he isn’t a good man…[H]e kicks the refrigerator and says he hates this shitty house and is going out where he won’t be bothered with the baby’s howling and her suspicious questions, and her requests to fix this and this and this because if she had any brains in her head she’d realize he’s been up before the rooster earning his living to pay for the food in

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The initial statement of him being a “good man” is subverted by his subsequent actions and words. In the tirade which is presented, the husband belittles his wife for being an idiot and a nag. By making it patent that he provides for her, and that she does not possess skills to support herself, he reinforces that she has no other choice but to stay at his side. She realizes that he is “this man, this father, this rival, this keeper, this lord, this master, this husband till kingdom come” (49). Jacqueline Doyle points out that this pronouncement evokes St. Paul’s words in Ephesians 5:22, encouraging women to submit to their husbands’ dominance (63). At the same time, these liturgical words fill Cleófilas with despair, since they suggest that marriage is for eternity in the eyes of the Church. There is no escaping the tyrannical Juan Pedro until death. When Juan Pedro hits her in the face with a book, Cleófilas realizes that the bruises run much deeper than the skin: “A hot welt across her cheek. She could forgive that. But what stung more was the fact it was her book, a love story by Corín Tellado, what she loved most now that she lived in the U.S., without a television set, without the telenovelas” (52). Juan Pedro has taken an object which contains her vision of idealized life and converted it into a weapon with which to harm her. By injuring her with a Corín Tellado book, he points to the invalidity of her only means of evading the present and makes her cognizant that her dreams are futile. With the realization that life is not accurately reflected in soap operas, Cleófilas begins to reflect upon her future. When she recalls her father’s parting words, she finds a solution to her problem. He had said, “I am your father, I will never abandon you. Only now as a mother did she remember. Now, when she and Juan Pedrito sat by the creek’s edge. How when a man and a woman love each other, sometimes that love sours. But a parent’s love for a child, a child’s for its parents, is another thing entirely” (43). These words, echoing biblical phrases found in John 15:9-17 and Hebrews 13:5, remind Cleófilas that God never abandons his children. Repeated as a sacred chant in the text, these words will lead her to her salvation. She does realize that if she returns home to her father, it would be seen as a “disgrace” for her family because society holds the victim just as responsible for the actions of the perpetrator (50). Despite its

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inaccuracy, this belief persists that the victim should have done something to control or alter the actions of the violator. In “Woman Hollering Creek,” the protagonist knows she must ask for assistance if she is going to escape the physical abuse that she suffers. In one of the few times Cleófilas’s voice is recorded, albeit indirectly, she begs Juan Pedro to take her to the doctor. In this onesided conversation, the reader sees how artfully she overcomes his reticence to allow her to go. For all his counters, she is able to parry back. When he objects because they might see her bruises, she says she will lie and say that she fell clumsily. When he identifies lack of money as an impediment, she says she will write her father to ask for a loan. When he wants to know why she is so insistent, she says she fears the baby is not positioned well and may kill her. When he worries about how they will dress, she assures him that he will not be embarrassed (53). At the doctor’s office, Graciela sees the bruises on Cleófilas’s body and realizes that this woman must escape her violent situation. Graciela knows that they can not contact the authorities in this matter since it is futile: “[s]hit. You think they’re going to help her? Give me a break. This lady doesn’t even speak English. She hasn’t been allowed to call home or write or nothing” (54). Graciela knows that all-male avenues to help Cleófilas will fail. In the cases of spousal battery, the spouse is usually released to the husband, and the cycle continues until one or both end up dead. Graciela’s plan lies outside male boundaries, since women will have to save her. On the way to the bus station, Felice and Cleófilas cross over the creek that serves as the border that demarcates Cleófilas’s hell. At that moment, Felice “let out a yell as loud as any mariachi” (55). This scream startles Cleófilas, but it also lets her see another possibility for women: “The fact that she drove a pickup. A pickup, mind you… The pickup was hers. She herself has chosen it. She was paying for it… Felice was like no woman she’d ever met. Can you imagine, when we crossed the arroyo she just started yelling like a crazy, she would say later to her father and brothers.” (55-56). Cleófilas too finds her voice when she crosses over the creek that has confined her. Consequently, she will later be able to tell her family about Felice and her own story. Carbonell believes that with her yell, “Cleófilas… regains her voice by transforming herself from a stereotypical Llorona figure, a weeping victim, to a Gritona, a hollering warrior” (64). The closing lines attest to Cleófilas’s survival, her gurgling laughter becoming a formidable escape force.

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In “Woman Hollering Creek,” Cleófilas herself has not defined her identity, so she forges one based on the telenovelas. In the initial lines of the short story, her lack of identity is made patent, as it is noted that when she married, “Don Serafín gave Juan Pedro Martínez Sánchez permission to take Cleófilas Enriqueta DeLeón Hernández as his bride, across her father’s threshold…” (43). The marriage contract traditionally entered by two equal partners is subverted here. Cleófilas is presented as an object that passes hands in a business transaction, implied by the wording of the sentence. Cleófilas passes from her paternal home to her husband’s house without ever having to define herself as a woman. This lack of identity is compounded by the fact that Cleófilas has not had a mother figure to guide her. Therefore, she is forced to take her cues for fashion, hairstyles, and reactions to problems from the telenovelas that she watches. As Teresa De Lauretis notes, Cleófilas and her friends “accept and absorb” this representation of women as their own (22-24). This leads Cleófilas to believe that what she “has been waiting for, has been whispering, and sighing and giggling for, has been anticipating since she was old enough to lean against the window displays of gauze and butterflies and lace, is passion” (44). Unfortunately, the telenovelas Cleófilas watches, Tu o Nadie, The Rich Also Cry, and María de Nadie, all portray unrealistic images of women and relationships. They reiterate the female qualities desired by the patriarchy, forming a mantra that women learn to embody. According to Jean Wyatt, “Mexican telenovelas impl[y] that interpellation into the cultural space of womanhood depends on a specular identification with an infinite repetition of the ‘self-same’ model of femininity—a process which allows no leeway for resistance or innovation” (101). This is why Cleófilas cannot accept the disparity between her idealized world and the world in which she lives. Her dreams have failed her: “Cleófilas thought her life would have to be like that, like a telenovela, only now the episodes got sadder and sadder. And there were no commercials in between for comic relief. And no happy ending in sight” (52-53). The time spent watching the telenovelas is an occasion for socialization among women and an event which nurtures a feeling of solidarity. However, at other times, it can result in loneliness if the expectations are not met. Cleófilas recognizes that her husband is not as attractive as the men of the soap operas, as he has a pock-marked face, a beer belly, and husky physique. He also doesn’t act like those men, since he “farts and belches and snores” (49). Yet, she still longs

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for the idealized life, believing it can be achieved by a simple name change, “But somehow she would have to change her name to Topazio, or Yesenia, Cristal, Adriana, Stefania, Andrea, something more poetic than Cleófilas. Everything happened to women with names like jewels…But what happened to a Cleófilas? Nothing. But a crack in the face” (53).9 Ironically, the things that are happening to her should be told but are silenced. In this short story, Cisneros revises the myths made popular in culture by the telenovelas to force her character to reinvent herself by forging a different identity. 5. Conclusion What becomes evident in Woman Hollering Creek and other stories is the number of taboos which Cisneros chooses to portray, including adultery, homosexuality, rape and abuse. In the case of adultery, society’s prevailing attitude of unacceptability in these texts is challenged. Each one of the female characters in “La Fabulosa: A Texas Operetta,” “Never Marry a Mexican,” “Eyes of Zapata,” and “Bien Pretty” finds that their sexual yearnings take precedence over societal norms. In these four stories, the protagonists feel empowered as they choose to sleep with married men. Their assertiveness emerges as if they were assuming the male roles in these adulterous liaisons, thus setting the boundaries of the relationships. In this fashion, Cisneros parodies the traditional role assigned to men by placing the women in them. In the short stories “Remember the Alamo,” “The Marlboro Man,” and “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” homosexuality is presented as a normal occurrence. Yet in all of the stories, glimpses are exhibited through the biker types at bars, women gossiping, or one’s own identity struggle with society’s unwillingness to accept this sexual deviancy. As has been demonstrated in “Remember the Alamo,” Rudy/Tristán’s bisexuality is accepted by his family and friends as they see it as an extension of his artistry. Yet in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” Benjamin is imbued with feelings of shame for his sexual preferences. The topic of rape, addressed in “One Holy Night” and “Eyes of Zapata,” is muted somewhat, perhaps due to the severity of the transgression. In “One Holy Night,” the reader is not aware that Boy Baby is a grown man and that the young girl’s sexual initiation is not perpetrated by a peer. When Boy Baby’s age is revealed at the conclusion of the story, the shock of the rape is displaced by his other

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nefarious actions. In “Eyes of Zapata,” rape serves as a warning to other women that adulterous affairs will not be tolerated by the community. Domestic violence is treated in both “Woman Hollering Creek” and “My Tocaya.” In these two stories, the abusive conduct receives little attention as Cisneros portrays it much as society does. In “My Tocaya,” abuse is euphemistically represented as Trish’s displeasure of “smelling like tacos,” while in “Woman Hollering Creek,” Cleófilas quickly dismisses it, believing that she has brought the violence upon herself by some defect of her own. Throughout the entire book, Cisneros plays with societal expectations of the taboos, in some cases parodying them by interchanging male and female roles. In the collection of short stories, each taboo affects the characters differently. Regarding adultery, where the character knows that she is committing the transgression, she revels in it. Carmen, Inés, and Clemencia engage in these affairs willingly, and seem to be unfazed when the relationships sour; when this occurs, each forges ahead by finding a new interest, protecting her children and her man, or plotting revenge. In Lupe’s case, where she is unaware of being in an adulterous affair, she turns to traditional methods to find solace. These fail her, and only when she consciously takes control and actively engages in the healing process does she succeed. Varied responses to homosexuality are registered. On the one hand, Ben exhibits the shame he feels and on the other, Tristán/Rudy accepts who he is even though he never defends himself. The reaction toward the transgression of rape is presented in a dichotomous fashion. The young girl in “One Holy Night” is proud that she finally has been initiated into the secrets of womanhood while her family is shamed because they were unable to prevent it. In “Eyes of Zapata,” the town views the rape as warranted whereas the daughter, Inés, grieves the violence perpetrated upon her mother. In the case of domestic violence, Cleófilas quietly endures the physical abuse and does not know how to overcome it until she abandons her husband. In “My Tocaya,” Trish flees the home to avoid the abuse; however, she must return when she realizes she does not have any other options. In many of the short stories, the characters are negatively influenced by their bi-cultural heritage; their inability to define themselves as either Mexican or American affects their concept of self. For Cisneros, society has set up a binary construct of identification: one is either Mexican/ American; heterosexual/ homosexual; white/ non-white; man/woman. These characters are

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unable to select only one identity option, and this causes them to experience crises of self. Compounding this identity crisis is the fact that many of the females are portrayed as motherless. Mothers in Hispanic society are charged with the role of passing on traditions, cultural knowledge, and the acceptable traits of femininity. According to Szadziuk: This ambiguous mother’s role, encouraging as well as repressive, reflects a double standard: on the one hand, an attempt to become integrated in the dominant, North American culture, which provides access to economic and social privileges, and on the other, an effort to preserve one’s own cultural identity by clinging to Hispanic traditions and stereotypes. (116)

When the mother figure is absent, the females must find other readily available role models, including those in pop culture and the telenovelas. In “My Tocaya,” “Woman Hollering Creek,” and “Bien Pretty,” the influence of soap operas is emphasized. The process of establishing an identity is particularly difficult for Latinos in a predominantly Anglo culture. Maria Herrera-Sobek sees the establishment of this identity as even harder for Latinas since they are a “marginal group within a marginal group” (10). Thus, as Gloria Anzaldúa has pointed out in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the reconstruction of the mestiza identity has to be dynamic and multiple, accepting traditions, myths and symbols and transforming them to suit an individual’s own personal reality (82-84). By exploring sexuality and the conflicting nature of it, Cisneros gives rise to a voice that will denounce the taboos as unacceptable. This topic, more so than any other, allows Cisneros to break the imposed silence that surrounds prescribed norms of behavior, gender stereotypes, ethnic identities, and sexual violence. According to Mary McCay, “Cisneros certainly breaks the tight constraints on language and voice. She also insists on breaking the genre constraints of the poem and the story, and, finally, she crashes through the most difficult border of all, the border of identity” (318). By blurring language, gender, and roles, Cisneros is able to acquire a voice not only for herself, but also for the Chicana experience. Her representation of culture as a permutable entity allows for there to be a reconstruction of cultural identity with multiple combinations. In Woman Hollering

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Creek and Other Stories, Cisneros achieves a “dialogue of resistance,” as identified by Tey Diana Rebolledo, to the dominant culture, as well as an affirmation of the Mexican-American identity and culture.

Victoria L. Ketz Iona College Notes 1

This is particularly apparent in the short story “Barbie-Q” which is not studied in this essay. In “Barbie-Q,” the young girls are aware of the images that are considered desirable by society, emblematized through the Barbie dolls with which they play. The girls are reduced to playing with discounted models with physical imperfections. This points to the fact that many ethnic groups will never be able to achieve neither the physical attributes nor financial standing held so important by Anglo society. 2 It is important to note that Chicana writers are re-envisioning Malinche from a vilified figure to a vindicated one. This symbolic role of Malinche’s story has been studied in many articles. Among those, please see the articles written by González, Bados Ciria, Griffin, Phelan, Doyle, Carbonell, and Wyatt. 3 Translations: “I have you hitched and nailed” and “Return to me.” 4 The sexuality of the fruit is obvious. Mangos have been linked to goddesses of sexuality and recently in Caribbean literature have been associated with female sexuality. The chili powder is a very hot spice, which is a reference to the heat of lust. The cucumber is an obvious phallic symbol, which has long been used to temper spicy foods. 5 In an interview with Martha Satz, Cisneros reveals what it is like growing up as a Mexican: “I felt a great guilt betraying that culture. Your culture tells you that if you step out of line, if you break these norms, you are becoming anglicized, you’re becoming the malinche—influenced and contaminated by these foreign influences and ideas” (4). 6 “My Tocaya” has many parallels to the abuse that Sally has to endure in The House on Mango Street. 7 Cisneros uses an effaced narrator in 14 narrative sequences with transitions and four temporal moments (Phelan 223). 8 A great deal of excellent criticism further elucidates La Llorona. Please see González, Payant, Cutting, Carroll, Doyle, and Wyatt. 9 Cutting has analyzed the name Cleófilas and finds “…the two syllables of the name suggest ‘Cleopatra’ and ‘filial.” Both syllables are relevant to Cleófilas’s story. The latter syllable, with its association of affiliation, connection, and especially the common meaning of offspring or a branch of the family, suggests Cleófilas’s exploration of life as daughter, wife and mother. The popular conception of Cleopatra as a powerful queen who is also a martyr to love invites comparison with Cleófilas’s initial devotion to the myths of romantic love and her apparent powerlessness in marriage and society” (36).

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Works Consulted Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Bados Ciria, Concepción. “Sandra Cisneros and Helena Maria Viramontes: The Impact of Chicana Writers in the ‘New’ Literary Arena in the United States” in Letras en el espejo: Ensayos de literature Americana comparada. eds. María José Alvárez, Manuel Broncano, and José Luis Chamosa, León: Universidad de León, 1999. (31-37) Beltrán-Vocal, María. “La problemática de la chicana en dos obras de Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street y Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.” Letras Femeninas 21.1-2. (1995): 139-151. Bovenschen, Silvia, et al. “The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch, and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of Appropriation of the Nature and Object of Domination of Nature.” New German Critique 15 (1978): 82-119. Briante, Susan. “Hijas de La Malinche: Contemporary Representations of ‘El bueno el mal Salvaje.’” Bilingual Review 24.3 (1999): 254-263. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carbonell, Ana María. “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.” Melus 24.2 (Summer 1999): 53-74. Carroll, Michael, and Susan Maher. “‘A las Mujeres’: Cultural Context and the Process of Maturity in Sandra Cisneros’ [sic] Woman Hollering Creek.” North Dakota Quarterly 64.1 (1997): 70-80. Castillo, Debra A. Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1992. Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage Contemporary, 1991. Cortés-Conde, Florencia, and Diana Boxer. “Bilingual Word-Play in Literary Discourse: the Creation of Relational Identity.” Language and Literature 11.2 (2002): 137-151. Cutting, Rose Marie. “Power and Powerlessness: Names in the Fiction of Sandra Cisneros.” Xavier Review 18.2 (1998): 33-42. Danielson, Linda L. “Storyteller: Grandmother Spider’s Web.” Journal of the Southwest 30 (1988): 325-355. De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1987. Detmer, Emily, “Civilizing Subordination: Domestic Violence and The Taming of the Shrew.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.3 (1997): 273-294. Doyle, Jacqueline. “Faces of the Virgin in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek” in Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality. ed. Kristina L. Groover. .South Bend: U Notre Dame P, 2004. (256-83) ———. “Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Woman Hollering Creek’” Frontiers 16.1 (1996): 53-64. Fiore, Teresa. “Crossing and Recrossing: ‘Woman Hollering Creek’ by Sandra Cisneros.”Prospero 1 (1994): 61-75. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. García, Alesia. “Politics and Indigenous Theory in Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Yellow

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Woman’ and Sandra Cisneros’ [sic] ‘Woman Hollering Creek’” in Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory: Collected Essays. ed. Cathy Lynn Preston. New York: Garland Publications, 1995. (3-21) Ganz, Robin. “Sandra Cisneros: Borderland Crossings and Beyond.” Melus 19.1 (1994): 19-29. González, María. “Love and Conflict: Mexican American Women Writers as Daughters” in Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature. ed. Elizabeth Brown-Gillory. Austin: U Texas P, 1996. (153-71) Griffin, Susan E. “Resistance and Reinvention in Sandra Cisneros’ [sic] Woman Hollering Creek” in Ethnicity and the American Short Story. eds. William Cain and Julia Brown. New York: Garland, 1997. (85-96) Herrera-Sobek, María. Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature .Binghamton, NY: Bilingual P, 1985. Kingsolver, Barbara. “Poetic Fiction With a Tex-Mex Tilt.” Review of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) by Sandra Cisneros in Los Angeles Times Book Review 28 April 1991: 4. MacKinnon, Catherine A. “Rape: On Coercion and Consent” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sara Stanbury. New York: Columbia U P, 1997. (42-58) McCay, Mary A. “Sandra Cisneros: Crossing Border” in Uneasy Alliance: Twentieth Century American Literature, Culture, and Biography. ed. Hans Bak. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. (305-321) McCracken, Ellen. “Contemporary Chicano Narrative and Public Religious Display: Recuperating the Sacred in the Barrio Street and the Literary Text” in Cultures de la rue: Les ‘Barrios” d’Amérique du Nord. eds. Geneviève Fabre and Catherine Lejeune. Paris: l’Université Paris, 1996. (163-177) Payant, Katherine. “Borderland Themes in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek” in The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving out a Niche. eds. Katherine Pavant and Toby Rose. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. (95-108). Phelan, James. “Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Woman Hollering Creek’: Narrative as Rhetoric and as Cultural Practice.” Narrative 6.3 (1998): 221-235. Rebolledo, Tey Diana. Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicano Literature. Tucson: U Arizona P, 1995. Rodríguez Aranda, Pilar E. “On the Solidarity Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty Three: An Interview with Writer Sandra Cisneros.” The Americas Review: A Review of Hispanic Literature and Art of the USA. 18 (1990): 64-80. Satz, Martha. “Return to One’s House” Southwest Review 82.2 (1997): 166-185. Spencer, Laura Gutierrez. “Fairy Tales and Opera: The Fate of the Heroine in the Work of Sandra Cisneros” in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writer. ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: U Georgia P, 1997. (278287) Szadziuk, Maria. “Culture as Transition: Becoming a Woman in Bi-ethnic Space.” Mosaic 32.2 (1999): 109-120. Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1979. Thomson, Jeff. “’What is Called Heaven’: Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek.” Studies in Short Fiction 31.3 (1994): 415-424.

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Walker, Leonore. The Battered Woman Syndrome. 2nd ed. New York: Springer Publishing, 2000. Wofford, Suzanne L. “The Social Aesthetics of Rape: Closural Violence in Boccaccio and Botticelli” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene. eds. David Quint et al., Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992. (189-238) Wyatt, Jean. "On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros's 'Never Marry a Mexican' and 'Woman Hollering Creek.'" Tulsa Studies in women's Literature 14.2 (Fall 1995): 243-271. ———. "Hazards of Idealization in Cross-Cultural Feminist Dialogues; Abel, Cisneros, Gallop, McDowell, and Moraga." Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. 1.2 (1996): 95-112. Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, "Chicana Literature: From a Chicana Feminist Perspective." Americas REview 15 (1987): 139-145.

Images of Women: Role Expectations and Conflict Author Dialogue Brandy A. Harvey: The female characters in Woman Hollering Creek must reconcile their hope for love and prosperity and successful womanhood with the reality that the expectations provided within popular culture are not achievable. They attempt to meet the impossible goal of measuring up to the expectations of men who hold the Virgin Mary supreme and provide none of the love and passion promised in telenovelas. When reality does not match fantasy, the female characters must search outside the predetermined cultural images that saturate their existence for positive images of womanhood/motherhood. Our Lady of Guadalupe offers an alternative version of womanhood, as does La Llorona. The Virgen de Guadalupe provides one source of survival as the women circumvent the predominating image of the Virgin Mary to locate their own autonomy and sexuality. Outside religious imagery, La Llorona offers subversive hope for female creativity and autonomy. In “Woman Hollering Creek” La Llorona’s story and voice speak to Cleófilas, who listens intently as they seem to tell her she does not have to endure the abuse that has almost become cliché for many of the women she knows. She no longer has to suffer in silence in an attempt to endure with the fortitude of the Virgin Mary. With the support of a female community, Cleófilas is able to relinquish her hold on cultural expectations. Finally, through the shout of Felice as she crosses the creek, the story and voice of La Llorona empower Cleófilas to respond to her own experience. Cleófilas imagines telling her own story (one of triumph) to her father and brother. By looking beyond the predominating role models, the Virgin Mary and the romantic fantasies of the telenovelas, Cleófilas locates her own version of womanhood/motherhood. Our essays confirm the notion that the female characters in this collection must locate and assert their own voice, whether literal or figurative, to survive the reality that the communal stories such as those upheld in telenovelas and tales of the Virgin Mary and to assert their belief that these myths do not apply to them. Mythical female figures provide Cisneros’s female characters with female role models

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whose means of survival and living are more readily accessible. While the legend of La Llorona and the stories of the Virgen de Guadalupe are didactic, serving the patriarchy to an extent, both narrative traditions offer a female character who chooses to act rather than to be acted upon. It is this action that inspires the female characters in this collection to formulate their own autonomy even in the face of subjugation. Victoria Ketz: Brandy and Maria Jesús, you both point out that Cisneros adopts two mythical female figures as role models for her characters. Myths and legends themselves are tales of action that purportedly occurred in the past and possess some grounding in reality. These tales, which have some didactic purpose that emphasizes a value that culture esteems, are reiterated and expanded over time. Cisneros takes these myths that exalt patriarchal values and mutates them to reflect contemporary concerns. Her retelling of the myth is then assigned a different connotation that allows the female character to become empowered, as presented in your articles. By breaking down the preconceived notions that society holds, Cisneros indicates that all women do not find fulfillment within the traditional patriarchal structures. Indeed, many of the “traditional” relationships depicted in Cisneros’s texts result in disappointment and frustration. It is only when Cisneros portrays a stronger woman who takes charge of her situation and therefore is empowered to do as she wishes that the patriarchal construct is breached. In Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, societal ideals are transmitted through Barbie dolls, telenovelas, and novels. María Jesús, I concur with your observation that all of these agents are revealed as false when placed under scrutiny, as they represent an idealization and not reality. One of the main vehicles of empowerment and self-actualization for Cisneros’s characters is creativity. Brandy, this is one of the key points that you make evident. In many of the stories, the female protagonist has to embrace and assume the role of creator. Some are mothers like Cleófilas in “Woman Hollering Creek” and the young girl in “One Holy Night,” while Lupe in “Bien Pretty” and Clemencia in “Never Marry a Mexican” are artists, and Carmen from “La fabulosa: a Texas Operetta” and Patricia from “My Tocaya” are “actresses” who assume various identities. In all the situations, the females defy the patriarchal order by creating their own destiny. What first attracted me to Cisneros’s writing is her portrayal of biculturalism in the characters’ emotions and language. Although I am

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not a Mexican-American, I am Spanish-American and have lived alternately in both cultures. I have come to understand that one can be accepted in both cultures up to a certain point especially if you look like them, speak without an accent, and understand their thought processes. However, this is not complete acceptance because at one point or another you become a “spic” or a “yanqui.” I have had to live my whole life between two languages, two cultures, two families, two sets of customs, and two distinct value systems. I think that Cisneros has been gifted with the ability to eloquently state the internal struggle of a bicultural person. She is able to put into words her keen insight into the situation and portray what it means to have a blended heritage and to season it with a dose of humor. María Jesús Castro Dopacio: Brandy, I agree with you regarding the mismatch between men’s patriarchally-sponsored hyper-reality and women’s truncated dreams and consequent reactions. I believe this impels women to initiate their heroic quest in search of their own selfhood. Cisneros highlights the significance of women’s roles regarding the cultural transformations they must bring about. Cultural memory and sisterhood are two of the strategies the Chicana writer employs in her stories. However, recovering indigenous roots is not enough in itself; Cisneros rewrites the myths of La Llorona and the Virgen de Guadalupe from a feminist perspective that allows their meanings to become updated and valid in present day-contexts, as our three essays come to prove. Strength is granted to female characters through the Virgin on a spiritual level as well as through feminine solidarity, as is the case of Graciela and Felice in “Woman Hollering Creek.” Despite meekness and submission being two of the main attributes of the Virgin, Cleófilas’s final decision to forge herself a different future outside an unpromising matrimony contradicts traditions in Seguín, Texas, where nothing is named after a woman, “[u]nless she’s the Virgin” (55). The appropriation of the name of the creek runs parallel to the development of an identifying relationship between self and positive female role models. Because the collective imaginary ignores female points of view, Felice inserts her “hoot” within a renewed social textualization. Her own name is a signal of the kind of pleasure she gets from her own independence. Women’s entrance into the public sphere is severely restricted by androcentric laws. In “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” Chayo is accused of being a “malinchista” for expressing ideas contrary to the

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established order, and, even more so, for daring to express her female creativity through her painting rather than through her mothering. She gets inspiration from the Virgen de Guadalupe, understood in this context as a political figure capable of rallying a people several times throughout history. Victoria, this relates to the concept of collective self you refer to in your essay. Hence, the Virgin is not only a mother in the biological sense of reproduction, but also the mother of fostering ideas and political activism. Concerning biculturalism, it has already been suggested that Cisneros depicts how women try to cope with contradictory messages coming from Mexican and Anglo-American cultures. The voices of female narrators portray men’s difficulties to fit in such a cultural crossroad as well. Victoria, the humor you rightly ascribe to Cisneros’s writing is apparent in the fourth petition letter in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.” Ms. Barbara Ybañez, the letter writer, asks San Antonio de Padua to send her “a man man” (117). Her ideal man is a composite of both cultural substrata, someone who helps with the housework and has an autonomous capacity to live on his own. In fact, her own brothers are counterexamples to this image since they have been spoiled by an overprotective mother. This woman’s experience has cemented her self-assertive character, one that draws her apart from the objectifying male gaze. Cisneros reveals, therefore, the fluid nature of male and female identities whose ability to navigate two worlds is the true sign of their bicultural dimension. Despite fragmentation posing a real threat, most women in Woman Hollering Creek are able to overcome what some critics have called a “cultural schizophrenia.” In this sense, not only is gender identity politics rendered visible, but ethnic identity is as well. Ms. Ybañez, for instance, wants a man who speaks Spanish and who honors his cultural traditions, disregarding the term “Hispanic” as a government label that erases the history of distinct communities within the USA.

About the Authors Cecilia Donohue is Professor and Chairperson of Language and Literature at Madonna University in Livonia, Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in English from Kent State University, Ohio, and holds a Masters of Business Administration from St. John’s University in New York City. Her book, Robert Penn Warren’s Novels: Feminine and Feminist Discourse, was published in 1999. She has presented and published essays on twentieth century Southern women authors, the works of John Steinbeck, film translations of novels, sports fiction, and popular culture. Cecilia has authored several entries on American literature and culture for The Literary Encyclopedia, a British-based web database, as well as for Salem Press. Her current research is focused on Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Journal of a Novel. Ana María Almería holds a degree in English Philology, having studied at both the University of Valladolid in Spain and the University of Leicester, Great Britain. She received a grant to pursue a Masters Degree in TESOL and Spanish Literature from the University of West Virginia, where she worked as a Teaching Assistant and Department Coordinator. She currently teaches English on the secondary level in Madrid, Spain, while continuing her research on second language acquisition. Michael Carroll is an Associate Professor in the Goodrich Program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He teaches courses in Irish Literature, African American Literature, Native American Humanities, American Multicultural Humanities, and English Composition. His research interests include Indian poetry, Chicano(a) literature, multicultural education, and all aspects of African American cultural studies, especially the Jazz-Blues Aesthetic, the African American Novel, and the work of James Baldwin. Philip Coleman is a Lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, where he is Director of the MPhil in Literatures of the Americas and Head of Sophisters. He has edited collections of essays on literature and science and on the poetry of John Berryman, and has published widely on Berryman and other American writers including

232

About the Authors

William Austin, Edgar Allan Poe, Chuck Palahniuk, and Muriel Rukeyser. Mary S. Comfort teaches American Literature at Moravian College. She has published several articles on the short stories of Toni Cade Bambara. Her biographical-critical articles on Mary Delaney, Mary Wortley Montague, Hester Piozzi, Hannah Glasse, and Jane Addams appear in the The Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. She has also written biographical-critical essays on Eugene O’Neill and Revolutionary War-Women’s Diaries which have been published in The Encyclopedia of American War Literature. María Jesús Castro Dopacio has been teaching EFL in Spain since 2003, after starting her career as a visiting teacher in Texas. She earned both her M.A. in English (in 1996) and her Ph.D. in Literatures (in 2009) from the University of Oviedo, Spain. Her book, Emparatriz de las Américas: La Virgen de Guadalupe en la Literatura Chicana (University of Valencia Publications) is forthcoming. Her research interests include Chicano/a fiction, women’s studies, rewritings of Catholic iconography, and transnational identities. Brandy Andrews Harvey earned a Bachelor of Science in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She has presented her work on narratives of maternal infanticide at conferences across the United States. Dr. Harvey teaches composition and literature courses at Lone Star College in The Woodlands, Texas. Her professional work, both inside and outside the classroom, focuses on minority literature and the individual voices of the human experience. Victoria L. Ketz is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Columbia University in 1999, her M.A. in Romance Languages and Literatures from The Ohio State University in 1988, and her B.S. in Microbiology from The Ohio State University in 1986. Born in Madrid, Spain, she grew up in Europe, Africa, and the United States. Her research interests in clued: contemporary theater, narrative, film, and literary theory. Ketz has published articles on pedagogy and on twentieth century writers such as Valle-Inclàn, Pérez de Ayala, and Miguel de Unamuno. Her current book project

About the Authors

233

examines the portrayal of violence by female authors in Contemporary Peninsular Literature. Susan Naramore Maher is Peter Kiewit Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She has published widely on the literature of the American and Canadian West, with particular emphasis on contemporary fiction and creative nonfiction. With co-editor Tom Lynch, she is producing a critical anthology on the writings of Loren Eiseley entitled Artifacts and Illuminations (forthcoming, University of Nebraska Press). She is currently working on a book-length study of Plains nonfiction writers entitled Deep Maps: A Literary Cartography of the Great Plains. Professor Maher also serves on the Executive Boards of the Willa Cather Foundation, the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Society, and the Loren Eiseley Society. Pamela Rader is a member of the English Department at Georgian Court University in New Jersey, where she teaches world, women’s, and multi-ethnic literatures. She also promotes undergraduate research and scholarship, encouraging students to apply for conferences. Since Dr. Rader completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she continues to publish internationally on the works of Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Assia Djebar, Louise Erdrich, and Marjane Satrapi. Her current project addresses productive silences in literature. Dora Ramírez-Dhoore, Associate Chair and Assistant Professor of American Literature at Boise State University, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her scholarship, teaching, and service focuses on bringing textual knowledge, literacy, and the power attached to those ways of knowing to underrepresented populations. Dora’s research interrogates the relationships between textual production and how our global systems fashion citizens to consume those words and images in popular culture. She is the author of “The Cyberborderland: Surfing the Web for Xicanidad,” published in Chicana/Latina Studies, the Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambios Social; “Discovering a ‘Proper Pedagogy’: The Geography of Writing at UTPA,” in Teaching Writing with Latino/a Students: Lessons Learned at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, edited by Cristina Kirklighter, Susan Loudermilk, Diana Cardenas, and Susan Wolff Murphy; and “Dissecting Environmental Racism: Redirecting the

234

About the Authors

Toxic in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood and Helena Maria Viramonte’s Under the Feet of Jesus,” published in Ecocritical Approaches to Latin American and Latino Literatures and Cultures, edited by Adrian Kane. Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity University in Sandra Cisneros’s own San Antonio, Texas. She teaches primarily courses in nineteenth-century British literature, and she has written about Thomas Gray, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. She is currently completing a book project treating John Keats and his Victorian legacies. Shannon Wilson is currently working towards the completion of her Ph.D. at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include Twentieth Century and Contemporary American Women Writers, Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S., and Feminist Mythic Poetics.

Index A AIDS, 119, 133, 144, 170, 204 abuse, xxi, 32, 61-77, 107, 172, 1757, 179-80, 183-4, 189-191, 210-20, 222, 227 adultery, xviii, xxi, 189-203, 210, 219-20, 224 agency, 2-3, 91, 116, 136, 151-2, 160, 169-88, Adonis, 44, 147 Allen, Drew, 116 American Medical Association, 62, “Anguiano Religious Articles Rosaries Statues Medals Incense Candles Talismans Perfumes Oils Herbs,” 26, 166 Anzaldúa, Gloria, xvii, 16, 31-4, 36, 38, 47, 51-55, 89, 92, 97, 104-5, 131, 137, 151, 160, 168, 189, 221, 223 Aprea, Gustavo, 71, 77 Armendàriz, Pedro, 117, 124 Asqueta, María Cristina, 72-3, 77 Audience, 61, 69-72, 95, 145, 170, 172, 178-82, 204

B Bad Boys, xi Barbie Dolls, 79-87, 102, 108-10, 222, 228 “Barbie-Q,” 79-87, 108-10, 222 Bhaba, Homi, 91 “Bien Pretty,” xv-xvi, xix, 1, 5, 9-16, 22, 24-6, 54, 131, 145, 189, 191, 199, 201, 219, 221, 228 body, 3-4, 8, 21, 24, 33-7, 43-4, 46, 48,67, 89-90, 93, 95, 97-8, 101, 104, 122-3, 126, 1328, 142, 146-9, 165-8, 190, 206, 209, 212, 214, 217

borderlands, xxii, 3, 10, 15-6, 31, 523, 77, 90, 92, 97, 104, 106, 131, 168, 180, 187, 221, 223, Brady, Mary Pat, xv, xxii, 4, 16, 56, 90,97, 106, 139, 143, 145, 149 Brando, Marlon, 124 buey, 92, 105 burra, 92

C Caramelo, xii, 90, 115-6, 120-2, 124, 128-9 Carbonell, Ana María, xv, xxii, 51-2, 66, 77, 213, 217, 222-3 “The Cariboo Café,” 66 Castillo, Ana, xxii, 94, 106, 128-9, 151, 168, 189 Catholicism, 25, 34, 36, 51, 131, 155, 161-2, 165, 168 Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 63 Chantico, 37 Chicago, Illinois, xi, 4, 90 Chicana, xii-xiii, xvii-xviii, xx, 1, 3-4, 15-6, 24, 31-52, 54, 61, 646, 68, 71, 73, 75-6, 90, 912, 94-7, 99, 101-2, 104-7, 111, 128, 131, 140, 148-9, 155-68, 189, 203, 221-4, 229, 232-3, Chicana subjectivity, 90-1, 107, 158 Chicano cultural myths, 14, 61, 107 childhood, 4, 21, 79, 110, 131, 13740, 158, 171, 179, 183-4, 198 La Chingada, 41-2, 46, 51, 131, 1356 Cihuacoatl, 39, 44, 47, 49, 51, 207 Cisneros, Alfredo, xi-xii Cixous, Hélène, 186-7 class, xvi, 1-16, 19, 20, 23, 55, 67, 70-2,81-2, 89-92, 96-7, 99, 102, 106, 110, 156, 169-70 Coatlicue, xxii, 10, 32, 34, 37-9, 51-2,

Index

236 77, 106, 164 community, viii, xii, xiv, 6, 17, 23-8, 40, 42, 61, 75, 84-6, 90, 94, 97-8, 103-4, 107, 109-10, 155, 161, 173-4, 176, 17981, 183, 185, 195-6, 200, 209, 220, 227 composite language, 181 composite novel, 18-9, 28 Cortés, Hernán, xv, 131, 148 creativity, 1, 163, 171, 185-6, 227-8, 230 creolization, 85 Cruz, José Pedro Infante, 117, cultural identity, xviii, 54, 81, 90, 110, 201, 221 Curiel, Barbara Brinson, xiii, xxii

D Dasenbrock, Reed Way, 16, 90, 93, 96, 106 The Decolonial Imaginary, 91, 106 decolonization, 165, Del Castillo, Adelaida R., 99 discrimination, 2, 15, 68, 203 disfrasismos, 105 domestic abuse, xxi, 61-2, 210 domestic duties, 176 domestic violence, xvii, 61-77, 106-7, 159, 215, 220, 223, Doyle, Jacqueline, xv, 64, 180, 186, 216 Ducille, Ann, 79 Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project, 62

21, 56, 115-129, 152, 189, 191, 194-5, 206, 209, 21920 Eyesight, see sight

F FBI Uniform Crime Statistics, 62 fantasy, xviii, 5-6, 8, 71, 119, 141, 174-6, 227 father, xi-xii, xvii, 5-7, 23, 27, 35-6, 41-2, 44-5, 48, 50, 53, 64, 70, 73, 75, 93-4, 96, 98, 100-1, 103, 116-7, 119, 138, 144, 148, 155, 159, 166, 170, 173, 175, 179, 183-5, 187, 194-5, 197-201, 204, 209, 211, 215-8, 227 female sexuality, 35, 48, 155-168, 209, 222 Fitts, Alexandra, xv flor y canto, 95 la frontera, xxii, 16, 31, 52-3, 89, 912, 94, 106, 131, 168, 221, 223

G gender roles, 35, 68, 155 gender stereotypes, xxi, 80 gothic writing, 122 Grassel, Kathleen, 84, 86 Greek sculpture, 133-4, 146 Grever, María, 115 La Gritona, 48, 50, 66-7, 76, 111, 169, 177, 186, 217, 223

E “Eleven,” 23 epic, 17 equality between sexes, 32, 34, 61, 68 Estés, Clarissa Pinkola, 170 eyes, xix, 6, 9, 11-2, 21, 61, 68, 73, 104,115-129, 131, 144, 146-7, 164, 192, 201, 21011, 216 “Eyes of Zapata,” xii, xv, xix, xxii,

gummy bears, xviii, xix, 7, 45, 89106, 197

H Hairs/Pelitos, xi heroine, xx, 1, 4-5, 9, 13, 15,47, 52, 61, 66, 69-70, 72, 74, 200, 224

Index Hightower, Judge, 84 homosexuality, xxi, 136, 143-4, 18990,203-6, 219-20 The House on Mango Street, xi-xii, xiv, 19, 28, 55, 90-1, 189, 222-3 husband, xvii, 10, 33, 42, 46, 48-9, 61-5, 67-9, 72-5, 97, 100-3, 109, 125-6, 138, 148, 15960, 169, 171-3, 175-6, 17980, 182, 196-7, 200, 213-8, 220

I iconography, 159, 167, 232 Idaho Code, 61, 77 identity, xvi, xvii-xviii, xxiii, 2-4, 6, 10, 14-29, 31-2, 36-7, 42, 48-50, 54-5, 61, 66, 71, 7981, 83, 85-6, 89-107, 10911, 118, 128, 133, 136, 142, 145, 156-8, 160-1, 165-6, 178-9, 189-90, 193, 196, 198-9, 201-5, 209, 212, 218-9, 221-4, 230 Immigrant Women Task Force of the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Tasks, 63 incomplete narratives, 173 Infante, Pedro, 117-8 infanticidal narrative, 173, 183-4, infanticide, 48, 169-72, 1837, 232 infidelity, 192, 210 interpretation, ix, xv-xvii, xix, 43, 92, 134, 136, 155, 164, 170, 172, 177-9, 182-4, 186, 187 interstitial space, 104 invisibility, 89, 91, 98, 137-8 Irigaray, Luce, 186-7 Ixta, 147-8, 201, Ixtaccíhuatl, 13, 147

237

J Jago, Carol, xiv, xxii Johnson, Barbara, 169, 185 Jussawalla, Feroza, 90, 93, 96, 106

K Kazan, Elia, 115, 124, 127 Kearney, Michael, 168, 170 kunstlerroman, 83

L language, xii, xiii, xix, 6, 11, 20, 44, 65, 69, 80-3, 89-92, 94-6, 98-9, 101-2, 104-5, 108, 124, 132, 135, 139-40, 148, 171, 179-83, 186-7, 190, 221, 228-9, 231-2 laughter, 68, 99, 141, 181, 186, 217 legend, xv, xvii, xx, xxi, 31-2, 40-1, 46-8, 181-7, 228 linguistic terrorism, 104 listing, xvi, 19-20, 23, 28, 53-4 “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” xv, xvii, 17, 26, 31, 33, 36, 161-2, 189, 203, 205, 219, 229-30 La Llorona, xv, xvii, xx, xxii, 31, 33, 46-52, 56, 61, 66-8, 75-7, 89, 99, 102-3, 105-8, 111, 152, 160, 169-188, 214, 217, 222-3, 227-9 Loose Woman, xi, 21, 90, 116, 128-9 López, Ana, 69, 72 “Los Acknowledgements,” 17

M MacDougall, J. Paige, 85-6 macho, 25, 132-5, 137, 140-1, 204 male tradition, 65 maleness, xix, xx, 118-20, 124, 131, 134, 136-7 La Malinche, xv, xvii, xxii-xxiii, 6, 8,

238 15, 31, 33, 38, 40-4, 46, 502, 56, 86, 96, 99-103, 111, 131-2, 135-6, 148, 152, 180, 188, 199, 222-3 “The Marlboro Man,” 118-9, 189, 203-4, 219 marginalization, 72 María de Nadie, 71, 218 marriage, xiii, xvii, 36, 48-50, 53, 61, 67, 71, 93, 95-6, 152, 15960, 164, 169, 172-3, 175, 183, 191-7, 201, 208-9, 216, 218, 222 Martínez, Betty, xvii, 64, 72, 77, 213, 218 masculinity, xix, 115-152, 175, 181 master narrative, 182-3 maternity, 155-6, 161, 163, 184, 197 maternal infanticide, 48, 170-2, 1835, 232 maternal language, 186 Mayer, Vicki, 70-1, 77 memory, xxiii, 7, 9, 12, 19, 21-2, 28, 99, 125, 138-40, 158, 175, 178, 182, 200, 229 “Mericans,” 12, 20, 24, 46, 63, 156-7 mestiza consciousness, xvii, 31-52 mestizo, 4, 99, 135-6 Mathis, Dennis, 116 Mattel, 79-84, 108 Maxwell Street Market, 80, 83-4 Mayhew, Henry, 19-20, 28 “Mexican Movies,” 117-9 Mexican Tales and Legends from Veracruz, 170, 188 Mexican revolution, 117, 120-1, 1234,129 Mexican-American cinema, 117, 119 Mexican-American families, 63, 76, 159, 212, 229 Mexican-American War, 63 Mexico, xi-xiii, 4-5, 12, 31-5, 41-2, 44, 48-52, 61, 65, 67, 69, 71, 75, 85-6, 90, 99, 106, 121, 131, 135-7, 139-41, 144, 147, 152, 155-9, 162, 169, 174-5, 200, 202, 208-9 miscegenation, 93, 100, 106 Mocihuaquetyque, 47 Moran, Kristin, 69

Index Mosse, George, 147 motherhood, xx, 34-5, 51, 110, 155188, 191, 227 Mullen, Harryette, xv, xxii, 20, 29, 85-6, 135-6, 149 Muñoz, Clara, 72-3, 77 multiple identities, 91-2 My Wicked Wicked Ways, xi, 21, 1156, 128-9 mythic character, 182 mythologies, xvi, 5, 39, 44, 52, 56, 99, 102, 128, 141, 145-6, 149, 152, 155, 158, 162, 201-2

N Nahuatl, 33, 40, 95, 102, 105, 147 National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence, 63, 77 “Never Marry a Mexican,” xvi-xviii, xxii-xxiii, 1, 4-9, 14-6, 23, 31, 33, 42, 46, 53, 83, 86, 89-106, 109, 111, 180, 18890, 191, 196-9, 219, 228-9

O “One Holy Night,” xix, 22, 131, 140, 189, 206, 208, 219, 228 Ong, Walter, 18 oral tradition, 18

P Pachuco, 132, 134-5, 140-1, 148 patriarchy, 13, 34-5, 126, 185, 187, 210, 218, 228 Paz, Octavio, xix, 41, 52, 131-2, 149, 152 Perez, Emma, 42, 91 personal narrative, 178 Phelan, James, 81 Poe, Edgar Allan, 122, 232 poetry, xii, 5, 11, 20, 54, 189, 200, 231

Index Ponce, Marrihelen, xii, xxii Popocatépetl, 13, 147-8, 201 “Postcard to the Lace Man—The Old Market, Antibes,” 116 post-trauma identity, 178, post-traumatic testimony, xx, 178-9, 182 Prescott, Peter S., xiii, xxii, private space, 74, 117, 152, 155 psychological violence, 176 public space, 74, 117

R race, 2-4, 6, 9-10, 12, 15-6, 28, 37-8, 41, 72, 79, 81, 89, 91-2, 967, 106-7, 110, 123, 136, 156-7 rape, xxi, 41, 134-5, 141, 189-90, 205-210, 219-220, 224-5 Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 33, 40-1, 46-8, 52, 101-3, 105-6, 165, 168, 222, 224 “Remember the Alamo,” xix, 26, 131-2, 142-3, 189, 203-5, 219 repetitive memory, 178, 182 representation, viii, xix, xx, 28, 40, 46, 49, 53, 115-129, 135-6, 161, 164-6, 210, 218, 221, 223 rhetoric, xviii, 17-8, 20, 79, 86, 8990, 96, 133, 136, 207, 224 The Rich Also Cry, 70-1, 174, 218

Rodriguez, Jeanette, 95, 99-100, 1056, 158, 168 Robe, Stanley, 170, 182, 188 Rojas, Maythee, xv, xxii Romo, Leticia I., 82

S Saldívar-Hull, Sonia, xv, xxii, 91, 106 San Antonio, Texas, xii, xvi, 5, 7, 10,

239 13, 54, 63, 192, 204, 230, 234 Sandra Cisneros in the Classroom: “Do Not Forget to Reach,” xiv, xxii seeing, see sight self-colonization, 90, 92 self-empowerment, xvii, 94-5, 228 Senda Prohibida, 69 Seguín, Texas, 64, 160, 169, 173-5, 213, 229 sexuality, viii, xx-xxi, 4, 28, 35-6, 43, 46-8, 51-2, 69, 90, 94, 100, 102-4, 136-7, 143-5, 155168, 189-91, 203-6, 208-9, 219-23, 227 shadow, 68, 94-5, 101, 103-5, 149 sight, 2, 9, 36, 39, 62, 115-7, 121, 123, 128, 143, 148, 230 silence, ix, xiv, xviii, xxi, xxii, 29, 37, 86, 89, 92-3, 97, 100-3, 105-6, 135, 176, 178, 180, 183-4, 189-90, 193, 205-6, 208, 212, 219, 221, 227, 233 Simplemente María, 72 sombra, 89-90 spatial narratives, xv, 90, 155 Springer, Karen, xiii, Stanford, Ann Folwell, 91, 106 Stavans, Ilan, xiii, xxiii Steinbeck, John, vii, 115, 117, 124, 127, 129, 231

T taboo, xxi, 101, 144, 155, 159, 164-6, 169, 185, 189-225 telenovela, xvii-xviii, 13, 48, 55, 612, 68-77, 107-11, 169, 171-7, 183, 190, 200-1, 214, 216, 218-9, 221, 227-8 “Tepeyac,” 37, 131-2, 138-40, 156, 158 testimony, xx, 105, 169, 172-3, 1789, 182-5, 187 Thomson, Jeff, xv, xxiii, 24, 26, 29, 80, 86, 195, 224

Index

240 Tlalteotl, 37 Toci, 39-40, 207 Tonantzín, 33-5, 37-39, 51, 131, 156, 163-4 transitional identity, 91 trauma, xx, 169-70, 172-3, 178-9, 182, 187 Tú o Nadie, 69, 71, 74, 173, 175, 218

U University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, xi, 23

V vehicle, 134, 180-1, 228 victim, xxi, 26, 37, 41, 61-2, 73, 75, 101, 108, 110, 132, 163, 172, 175-5, 178, 180, 182, 184, 206, 209-11, 214-17, 228 victim/agent, 178 Violence Against Women Act of 1994, 62 Viramontes, Helena María, xxii, 66, 77 La Virgen de Guadalupe, xvii, xx, 31, 33-7, 99, 101, 105, 131, 157, 166, 232 vision, xix, 11-13, 50, 56-7, 117, 121, 123-7, 161, 182-3, 197, 205 Viva Zapata! 115, 124 voice, vii-viii, ix, xiv, xviii, xix, xxi, 3, 12-3, 17, 20-1, 23, 28, 49, 56, 67, 79, 81, 89-92, 94, 98-102, 109-10, 127, 137-40, 155, 158, 161, 164, 166, 171-3, 175, 177-81, 183-7, 189-90, 192, 197, 204-6, 211, 215, 217, 221, 227, 230, 232

W Weissmuller, Johnny, 147 white feminist discourse, 90-1, 94, 96, 98 Whitman, Walt, 20 Wickstrom, Stephanie, 90, 100, 106 Wilkerson, Isabel, 84, 86 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 133, 146 “Woman Hollering Creek,” xvii, 6177, 107-9, 111, 115, 117-8, 159-60, 169-188, 227-9 Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, xi-xviii, xix-xx, 156, 81, 83, 90, 120, 126, 128, 131-49, 155-6, 167-8, 189225, 227-8, 230 womanhood, 2, 10, 35, 50, 56, 141, 169-188, 208, 218, 220, 227 Women Singing in the Snow, 52, 102, 224 Women’s Aid Federation, 61, 77 wordless cry, 180 Wyatt, Jean, xv, xxiii, 86, 180, 188, 197, 199, 218

Y Ybañez, Terry, 115

Z Zapata, Emiliano, xii, 117, 119, 121, 123, 127, 194