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After dinner Wangero shows the true meaning of her visit when she starts to examine different artifacts in the house and asking Mama if she can have them. Mama and Maggie show their love of the items Wangero has requested by being able to state who had made them and what they had been made of. Maggie emphasizes Wangero's lack of understanding and compassion by stating accurately that the dasher from the butter churn had been carved by Aunt Dee's first husband Henry who everyone called Stash. Wangero makes a joke of Maggie's memory (72) by saying she had the brain of an elephant. Once again Mama displays patience of astronomical proportions. To Wangero, the churn top and the dasher are items that she can use to impress her peers. They have no sentimental value and she would probably not even know how to use them. She does not need them and yet, knowing how poor her mother and sister are, she still has the gall to confiscate a valuable kitchen tool only to put them on display.

In the story "Woman Hollering Creek" Sandra Cisneros discusses the issues of living life as a married woman through a character named Cleofilas; a character who is married to a man who abuses her physically and mentally .Cisneros reveals the way the culture puts a difference between a male and a female, men above women. Cisneros has been famous about writing stories about the latino culture and how women are treated; she explain what they go through as a child, teen and when they are married; always dominated by men because of how the culture has been adapted. "Woman Hollering Creek" is one of the best examples. A character who grows up without a mother and who has no one to guid and give her advise about life.

Poverty and hardship are shown to create vulnerability in female characters, particularly the female servants, allowing powerful men to manipulate and sexually abuse them. Kent illustrates how poverty perpetuates maltreatment and abuse in a society like Burial Rites using the characters of Agnes’ mother Ingveldur and Agnes. Agnes’ mother is forced to make invidious choices as her children are “lugged along” from farm to farm, where she is sexually exploited by her employers. In spite of these circumstances, Agnes’ mother is commonly referred to as a whore in their society which abhors female promiscuity yet disregards male promiscuity as a harmless character trait; as in the case of Natan, who is merely “indiscreet” despite all his philandering. Born into poverty, Agnes experiences similar sexual coercion and manipulation from her “masters” and yet is labelled “a woman who is loose with her emotions and looser with her morals”. The severe poverty of Agnes is explicitly demonstrated to the reader by Kent through the intertextual reference of her entire belongings - a very dismal, piteous list to be “sold if a decent offer is presented”. Furthermore, Kent contrasts the situation of Agnes, a “landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty”, to the comparative security Steina has experienced using a rhetorical question from

You can see how Maria’s El Salvador is empty of people, full only of romantic ideas. Jose Luis’s image of El Salvador, in contrast, totally invokes manufactured weapons; violence. Maria’s “self-projection elides Jose Luis’s difference” and illustrates “how easy it is for the North American characters, including the big-hearted María, to consume a sensationalized, romanticized, or demonized version of the Salvadoran or Chicana in their midst” (Lomas 2006, 361). Marta Caminero-Santangelo writes: “The main thrust of the narrative of Mother Tongue ... continually ... destabilize[s] the grounds for ... a fantasy of connectedness by emphasizing the ways in which [Maria’s] experience as a Mexican American and José Luis’s experiences as a Salvadoran have created fundamentally different subjects” (Caminero-Santangelo 2001, 198). Similarly, Dalia Kandiyoti points out how Maria’s interactions with José Luis present her false assumptions concerning the supposed “seamlessness of the Latino-Latin American connection” (Kandiyoti 2004, 422). So the continual misinterpretations of José Luis and who he really is and has been through on Maria’s part really show how very far away her experiences as a middle-class, U.S.-born Chicana are from those of her Salvadoran lover. This tension and resistance continues throughout their relationship.

Thesis statement: Esperanza has a variety of female role models in her life. Many are trapped in abusive relationships, waiting for others to change their lives. Some are actively trying to change things on their own. Through these women and Esperanza’s reactions to them, Cisneros’ shows not only the hardships women face, but also explores their power to overcome them.

Through countless stories and the motif of women sitting by windows, Cisneros ratifies how draining it is to be an average woman in Esperanza's community. In The House on Mango Street, women by windows depict women trapped by their families, specifically their husbands, maturing into a disturbing image that portrays the failure to be an individual that makes her own decisions. In the vignette “Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut and Papaya Juice on Tuesdays,” the author tells of a woman who is “too beautiful to look at,” saying, “Rafaela who … wishes there were sweeter drinks, not bitter like an empty room, but sweet sweet like the island, like the dance hall down the street where women much older than her throw green eyes easily like dice and open homes with keys” (Cisneros 80). Rafaela is yearning to be able to leave her home like the women she envies. She compares the bitterness of her fruit drinks to the desolation and seclusion of the house, and wishes the drinks were sweeter, expressing her looking out the window and longing for something more in life, like the fortunate few women in her community have. A character Esperanza knows named Sally has received abuse from her father, and when she gets married, Esperanza says, “She says she is in love, but I think she did it to escape” (Cisneros 101) and, “She sits at home because she is afraid to go outside without his permission” (Cisneros 102). Sally tried to get away from her father’s physical abuse, but in doing so, she is now living the life of a woman by the window, a

“Beautiful and Cruel” marks the beginning of Esperanza’s “own quiet war” against machismo (Hispanic culture powered by men). She refuses to neither tame herself nor wait for a husband, and this rebellion is reflected in her leaving the “table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate (Cisneros 89).” Cisneros gives Esperanza a self-empowered voice and a desire for personal possessions, thing that she can call her own: Esperanza’s “power is her own (Cisneros 89).” Cisneros discusses two important themes: maintaining one’s own power and challenging the cultural and social expectations one is supposed to fulfill. Esperanza’s mission to create her own identity is manifest by her decision to not “lay (her) neck on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain (Cisneros 88).” Cisneros’ rough language and violent images of self-bondage reveal the contempt with which Esperanza views many of her peers whose only goal is to become a wife. To learn how to guard her power

people who caused despair to her husband and his friends, she takes pride in the fact that she has

To begin, the protagonist Clemencia is like a chameleon, who can blend into any social event and with any class of wealth when she says ““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”(Cisneros 71,72). Clemencia is a woman who knows how to talk and have a good time. By nature she is a very creative being who loves to impress by wearing the best clothes, and show off to anyone to make herself seem better than others. (Cisneros 71). Clemencia is poor and does not have much being that she works for the school system as a translator, and other various positions. But acts rich and very wealthy to all of her friends (Cisneros 72). This connects with the myth of La Malinche, of how the character is a bad woman who sleeps with lots of men.

A deeper examination of Cisneros’ famous short story, “Woman Hollering Creek” will highlight the liberation of those barriers. In this particular short story Cisneros speaks about the main character, Cleofilas, and her struggle with her abusive husband, Juan Pedro. Cleofilas had to live in a society where the women were simply there to assist their husbands, and God forbid she second guessed him. Living and struggling with the everyday battle of stereotypes, she decided to leave her husband at the end of this short story. This all developed the strong independent female role Cleofilas took on by the end of the story. The main character was forced to believe by her family and her husband that she wasn’t worth anything without a man; this made her doubtful of her abilities and her human capital. In the interview by Martha Satz, Cisneros says, “I think many of my stories come from dealing with straddling two cultures, and certainly it's something I'm going to deal with in future stories” (Cisneros 30). Here, Cisneros agrees that her stories have to do with the endless topic about coming from two cultures and the stereotypes it brings along. From firsthand accounts the Mexican American culture is embraced by “machismo”, or that male superiority. “Woman Hollering Creek”

The other main character of the story is Adelina a girl who leaves her home in California to go to Mexico. Adelina is driven out of the United States because her family won’t accept her relationship with her lover, so they both decide to go to Tijuana, a city in Mexico. Not much is said about Adelina’s experienced in the United States. What we do know is that she had a family that loved her, but she decided to leave it all behind to be together with her boyfriend Gerardo. In Mexico she finds nothing but shame and misery because Gerardo could not find a job and the only way for them to make money was for her to be a prostitute. Besides having to expose her body, Adelina, is physically and emotionally mistreated by her boyfriend until it finally leads to her death when she tells him that she is going back to the United States with Juana.

meal she cooked regardless of how hungry she was. His mother also shows qualities of a

For centuries, a great deal of ethnic groups have been disempowered and persecuted by others. However, one should realize that none are more intense than the oppression of women. In the novel, The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, women living in the Mango Street neighborhood suffer from their restricted freedom. Three such women, Rafaela, Mamacita, and Sally, provide great examples. All try to escape from their dreadful environment. Most of them fail, but at first, Sally seems to succeed in escaping from her father. However, she ends up meeting a husband as equally bad as her father. Ultimately, the men who live with Rafaela, Mamacita, and Sally act as insuperable obstacles that limit the freedom in their women’s lives.

She is disgusted at her mercenary and calculating sisters, who deceive their father. She prefers to “love and be silent.”

reluctance to admit her father’s death. When he dies, she refuses to let anyone remove his body from their house. It’s as if she feels she needs his comforting and protection.