Woman Hollering Creek By Sandra Cisneros

Thesis: In the short story “Woman Hollering Creek,” Sandra Cisneros emphasizes the importance of having a female figure to look up to in order to overcome the oppression women are subjected to in a patriarchal society.

The story “Woman Hollering Creek" by Sandra Cisneros describes the lives of Mexicans in a Chicago neighborhood. She depicts the life that women endure as Latino wives through her portrayal of the protagonist, Cleofilas. For Cisneros being a Mexican-American has given her a chance to see life from two different cultures. In addition, Cisneros has written the story from a woman’s perspective, illustrating the types of conflicts many women face as Latino wives. This unique paradigm allows the reader to examine the events and characters using a feminist critical perspective.

Tanya Barrientos explained her struggle with her identity growing up in her writing “Se Habla Español”. Barrientos describes herself as being “Guatemalan by birth but pure gringa by circumstance” (83). These circumstances began when her family relocated to the United States when she was three years old. Once the family moved to the states, her parents only spoke Spanish between themselves. The children learned to how read, write and speak the English language to fit into society at that time in 1963. (83) Barrientos explained how society shifted and “the nation changed its views on ethnic identity” (85) after she graduated college and it came as a backlash to her because she had isolated herself from the stereotype she constructed in her head. She was insulted to be called Mexican and to her speaking the Spanish language translated into being poor. She had felt superior to Latino waitresses and their maid when she told them that she didn’t speak Spanish. After the shift in society Barrientos wondered where she fit it since the Spanish language was the glue that held the new Latino American community together. Barrientos then set out on a difficult awkward journey to learn the language that others would assume she would already know. She wanted to nurture the seed of pride to be called Mexican that her father planted when her father sent her on a summer trip to Mexico City. Once Barrientos had learned more Spanish and could handle the present, past and future tenses she still

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.

Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue is divided into five sections and an epilogue. The first three parts of the text present Mary/ María’s, the narrator, recollection of the time when she was nineteen and met José Luis, a refuge from El Salvador, for the first time. The forth and fifth parts, chronologically, go back to her tragic experience when she was seven years old and then her trip to El Salvador with her son, the fruit of her romance with José Luis, twenty years after she met José Luis. And finally the epilogue consists a letter from José Luis to Mary/ María after her trip to El Salvador. The essay traces the development of Mother Tongue’s principal protagonists, María/ Mary. With a close reading of the text, I argue how the forth

Based on Cisneros’ works of literature, gender roles in a Hispanic culture revolves around patriarchal rule. The repercussions of a patriarchal rule includes the limitations of female liberation and development. Cleofilas’ abusive situation exemplifies the limitations of her independence and development as she can not make her own decisions and has to solely depend on her husband. This situation is illustrated when Cleofilas explains that the towns are “built so that you have to depend on husbands... You can drive only if you’re rich enough to own and drive an own car. There is no place to go” (Cisneros 628). Cleofilas reveals that men are the dominant gender and have more authority, and that women are compelled to depend on them in her society. It is an exceptionally rare case that a woman can afford her own car, for the men usually control the finances in a household. Additionally, Cleofilas has nowhere to seek refuge from her husband. Although she yearns to return to her father’s home, she decides not to due to the social standards imposed on her. In her society, the act of returning home after marriage is socially unacceptable. She understands that her family will be viewed in a negative light if she were to return home, as seen when Cleofilas refers to her town as a “town of gossips” (627). Similar to other men in the society, Juan Pedro’s authority is shown through his abuse. Cleofilas recalls, “He slapped her once, and then again, and again; until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood” (626).

Many women struggle to overcome obstacles in their lives. Sometimes they find it difficult to leave abusive relationships and end up never leaving. But some women are brave or work up the courage to take a stand and leave the situation. In the short story, “Women Hollering Creek”, Sandra Cisneros explains the theme of the story by telling about a woman who’s husband abuses her.

In my analysis of this novel, The Adventure of Don Chipote or, When Parrots Breast-Feed by Daniel Venegas, I kept in mind that Nicolás Kanellos put great effort into getting this novel circulated in Spanish and in English. Kanellos argues that Spanish-language immigrant novels more accurately present the “evils” of American society such as oppression of the immigrant workers and deconstructs the myth of the American Dream, which permeates in English-language ethnic autobiographies. I believe Kanellos felt so passionately about circulating this particular novel was due to the fact that in Venegas’ novel we see clear representations of the three U.S. Hispanic cultures that Kanellos presents which are the native, the immigrant, and the exile cultures.

Anzaldúa recounts her experience growing up in a community where her Chicana culture wasn’t widely accepted. She would be punished for speaking the language her culture influenced to create a language, which corresponds to a way of life. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” the variety of languages helps her compare, contrast and define her argument of the distinguished languages concerning her Chicana identity.

In this article, “The Myth of the Latin Woman” Cofer has talked about many incidents from her life where she was talked about, from a young girl the adult life. Ortiz Cofer is so ardent about this topic of stereotyping Latin women because she was a native women of the Puerto Rico area who really grew up in the United States. There is how she witnessed firsthand how hurtful stereotyping could be. In “The Myth of the Latin Woman”, She has repeated use of Spanish words in the essay to shows her audience how proud she is of the Latin heritage. she continuously uses other words, such as Puerto Rican, and Latina to stress the names she heard growing up. Because she has been brought up to love her Latin culture, she was often stereotyped here in the United States. As you can see, this is why she became so involved with trying to bring people so much awareness to the

Rodriguez is ashamed. He is ashamed with the fact his espanol is no longer his main language. The author presents, “I grew up a victim to a

Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Never Marry a Mexican” deals heavily with the concept of myth in literature, more specifically the myth La Malinche, which focuses on women, and how their lives are spun in the shadows on men (Fitts). Myths help power some of the beliefs of entire cultures or civilizations. She gives the reader the mind of a Mexican-American woman who seems traitorous to her friends, family and people she is close to. This causes destruction in her path in the form of love, power, heartbreak, hatred, and an intent to do harm to another, which are themes of myth in literature. The unreliable narrator of this story was created in this story with the purpose to show her confusion and what coming from two completely different

A life in the city of Seguin, Texas was not as easy as Cleofilas, the protagonist of the story thought it would be. The author, Cisneros describes the life women went through as a Latino wife through Cleofilas. Luckily, Cisneros is a Mexican-American herself and had provided the opportunity to see what life is like from two window of the different cultures. Also, it allowed her to write the story from a woman’s point of view, painting a vision of the types of problems many women went through as a Latino housewife. This allows readers to analyze the characters and events using a feminist critical view. In the short story “Women Hollering Creek” Sandra Cineros portrays the theme of expectation versus reality not only through cleofilas’s thoughts but also through her marriage and television in order to display how the hardship of women in a patriarchal society can destroy a woman’s life.

Woman Hollering Creek is a book of short stories published in 1991. The author, Sandra Cisneros, separated her book into three sections. The section that will be analyzed is the first section where the narrators are female children. Out of the many stories in section one, the three that will be focused on are, "Mericans," "My Friend Lucy Who Smells Like Corn," and "Barbie-Q." The children in these three stories are all lower class, Mexican-American females. These stories have been described by Thompson as Cisneros remembering her childhood, filled with no male figures, lack of close female friendships, and poverty (415-417). Each story shares both similar themes and different

In the two short stories, “Woman Hollering Creek” by Sandra Cisneros and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, both use the theme of societal expectations and discrimination of women as the basis of their plots.