Little Miracles, Kept Promises Summary / Study Guide

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Little Miracles, Kept Promises | Introduction

‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises’’ is a story in Sandra Cisneros’s collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (New York, 1991). The story consists almost entirely of letters left at a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe at a Catholic church in a Mexican-American community in Texas. There are twenty-three notes; each is a petition or request for divine favor. Some letters are only a few lines, others run to nearly a page and the final one covers over four pages. The notes are from a variety of Mexican Americans, including a family breadwinner, a husband, a wife, several young women, a gay man, a student, and a grandparent. They are addressed to various divine or saintly personages, including the Virgin of Guadalupe, a title originating in a vision of the Virgin Mary granted to a humble believer in Mexico in 1531; San Antonio de Padua, and the Miraculous Black Christ of Esquipulas. The notes are signed and each person gives the Texas town where he or she comes from; some hail from cities like Houston and Austin, but the majority are from small towns.

Cisneros’s work is notable because she gives voice to the experiences of people in the Mexican- American community, a group that has until recently been underrepresented in American literature. With its humorous, compassionate, and poetic insight into Mexican-American life and culture, as well as its challenge to some of that culture’s traditions and assumptions, ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises’’ is a typical example of Cisneros’s work. Taken in conjunction with the other stories in Woman Hollering Creek, as well as her earlier book, The House on Mango Street (1984), it helped to establish Cisneros’s reputation as an exciting new voice in American literature.

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