it tasted not sweet but bitter, so bitter in fact that she now implores the Virgin to take back her gift. In Teresa’s experience, a man may profess love, but he also expects to be in control, to lay down the law of how his woman should look and how she should behave. No doubt he is merely acting in accordance with his own experience of what his society sanctions or expects (which is why Barbara wants a man who can transcend such conditioned behavior and attitudes).

For Teresa, being restricted in this way amounts to imprisonment and even torture. Her present situation is like a ‘‘heavy cross’’ on her shoulders, an image that suggests the figure of Christ carrying his cross on the way to crucifixion. That image then gives way to images of lightness and freedom. Teresa wants to be once more the way she was, ‘‘wind on my neck, my arms swinging free,’’ with no one telling her what to do and how to be. Unlike Barbara, who still seeks a relationship but on a basis of equality, Teresa has discovered that she is happier being alone than being oppressed by another in the name of love. In that hard-won belief, she too foreshadows Rosario.

Finally, there is Rosario, to whom one-third of ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises’’ is devoted. Rosario is a semi-autobiographical figure, as Cisneros has stated in interviews. Cisneros also told Martha Satz, in an interview with Southwest Review:

I think that growing up Mexican and feminist is almost a contradiction in terms. For a long time—and it’s true for many writers and women like myself who have grown up in a patriarchal culture, like the Mexican culture—I felt 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.

This is at least part of Rosario’s story, the character who travels an emotional and spiritual journey to emancipate herself from the restrictions imposed on her by family and culture. Cisneros gives Rosario many poetic images that convey the importance and the difficulty of this journey. Rosario reports that she cut off her hair, which had never been cut before in her entire life. For Rosario this was a symbolic act. The shorn hair is a metaphor for all the inherited beliefs and expectations that she must cast off if she is to discover who she really is. For Rosario, her hair is like a snakeskin, something shed so that new life can grow in its place.

Just as Teresa had employed images of freedom, Rosario uses an image of lightness to convey the same effect of liberation: ‘‘my head as light as if I’d raised it from water.’’ The images that follow show how hard it has been for her to break loose: ‘‘I’m a snake swallowing its tail,’’ she writes, and she explains that by saying she is a product of all her ancestors who in a sense still live on inside her and will shape her future in a predetermined fashion unless she does something about it. So Rosario barricades the door to her room, an act that has a symbolic as well as literal meaning. On the literal level it gives her some peace and quiet to read and study, away from her family; symbolically, she is deliberately shutting the door on all those family and cultural influences that would create of her something that she cannot bear to be.

As she writes to the Virgin, Rosario draws attention to the fundamental differences in gender roles and expectations that operate in her family: ‘‘Do only girls have to come out and greet the relatives and smile and be nice and quedar bien?’’ she asks. Reproaches to her independent way of thinking and her desire not to marry come thick and fast from her family. When Rosario rejects the sacred icon of Catholic worship, the Virgin, she is accused of being a heretic and an atheist, as well as a traitor to her culture who acts like a bolilla, a white girl.

Rosario survives this barrage because she has the determination that comes to those who are driven from within by impulses they cannot resist. She must become an artist; this is not so much a desire or an ambition but a manifestation of a vital inner need. As she puts it, being an artist ‘‘isn’t something you choose. It’s something you are.’’ But this realization is not in itself sufficient. Rosario must also redefine what it means to be a woman, and a Latin woman at that. To do this she must find an icon of the feminine that can speak to her new consciousness of herself in a way that the Virgin of Guadalupe does not. As Cisneros said in an 1991 interview (quoted by Tompkins in Dictionary of Literary Biography):

in my stories and life I am trying to show that U.S. Latinas have to reinvent, to remythologize, ourselves. A myth believed by almost everyone, even Latina women, is that they are passive, submissive, longsuffering. . . . Yet those of us who are their daughters, mothers, sisters know that some of the fiercest women on this planet are Latina women.

Rosario associates the submissiveness of the women in her family and their capacity to suffer without complaint (much of it at the hands of men) with the passivity and mildness of the Virgin. In her eyes, the patriarchal society in which she grew up uses the icon of the Virgin to validate the oppression of women. But Rosario longs for a different godL dess, and she expresses herself in vivid images: ‘‘I wanted you bare-breasted, snakes in your hands. I wanted you leaping and somersaulting the backs of bulls. I wanted you swallowing raw hearts and rattling volcanic ash.’’

Rosario discovers what she wants, a goddess who embodies power rather than humility, in Tonantzín, the Aztec earth goddess and mother goddess. Tonantzín was worshipped by the indigenous Indians of Mexico before the arrival of the colonizing Spanish in the sixteenth century. In 1520, the Spanish, who were Catholics, destroyed the temple of Tonantzín at Tepeyac and built in its place a church honoring the Virgin. The knowledge of this is a great revelation to Rosario, who concludes that the Virgin Mary and Tonantzín are in truth one and the same goddess; they just express different aspects of the divine energy, one mild, the other fierce. Both are necessary.

When she realizes this, she finds that there is power and strength in the patience and ability to endure that her mother and grandmother exhibit, qualities that she had formerly despised. Now she recognizes the many different names under which the Virgin and Tonantzín are known, she is no longer ashamed to be her mother’s child, or ashamed of the culture into which she was born. She can also recognize that all the other names of God, whether the Buddha, the Tao, Allah, or many others, are all manifestations of the one God, and she sees all of them in the various names ascribed to Tonantzín and the Virgin. Through discovering more of her own tradition, she can discern the universality of all religions and the validity of all names of God.

Rosario has traveled a remarkable emotional and spiritual journey. To reconcile herself to her own culture, she has had to dig deep down into its Mexican roots, into the Aztec civilization that predates Christianity in the region and still survives in religious myths and symbols. Finally, after all the turbulence and pain, Rosario has found peace. Her personal crisis is over. She can at last accept the Virgin, and herself. The two-line note of gratitude she finally writes, addressed to Mighty Guadalupana Coatlaxopeuth Tonantzín, is perfect in its simplicity; it comes like a final quiet chord of harmony after a long and tempestuous symphony: ‘‘What ‘little miracle’ could I pin here? Braid of hair in its place and know that I thank you.’’

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

Readers who encounter Sandra Cisneros’s ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises’’ for the first time immediately notice several ways in which this story is unlike other, more conventional, short stories. There is no plot in the usual sense—no series of incidents in chronological order. In fact, there is no action in the story, and no central character around whom action might revolve. The only element approaching dialogue is the one-way conversations represented by the two dozen letters left behind by those who have prayed to various saints. The story’s setting is only roughly suggested by the reader’s understanding that the letters and milagritos have been placed in churches in the towns and cities near the Texas-Mexico border named below the signatures. ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises’’ does not offer many of the structural elements readers might expect in a short story, but clearly it is prose fiction, clearly it has been shaped by an intelligence and sensibility. The story is a story, but a story in a new form.

For Cisneros, however, the most important new element that her fiction brings to the literary landscape is not the form, though she has often spoken about her enthusiasm for reading and crafting writing that extends beyond the conventional formal boundaries. She is more interested in the characters she brings to life—Latino characters whose stories are generally not told by mainstream American literature. Most of Cisneros’s other stories focus on one or two central characters, but in ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises’’ she offers a window into an entire community.

Language is an element that both unites and individualizes the characters in the story. Many of the letters, such as those from Teresa Galindo and Arnulfo Contreras, contain elements of both English and Spanish. A few letters are entirely in English, or entirely in Spanish. This free movement back and forth between languages is commonly heard among Spanish-speaking people who live near the border of Mexico and the United States, and Cisneros presents this lively bilingualism with pride—and without translating the Spanish words for her English-speaking readers.

In the introduction to their anthology Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction, editors Delia Poey and Virgil Suarez assert that in defining the varied group of people known as Latinos,

The central point of our unity is language. While we may speak with different accents and use different expressions, we all share the experience of bilingualism. The ability to communicate in two languages, and more importantly to think and feel in two languages, brings with it the phenomenon of at times being unable to express oneself fully in only one.

In a story without action, the best way to sketch a character is through the language she uses. Through the letters, Cisneros reinforces the obvious point that even though her characters are all Latino, and all are to some extent bilingual, the label and the bilingualism do not erase individual voices. In contrast to old movie Westerns, in which all Native Americans spoke the same simplistic combination of grunts, ‘‘native’’ terms, and the occasional English word, this story presents characters whose language is as individual and unique as a fingerprint. Consider the Tijerinas, whose sentence ‘‘We didn’t know how we was going to make it’’ helps establish their social class. Gertrudis Parra, who writes ‘‘You who are crowned in heaven and who are so close to our Divine Savior, I implore your intercession before the Almighty on my behalf,’’ clearly learned the proper language for addressing the Saints in a Catholic School or in church. The stiff formality of Señor Gustavo Corchado B., praying for his wife of forty-eight years who ‘‘finds herself gravely ill from a complication’’ contrasts with the informality of Victor A. Lozano, who has left a ‘‘little gold milagrito’’ for Saint Sebastian, ‘‘And it ain’t that cheap gold-plate s—— either.’’ Teresa Galindo underlines several of her sentences to draw added attention to them, while Benjamin T. writes his letter in code to conceal that he is in love with another man.

Sexuality and gender roles form another element that characterizes the story’s letter-writers. As in much of Cisneros’s fiction, many of the women chafe under a culturally defined position that places them as less powerful than men. Adelfa Vásquez prays that his daughter will stop thinking about finishing school. Teresa Galindo prays to be rid of the boyfriend she prayed to find a year before. Rosario (Chayo) De Leon dreams of being a painter and not a mother, but finds no support from the men or the women of her family. The only woman who has freed herself from worrying about cultural expectations for her gender is Ms. Barbara Ybañez, who is nevertheless unable to find a man worthy of her.

In addition to raising the voices of these oftensilenced women, in this story, Cisneros also presents the voice of another marginalized figure, the gay man Benjamin T., whose shame brings him to leave his letter in code. This is not to say that the straight men in the story all enact the stereotype of the oppressive, dominant man although some do (including Chapa, who drinks and frightens his wife and children). Arnulfo Contreras, who avoids temptation when he is away from his wife, prays only for the money that is coming to him, so he can support his family. Gustavo Corchado B. is tender and broken-hearted as he prays for his dying wife. Both men have accepted the male role of protector and provider, but they fulfill that role with decency and humility. Their story, too, is often overlooked.

A third defining force for these characters, of course, is their Roman Catholic religion, but even here there is a variety of practice and belief. The Mexican custom of leaving small offerings, or milagritos (‘‘little miracles’’) as a token of thanks to the saints for favors granted is the central action of the story; each of the letters has been left in a church at the shrine to a particular saint, sometimes accompanied by another object, such as a graduation gown, a tiny gold figure, a photograph, or a braid of hair.

But Catholicism, along with the Spanish language, was brought to the New World by a conquering nation, and traces of indigenous religion have survived and even thrived among Latino people. Moises Ildefonso Mata, who calls on the ‘‘Seven African Powers that surround our Savior,’’ practices a religion known as Santeria, or Regla de Ocha (‘‘The Rule of the Orisha’’). Santeria, practiced in the United States primarily by Cuban Americans, combines elements of Roman Catholicism with the worship of the Yoruba deities, or Orisha, of West Africa. Rosario (Chayo) De Leon, whose extended reflection makes up half the story, can only accept Catholicism and the Virgin Mary when she comes to see her as one among the Aztec goddesses.

Although Cisneros is known primarily as a teller of women’s stories, in ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises’’ she presents a catalog of previously uncelebrated people, female and male; straight and gay; young, middle-aged and old; educated and uneducated; poor and wealthy; Spanish-speaking, English-speaking, and bilingual. It is the variety itself that lies at the heart of ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises.’’ As Poey and Suarez point out in their introduction to Iguana Dreams,

in the eyes of many Anglos, the diverse Latino cultures are interchangeable. . . . Although the ties that bind all Latino cultures are strong, there are many significant differences that are at times not obvious to a mainstream American public.

By telling many characters’ stories as a series of letters, Cisneros makes each story individual, but equally poignant, equally prominent.

Like poetry and drama, and like painting and music and virtually any art form, the short story has been the object of remarkable experimentation since it was first described and studied academically. The nineteenth-century American poet and fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe is often mentioned as the first to define the short story as a separate form in a 1842 review of a collection of stories by another American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Since that time, scholars have tried to pin down a static definition and description of the short story while writers and readers have continued to produce and be enriched by a form that has continued to evolve and change shape.

Often, as in Cisneros’s case, transformations in artistic forms have occurred at times of significant historical transformations when new cultural groups were emerging for the first time, or emerging from under the influences of another dominant culture. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was among a group of writers trying to create new forms of writing that were truly American. The United States was still a new country, not yet grown into an awareness of its own identity, and American writers looked primarily to Europe for literary forms and themes. Whitman continually experimented with new kinds of verse that did not use the regular meter, rhyme, and stanza forms of the British literature that served as the model for many of Whitman’s colleagues. He looked instead for ‘‘organic’’ forms that emerged from the experiences and the consciousness of Americans. The United States, Whitman felt, was too large and magnificent to be expressed adequately in tightly controlled, short, and regular lines. The result was a collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, that celebrated the common citizen of the United States in long irregular unrhymed lines reflecting the grandeur and the energy of the young nation.

In a similar way, twentieth century African writers such as the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka studied European literature in school, and served their apprenticeships as writers by using European forms as their models. In the middle of the twentieth century, as African nations began one by one to win independence from the European nations that had colonized them, writers and other artists sought to reclaim their own cultural identity. Soyinka created plays that included the traditional rituals of mime and dance from his own Yoruba ethnic group. Instead of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter lines, Soyinka’s characters spoke in the rhythms of ritual chant. Instead of allusions to Greek and Roman gods or the Christian Bible, Soyinka’s characters were influenced by Yoruba deities.

Cisneros does not approach her material as a sociologist or a ‘‘professional Latina,’’ offering a lesson in Latino culture and its variety for an Anglo audience. Her characters are delightful to her for all the same reasons that any writer finds delight in her characters: because they are sad and funny and sweet and strong. In an interview with Feroza Jusawalla and Reed Dasenbrock, collected in Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, she commented,

The readers who are going to like my stories the best and catch all the subtexts and all the subtleties, that even my editor can’t catch, are Chicanas. When there are Chicanas in the audience and they laugh, they are laughing at stuff that we talk about among oursel ves. . . . But I am also very conscious when I’m writing that I’m opening doors for people who don’t know the culture.

As the daughter of a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother, Cisneros has felt throughout her career that it is important to use her writing to give voice to the stories of Latino people, whose stories have not often told in literature. In ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises,’’ through the device of the collection of letters, Cisneros stands beside Whitman and Soyinka and other writers around the world in proclaiming that the language of everyday speech is poetic and beautiful, that the culture of our ancestors is to be cherished, and that the common people around us, praying for their little miracles, are valuable and worthy of being celebrated in literature.

Source: Cynthia Bily, Critical Essay on ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

One particular prose piece, ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises,’’ is perhaps the most telling representation of the diversity of voices that make up Woman Hollering Creek. It is introduced by a prelude told in the voice of young, working-class Chicana who, while shopping in a ‘‘religious store’’ for a statue or ‘‘holy picture’’ to give to a friend in the hospital, is told by the ‘‘crab ass’’ store owner, ‘‘I can see you’re not going to buy anything.’’ When the narrator protests and says that she will, she’s just thinking, he replies, ‘‘Well, if it’s thinking you want, you just go across the street to the church to think— you’re just wasting my time and yours thinking here.’’ She does go across the street, and inside the church she reads the little letters of supplication that the churchgoers leave for the Virgin and other saints. A sampling follows of the twenty-three letters covering the church walls that comprise ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises’’:

Miraculous Black Christ of Esquípulas,
Please make our grandson to be nice to us and stay
away from drugs. Save him to find a job and
move away from us.
Grandma y Grandfather
Harlingen
Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes,
Help me pass my English 320, British Restoration
Literature class and everything to turn out ok.
Eliberto Gonzalez
Dallas
M3r1c5145s B1lck Chr3st 4f 2sq53p51ls,
3 1sk y45, L4rd,w3th 1ll my h21rt pl2s2 w1tch 4v2r
M1nny B2n1v3d2s wh4 3s 4v2rs21s. 3 l4v2
h3m 1nd 3 d4n’t kn4w wh1t t4 d4 1bi5t 1ll th3s
14v2 s1dn2ss 1and sh1m2 th1t f3lls m2.
B2nj1m3n T.
D21 R34 Tx (122–24)

In the case of the last letter, Benjamin T. is apparently so discomfited by his love for another man that he creates a code (a=1, e=2, i=3, etc.), trusting that his faith will translate both his message and his pain:

[Miraculous Black Christ of Esquípulas,
I ask you Lord, with all my heart please watch over
Manny Benavidas who is overseas. I love him
and I don’t know what to do about all this love
sadness and shame that fills me.
Benjamin T.
Del Rio TX]

One of the unexpected reasons that Cisneros’s stories resonate with such genuineness is that her indispensable source for names and other cultural information is the San Antonio phone book. When she’s searching for just the right name for a character, she leafs through the listings for a last name then repeats the process for a first name, thereby coming up with a euphonious or suitable combination without appropriating anybody’s real name. Cisneros also uses the Yellow Pages and mail-order catalogues in much the same way for the names of businesses and so forth. For inspiration, she reads the Popul Vuh, the Maya Bible.

About the experience of writing Woman Hollering Creek and giving voice to so many different characters, Cisnero said at the Santa Fe conference, ‘‘I felt like a ventriloquist.’’ Her advice to the writers in attendance was to ‘‘transcribe voices of the people of a community you know,’’ and con- fided that she keeps voluminous files of snippets of dialogue or monologue—records of conversations she hears wherever she goes. She emphasized that she’ll mix and match to suit her purpose because, as she put it, ‘‘real life doesn’t have shape. You have to snip and cut.’’

When Cisneros was at work on Woman Hollering Creek, she became so immersed in her characters that they began to penetrate her unconscious; once, while writing ‘‘Eyes of Zapata,’’ she awakened in the middle of the night, convinced for the moment that she was Inés, the young bride of the Mexican revolutionary. Her dream conversation with Zapata then became those characters’s dialogue in her story. The task of breaking the silence, of articulating the unpronounceable pain of the characters that populate Woman Hollering Creek, was a very serious undertaking for Cisneros. She said in a recent interview: ‘‘I’m trying to write the stories that haven’t been written. I felt like a cartographer; I’m determined to fill a literary void.’’ The pressure intensifies for her because of her biculturalism and bilingualism: She charts not only the big city barrio back alleyways, its mean streets and the dusty arroyos of the borderland, but also offers us a window into the experience of the educated, cosmopolitan Chicano/artist, writer and academic. While she revels in her biculturalism, enjoys her life in two worlds, and as a writer she’s grateful to have ‘‘twice as many words to pick from . . . two ways of looking at the world,’’ her wide range of experience is a double-edged sword. In the Sagel interview, she revealed another side of her motivation to tell many peoples’s stories in their own voices—the responsibility and the anxiety which that task produces: ‘‘One of the most frightening pressures I faced as I wrote this book,’’ she says, ‘‘was the fear that I would blow it . . . I kept asking myself, What have I taken on here? That’s why I was so obsessed with getting everybody’s stories out.’’

She feels under additional pressure as the first Chicana to enter the mainstream of literary culture. Until Random House published Woman Hollering Creek and The House on Mango Street was reissued by Vintage Press, the Chicano literature that had crossed over into the mainstream remained a male domain—Gary Soto, Luis Valdez, Richard Rodríguez, Jimmy Santiago Baca and Alberto Rios had all made the transition. Women, however, were unrepresented there until Cisneros’s recent successes. On September 19, 1991 she said in a National Public Radio interview broadcast on Morning Edition:

I think I can’t be happy if I’m the only one that’s getting published by Random House when I know there are such magnificent writers—both Latinos and Latinas, both Chicanos and Chicanas—in the U.S. whose books are not published by mainstream presses or whom the mainstream isn’t even aware of. And, you know, if my success means that other presses will take a second look at these writers . . . and publish them in larger numbers then our ship will come in.

While it is undeniable that Sandra Cisneros has traversed the boundary dividing the small press market and the mainstream publishing establishment, a controversy continues about her writing among the critics over the issue of genre-crossing. In her review of Woman Hollering Creek in the Los Angeles Times titled ‘‘Poetic Fiction With A Tex- Mex Tilt,’’ Barbara Kingsolver writes that ‘‘Sandra Cisneros has added length and dialogue and a hint of plot to her poems and published them in a stunning collection called Woman Hollering Creek.’’ Later on in the review she elaborates:

It’s a practical thing for poets in the United States to turn to fiction. Elsewhere, poets have the cultural status of our rock stars and the income of our romance novelists. Here, a poet is something your mother probably didn’t want you to grow up to be. . . When you read this book, don’t be fooled. It’s poetry. Just don’t tell your mother.

In her review in The Nation, Patricia Hart writes, ‘‘In her new book, Woman Hollering Creekand Other Stories, Cisneros breathes narrative life into her adroit, poetic descriptions, making them mature, fully formed works of fiction.’’ We might ask then, is Woman Hollering Creek poetry or is it prose? Ever since the publication of The House on Mango Street, critics have debated the degree to which Cisneros embraces both forms simultaneously. Gary Soto addresses the mirror image of the same issue in his review of her poetry collection, My Wicked Wicked Ways:

I use the term ‘‘prosaic poetry’’ not in disapproval, but as a descriptive phrase. Cisneros, as she illustrated in The House on Mango Street, is foremost a storyteller. Except for the ‘‘Rodrigo Poems,’’ which meditate on the themes of love and deceit, and perhaps a few of the travel poems, each of the poems in this collection is a little story, distilled to a few stanzas, yet with a beginning, middle, and end.

It is unlikely that critics will ever reach a definitive agreement on the matter of whether Cisneros’s writing is poetic prose or prose-like poetry. I predict, however, that this question will persist throughout her literary career, continuing to arise in subsequent criticism of her work. Cisneros herself is entitled to the final word (for the time being, at least) on the subject. At a reading in Albuquerque, New Mexico in October, 1991 she said that when she has the words to express her idea, it’s a story. When she doesn’t, it’s a poem.

Sandra Cisneros is a relatively young writer, both chronologically and in the sense that she is a fresh voice, a new presence in the spectrum of contemporary literature. One is likely to forget her relative inexperience because of the wisdom and understanding that charge and permeate her stories and poems. From time to time I am reminded of it, however, when I come across a passage that verges on the cute—at times, whether in a poem or story, she veers dangerously toward the precious. A reviewer for Booklist wrote the following criticism about The House on Mango Street, but it could apply to her work in other instances as well:

These vignettes of autobiographical fiction . . . written in a loose and deliberately simple style, halfway between a prose poem and the awkwardness of semiliteracy, convincingly represent the reflections of a young girl. Occasionally the method annoys by its cuteness.

Far more often than it is coy or cloying however, Cisneros’s work is affecting, charming and filled with the humor and the rich cultural offerings of Mexican America. Her style is as clear as water, as evinced in her unadorned syntax, her spare and elegant phrasing, and the entirely original Mexican- American inflected diction of her poetry and prose. Yet, as with the clearest water, beneath the surface, Cisneros’s work is alive with complexity and depth of meaning. Cisneros’s voice is the sound of many voices speaking—over the kitchen table, out on the street, across the borderlands, and through the years.

Source: Robin Ganz, ‘‘Border Crossings and Beyond,’’ in Melus, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 25–29.