SOURCE: Lewis, L. M. “Ethnic and Gender Identity: Parallel Growth in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek.” Short Story 2, no. 2 (fall 1994): 69-78.
[In the following essay, Lewis classifies the stories in Woman Hollering Creek into three groups and asserts that the stories in the collection concern minority women who “find themselves confronting an external, dominant set of values.”]
Sandra Cisneros once characterized the stories in The House on Mango Street as “lazy poems” (“Do You Know Me?” 79). The collection is surely more crafted than lazy, but her latest collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, grows dynamically beyond it in form and in theme. According to one account, Mango Street [The House on Mango Street] portrays only “two types of girls”: those who try to escape the patriarchal limits of their culture through education, and those who trade fathers for husbands, one patriarch for another (Olivares 164). In Woman Hollering Creek [Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories], the protagonists grow in several ways, through several ages, from being defined by others, toward some self-definition, from confusion on the margins of two or three ethnic cultures, to a mature and expansive synthesis. In a parallel sequence, the same girl breaks away from a series of patriarchs, acquires a fierce independence, and celebrates her membership in a sustaining community of women. The collection is composed of three parts. The first is of children: all the characters except one are about eleven years old and live in Mexican villages or barrios in the United States. They regard their homes as safe and nurturing, expecting to be happy in them. The girls in the second group of stories are adolescents who experience an initiation or epiphany. One is seduced, learns the truth about sex, and thus becomes wise (“One Holy Night”). The other girl discovers that a father's power is hard to escape, and, as implied by the title “My Tocaya,” (namesake), she sees that all Chicana women share different versions of the same experience. The third group, the longest and most substantive, includes the half-dozen stories in which women act against the dominance of tradition, first to protect themselves, but ultimately to define themselves.
Cisneros' women begin with the work of all minority groups who find themselves confronting an external, dominant set of values. They must “syncretize,” or mix language, social protocol, and mythologies of the two cultural forces. Mayans and Aztecs were eventually forced to incorporate medieval Christian and Spanish symbols and figures into their daily lives and define Mexico for themselves; in the same way, a character like Cleófilas in Cisneros' title story, who has been literally transported into Texas from el otro lado (the other side), must construct a life for herself out of memories of her life in Mexico, episodes from telenovelas [soap operas] and the realities of Seguin, Texas. She sometimes sat on the bank of the creek, recalling stories of La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) from her childhood while her own child played on a Donald Duck blanket (51). Cleófilas is not as successful as other characters in establishing synthesis, but her conflict represents the forces which will eventually be reconciled—the behavior and artifacts of two competing groups.
In early stories, the protagonist, as a child or adolescent, speaks or encounters language which is difficult, alien, clumsy, rough, or mysterious because of an incomplete reconciliation of Spanish and English in communities which demand both. In a group of later stories, there is a shift from painful conflict to a wistful regard for Spanish and an instinct to embrace those who speak it, particularly if they speak it well. Micaela, in “Mericans,” particularly exhibits the pain of not belonging. The girl shifts uneasily from knee to knee in the Mexican church, which is to her grandmother a sanctuary from a grotesque and threatening world. Raised in the U.S., which her grandmother considers barbaric, Micaela can only understand Spanish when she is “paying attention” (19). When the children speak in English, they reveal themselves as not Mexican, but not quite Americans either; they are “Mericans” (20).
There are early efforts to deny the forces of time and the dominance of English. In “One Holy Night,” a young man materializes in a Mexican American neighborhood, identifying himself as Chaq Uxmal Paloquin from “the ancient cities” in the Yucatan (27), “speaking a strange language that no one could understand,” and intending to restore the “ancient ways” and “grandeur” of his people (29-30). However, Chaq did not belong in the old culture he claimed for himself. Most of his mail was addressed to “Occupant” and his real name was Chato (Flat Face) Cruz (32). He was born, not in the Yucatan, home of the Mayan rain god, Chaq, but “on a street with no name” (33). His sister had long since compromised any connection to the ancient ways—she is a Carmelite nun (33). Instead of adopting a fanciful identity from her heritage, one of the Patricias in “My Tocaya” “adopted a phony British accent” and a “breathless” Marilyn Monroe delivery, as if to escape her place in her family and her community (37). Cleófilas abruptly moves from a small town in Mexico to a small town in Texas, remains disenfranchised because she speaks no English, and must listen to “gruff Spanish” (46) or Spanish “pocked with English” (55).
“Never Marry a Mexican” is a pivotal story, one of syncretism which is unsatisfying, bitter, even violent. In it, Clemencia is older and more mobile than earlier characters, but she is not fully at ease with her mixed identity, calling herself an “amphibian who doesn't belong to any class” (71). She is the daughter of “a Mexican girl who couldn't even speak Spanish” (69) and a father who moved to the U.S. and “must've found U.S. Mexicans very strange” (71). Appropriately, she makes part of her living by translating travel brochures, but is still uncomfortable with her idiom: “I can't even get the sayings right, even though I was born in this country” (73). The Mexican American neighborhood she chooses is not apt, but only “cute”; it looks like Sesame Street (72).
Clemencia's lover, Drew, was her “Cortés” with pale skin and a dark beard; her own skin was dark against his (74). She felt some delight at the contrast because he called it “beautiful” and made love to her in Spanish (74). However, their bond, and her resulting identity, never lasted past dawn when he would leave her her to return to his pale-skinned wife who was emphatically “not a Mexican” (74). The relationship is symbolic of a painful, perplexing syncretism. Drew, figuring as the invasive and dominating Cortés, called Clemencia his “Malinche—the Mexican name for Doña Marina, who became Cortés' mistress (Meyer and Sherman 102). She, like Clemencia, must have felt classless, amphibious. A royal Mayan child, she had been sold as a slave to one Aztec tribe, traded to another, then given to the Conquistador, Cortés. The legend demonstrates the cost of her survival and that of Clemencia. “Malinche” is traditionally a traitor's name: she became a spokesman for Cortés, encouraged Aztecs to betray their leaders, ultimately allowed the European conquest of Mexico, and bore the first “mestizo”—child with mixed blood. Clemencia uneasily confronts her alliance with Drew in those terms. She says she can live with herself because Drew's wife wasn't “a brown woman,” but admits “a bit of crazy joy” in sleeping with husbands of other women (76-77). She, like Malinche, has been used and discarded as unacceptable. Drew is fond of Mexican women, “all golden and sun-baked,” but would never marry one (76). Nor would Clemencia consider any Hispanic for a lover, rejecting a whole catalog: “Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban Chilean. …” (69). This, according to some critics, was Malinche's greatest betrayal. Her acceptance of Cortés was a “renunciation of the American Indian male,” symbolic of a “repudiation of the native in favor the foreign” (Cypess 35).
Ramon Saldivar says that Chicano literature, by its nature, must reflect such internal conflicts. It does not portray characters who can establish happy identities for themselves through a synthesis of competing cultures; the narrative “reveals the dialectical tension” without resolving it (174). In his account of Mexican American cultural development, James Vigil also characterizes synthesis as most often difficult, confused, or “shaky” (134). This is Clemencia's condition. However, she anticipates a healthy synthesis that Vigil says is also possible: a “cooperation of a sort” that can occur when the minority group assumes the dominant culture without “unlearning the native one” (134).
Lupita, in “Bien Pretty,” is the Chicana who finally constructs a full, cooperative, and comfortable ethnic identity for herself, one more expansive than a synthesis of only competing cultures. She is a Mexican American who at first wanted, in a way, to be Mexican. Her Spanish is competent, but in her mind not authentic. She had learned some of it in American schools and some from “crazy Graham,” but he “was Welsh and had learned his Spanish running guns to Bolivia” (153).
Flavio is Lupita's last and most likely lover. He ultimately fails her, but because of gender conflicts, not because he fails as a Mexican. His sense of his cultural identity is genuine, not like Chaq's which was a mask to disguise his real, shameful origins. When Flavio makes love to Lupita in Spanish, his phrasing is delicate and devout. He does not call her “Malinche” as Drew had called Clemencia. Flavio's words whispered, crooned, swept, startled, murmured, “whirred like silk, rolled, and puckered, and hissed” (153-4). His speech evokes all the sense of nurture and home from the early stories. And to Lupita, Flavio is an archetype figure. He is, in the folk tale of his grandmother, an Aztec god's third and best effort at making men (152).
Despite his fluency in Spanish which stirred Lupita's soul, she learns that he had achieved a comfortable synthesis of cultures. He moves with ease between English and Spanish, often combining them. Attributing his knowledge of myth and “indigenous” dances to his grandmother, rather than to the Popul Vuh or early ancestors (149), he will not pander to her wish to see him as the end of a clean line from the Mayans or Aztecs. When she scolds him for wearing a shirt with an alligator on it and for anglicizing words, he responds easily: “I don't have to dress in a serape and sombrero to be Mexican. I know who I am” (151). She suggests that they “‘let go of [their] present way of life and search for [their] past,’” but he corrects her:
You think old ages end, but that's not so. It's ridiculous to think one age has overcome another. American time is running along side the calendar of the sun, even if your world doesn't know it.
(150)
Ultimately Lupita discovers that she also is a combination of all the cultural forces she encounters and of all the times of her past. Her mature view is anticipated early when she moves into the home of a “Texas poet” who is “directly descended from Ixtaccihuatl or something,” holds a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, is married to a “Huichol curandero” [folk healer] and is currently in Nayarit on a Fulbright (139). The apartment is cluttered with artifacts from Haiti,...