Woman Hollering Creed
Morgan Sneed
ENGL2006
Sandra Cisneros is an American writer best known for her first novel The House on Mango Street and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Her work experiments with literary forms and investigates emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell.
Cisneros's early life provided many experiences she would later draw on as a writer: “born in Chicago, the child of a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother, Cisneros spent parts of her childhood in Texas and Mexico (1130).” Cisneros's work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of finding herself caught between Mexican and American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities. Using her position as an educator and writer, she began “to champion Chicana feminism, especially as this movement combines cultural issues with women’s concerns (1131)”. In Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros “cultivates a sense of warmth and naïve humor for her protagonists, qualities that are evident in introductory parts (1130).” This short story collection deals with the issues that young women faced. “What remains constant is the author’s view that by romanticizing sexual relations women cooperate with a male view that can be oppressive, even physically destructive…Ciseneros is ‘caught between here and there’. Yet ‘here’ and ‘there’ are not as dichotomous as young versus old, female versus male, or Mexico versus the United States (1130).”
Woman Hollering Creek is a tale of tragedy and triumph. The story, told from the third person, begins by showing us the foreknowledge our protagonist Cleofilas’s father held
ENGL2006
Sandra Cisneros is an American writer best known for her first novel The House on Mango Street and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Her work experiments with literary forms and investigates emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell.
Cisneros's early life provided many experiences she would later draw on as a writer: “born in Chicago, the child of a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother, Cisneros spent parts of her childhood in Texas and Mexico (1130).” Cisneros's work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of finding herself caught between Mexican and American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities. Using her position as an educator and writer, she began “to champion Chicana feminism, especially as this movement combines cultural issues with women’s concerns (1131)”. In Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros “cultivates a sense of warmth and naïve humor for her protagonists, qualities that are evident in introductory parts (1130).” This short story collection deals with the issues that young women faced. “What remains constant is the author’s view that by romanticizing sexual relations women cooperate with a male view that can be oppressive, even physically destructive…Ciseneros is ‘caught between here and there’. Yet ‘here’ and ‘there’ are not as dichotomous as young versus old, female versus male, or Mexico versus the United States (1130).”
Woman Hollering Creek is a tale of tragedy and triumph. The story, told from the third person, begins by showing us the foreknowledge our protagonist Cleofilas’s father held