Today I sat down with Woman Hollering Creek and I didn’t get up until I was halfway through, and even then I was reluctant to stop reading. Cisneros has such a powerful and fluid writing style that I quickly read through these stories while being completely engrossed in each of them. The first section, which is composed of girlhood vignettes, made me smile because the language is so evocative that it called up many of my own memories. Cisneros doesn’t neglect any of the senses, from the larger-than-life colours and objects seen from the eyes of a child, to the smell of Lucy and theatre popcorn, to the awful itch of the red sweater and being physically overtaken by emotion about an inconsequential and irrational thing. There were certain experiences and emotions I could relate to in the adolescent and adult sections of the book, but more commonly I felt dismay and frustration to be experiencing second-hand these terrible realities that are thankfully not my own, but are to many Chicanas.

Living in a deeply misogynist society is one of these realities. Not only do we read about the spousal abuse suffered by Cleofilas, but in both “My Tocaya” and “Woman Hollering Creek” the female characters mention how the newspapers are filled with accounts of women beaten and killed by their husbands, lovers, and male family members. When this happens it is not a surprise, but with a sickening resignation it is accepted as business as usual. Another reality that Chicanas must deal with is how their femininity and sexuality is constructed by the cheesy romanticism of telenovelas and ballads on the one hand and the Mexican and Southwestern myths of la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Llorona, and la Chingada on the other. The ways, often profoundly damaging ones, that these manifest themselves in women’s lives can be seen multiple times in the first half of the book, most painfully when a Chicana actually jokingly reenacts the Malinche/Cortez relationship with a white man she’s having an affair with.

The last reality that I’ll mention is that of being caught between two countries, not really being from one or the other, and feeling like you’re failing in both. There are strange and sad moments of dissonance when, for example, a bumbling tourist takes a picture of “authentic” Mexican children only to find out that they’re actually “Mericans,” and how the family in “One Holy Night” sends its female members back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. when they accidentally get pregnant, a migration forced by family honor in which the women have no say.