This is by far my favorite book we have read so far. I find Cisnero’s writing style to be captivating and poetic. The way in which she describes situations and emotions artfully and metaphorically is very powerful and speaks to the heart. I am having a hard time putting this one down! I really enjoy how she not only gives voice to the many characters and perspectives represented in the book, but she actually seems to become these characters themselves. There is a tragic quality to her writing, but it this same quality that resonates very deeply in the Chicano and female experience as I understand it. Her writing style inspires me to want to write more!

In My Friend Lucy Who Smells Like Corn, Cisneros embodies the voice of a sassy eleven-year-old girl, and these stories hilariously and insightfully detain the trials and triumphs of what it is like to see the world from her perspective. At first, I was slightly thrown off by the colloquial style, and it briefly felt like she was trying too hard, but once I got into the swing of things, I really came to enjoy seeing the world from these eyes. Even in the absurdity of the stories she tells, there is a certain truth and familiarity that is evoked in regards to me as my eleven-year-old self. I loved the way in which she described Salvador in Salvador Late or Early. “Salvador with eyes the color of caterpillar, Salvador of the crooked hair and crooked teeth. Salvador whose name the teacher cannot remember, is a boy who is no one’s friend, runs along somewhere in that vague direction where homes are the color of bad weather…”.

There are also beautiful description in the following story One Holey Night. I really enjoy the subtlety of how she writes. She does not flat out say things that happen or the way people feel about said situations, but she probes at them in the form of metaphors. “Then abuelita made me tell her the real story of how the cart had disappeared, all of which I told this time, except for that one night, which I would have to tell anyway, weeks later, I prayed for the moon of my cycle to come back, but it would not.”

All in all, I am very impressed with this book. So far, this class has probably had the best selection of literature of any lit class I’ve taken at UBC, and all of the books add different layers and dimensions to my overall understanding of the Chicano experience. I enjoy the artistry and the subtle layering of perspectives that seem to exists very strong in many of these

So far, I’ve been finding this book extremely unique in terms of its writing, style and breakdown. I can’t think of anything quite like this which I’ve read before. I enjoy the short chapter formats and the fast pace of the book in the beginning. Many of the sentences, while short and fragmented, are very descriptive and capture the moments described quite well. Cisneros creates a really personal style of writing, it’s as if she just threw out her thoughts as they came and put them down on paper. Even from the first chapter, I felt a pretty strong connection and understanding of the book. What I find amazing, is that as Marti was extremely descriptive (which I do enjoy), I think it works so much better in this book. I’m still trying to figure out how they’re descriptive style is different, maybe marti’s is more quantitative while Cisneros is more qualitative? I’m not sure.

As with much of the other works we’ve read, find that this book does a good job at shining light on the chicano community. Maybe it’s from patterns i’ve picked up throughout the works we’ve read so far, but I find I’ve been exposed to many gender issues I didn’t think were apparent. I also enjoy the innocence of this book through the child’s perspective, which complements the fragmented sentences really well.

So far I am really enjoying this book! The short stories in Cisnero’s novel are very simplistic in first-person narratives and provide very detailed descriptions. For example, in “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn”, a young girl carefully describes everything she knows about Lucy and how she longs to be her good friend. “We’re going to run home backwards and we’re going to run home frontwards….We’re going to wave to a lady we don’t know on the bus. Hello!” Cisneros definitely embodies the thoughts of an eleven-year old girl effectively and the simplicity of the language and actions made this chapter in particular very heartwarming!

The first section of the book consist of stories concerning young girls. My favourite chapter has to have been “eleven” because it was intriguining how someone could feel that they are two, three, five, ten, but not eleven!!! I felt sorry for her as she was being embarrassed on the brink of tears on her eleventh birthday, and that she would rather be one hundred and two years old just for her eleventh birthday to be over.

The message I am getting so far from the stories is that these Mexican-Americans are experiencing clashes between their heritage Mexican culture with the demands of American culture. I found this to be particularly true in the chapter “Mericans” where Micaela goes to a Mexican church with her grandmother and cannot relate to the Spanish customs but at the same time she feels out of place in the American society as well.

I have also read The House on Mango Street and I found the language to be very similiar because the story was also told through the eyes of a child.

I’m starting to see some similarities will every book we’ve read so far and it is definitely helping me get some sort of grasp as to what kind of hardships the Chicano communities go through.  I would enjoy this book a little more if it weren’t pessimistic towards men and did not shape us as harsh and typically a villainous sex. But, the same critique goes for women as well.  At least I got this from the first half of the book.  This was encompassed perfectly in one quotation.

“All I know is I was sleeping with your father the night you were born.  In the same bed where you were conceived.  I was sleeping with your father and didn’t give a damn about that woman, your mother.  If she was a brown woman like me, I might’ve had a harder time living with myself, but since she’s not, I don’t care” (Cisneros,76).

I thought this was a very powerful quote, the kind of quote where when you’re reading and just think to yourself “o snap!” The whole chapter never marry a Mexican was a lead up to certain stereotypes.  Since this man was married to a white woman, and according to the speakers logic, that she was not in some way equal to Chicanos.  This quote frames the man as not having any sort of control while it depicts the woman as a deviant she-wolf, who has no remorse for her actions.  I don’t enjoy how this book cages men under the guise of weak-willed individuals.  Having said that it makes the book a page turner.

Another quote from the same chapter that I thought was very interesting is on 71.  “I’m amphibious.  I’m a person who doesn’t belong in any social class.  The rich like to have me around because they envy my creativity; they know they can’t buy that.  The poor didn’t mind if I live in their neighborhood because they know I’m poor like they are, even if my education and the way I dress keeps us world apart…not to the middle class from which my sister Ximena and I fled” (Cisneros, 71).

This quote stuck to me when I was reading.  I really connected with this character and his social entrapment.  This was an interesting take on immigrants who live in el otro lado.  So far our readings have dealt with social assent and poverty, but this man doesn’t have a class to stick to and to me doesn’t seem to fazed by it.  I am looking forward to finishing this book and putting the jig-saw pieces together.

I’m starting to see some similarities will every book we’ve read so far and it is definitely helping me get some sort of grasp as to what kind of hardships the Chicano communities go through.  I would enjoy this book a little more if it weren’t pessimistic towards men and did not shape us as harsh and typically a villainous sex. But, the same critique goes for women as well.  At least I got this from the first half of the book.  This was encompassed perfectly in one quotation.

“All I know is I was sleeping with your father the night you were born.  In the same bed where you were conceived.  I was sleeping with your father and didn’t give a damn about that woman, your mother.  If she was a brown woman like me, I might’ve had a harder time living with myself, but since she’s not, I don’t care” (Cisneros,76).

I thought this was a very powerful quote, the kind of quote where when you’re reading and just think to yourself “o snap!” The whole chapter never marry a Mexican was a lead up to certain stereotypes.  Since this man was married to a white woman, and according to the speakers logic, that she was not in some way equal to Chicanos.  This quote frames the man as not having any sort of control while it depicts the woman as a deviant she-wolf, who has no remorse for her actions.  I don’t enjoy how this book cages men under the guise of weak-willed individuals.  Having said that it makes the book a page turner.

Another quote from the same chapter that I thought was very interesting is on 71.  “I’m amphibious.  I’m a person who doesn’t belong in any social class.  The rich like to have me around because they envy my creativity; they know they can’t buy that.  The poor didn’t mind if I live in their neighborhood because they know I’m poor like they are, even if my education and the way I dress keeps us world apart…not to the middle class from which my sister Ximena and I fled” (Cisneros, 71).

This quote stuck to me when I was reading.  I really connected with this character and his social entrapment.  This was an interesting take on immigrants who live in el otro lado.  So far our readings have dealt with social assent and poverty, but this man doesn’t have a class to stick to and to me doesn’t seem to fazed by it.  I am looking forward to finishing this book and putting the jig-saw pieces together.

Sandra Cisnero’s collection Woman Hollering Creek: and other stories is, first of all, quite wonderful. I can understand why it is a commonly studied text in universities, and why it was chosen for our class. Other than How the García Girl Lost Their Accents (my wiki article), this is my favorite text thus far. Of course, the English enhances my experience somewhat.

Reading “Woman Hollering Creek” (well, the first half) was like going into a Chinese restaurant and being able to get 8 different types of dim sum for the price of one. Am I the only one who thinks that reading Cisernos’ work is like…reading the work of numerous authors? Her use of voice allows her audience to hear the inside thoughts of her characters as well as their speaking voices. One story sounds like a telenovela, another, a tragedy, another a scene from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. It is almost as if “Woman Hollering Creek” is an anthology of Chicano Literature, each story as individual as the character telling it.

What I loved most about this book was the imagery. I was able to see “tri-ish” and hear her heels and see her hoop earrings and mini-skirt. I was able to smell the corn in the little girl’s hair and I could feel the boredom that comes with being in a family of devout Catholics. I also appreciated, as some of you stated, that this book seemed -real-. It seemed like literal literature. A non-fictional fiction. There were no traces of devils or dyed skin in this book. Only stories I could hear actual people saying, whether it be in a kindergarten playground or in a skeezy, smoke clouded bar.

Though I feel we got a glimpse of what “Chicano Culture” is in the last book, I feel like this book exemplifies the hybrid culture that embodies Mexican-Americans who live around the border or around the United States and Canada. This book shows the joys and difficulties and that accompany Chicanos throughout their lives. The Latino influences and the “American” ones (who is to say who is an “American”, Mexico is in America but that is another can of worms).

My main point is that this book is…real.

Oh, and when they Cisernos mentions “La Llorona”, I remembered this scene from the movie “Frida”. Beautiful. https://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=0gQ31m4Yt0s”

Much like Tomas Rivera, the many voices of Chicanas in this novel fuse together and become one voice which qualifies their existence. Unlike Rivera, it is a purely female voice.
A central issue in this novel is power struggle between men and women. To Cisneros, the chasm between the sexes is a deep one. There is little harmony. No man can be completely trusted; even grandfathers, fathers, have done their share to make mothers, wives, suffer.
But in bittersweet, poetic language Cisneros recognizes how much women can need men, and worship them, and how they can give all of themselves knowingly to someone who will hurt them, to watch them as they sleep and hold them after they’ve been hit. It’s painfully beautiful and very real. Not always is the man abusive, weak, or cowardly, but he is never as strong as the woman. Cisneros’ women love their men more than their men love them and they know it. They accept humbly that a woman’s way of loving is much more vast and hurts so much more.
If you read the “About the Author” section, it says, “she is nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife”. Like her characters, it seems Cisneros is portrayed as some sort of survivor, who in the end can only trust herself.
Underlying every story there is a recognition of woman’s primal power…”You’re nothing without me. I created you from spit and red dust”(75), says one of her characters to a man, emphasizing with imagery the power of creation that women hold above men.

so when i saw the title of our next book i kind of thought ‘oh no, more feminism…’ but have been pleasantly surprised so far.

Well the first time I read Woman Hollering Creek I had a hard time piecing these stories together…probably because, as critic Ilan Stavans claims, they are more like “verbal photographs” (a little tidbit from our Wikipedia article!) therefore, they often lack either a beginning, middle or end…or sometimes even all three. After doing some researching for our article, I’ve gained a huge appreciation for why Cisneros writes the way she does, and in reading this book a second time with knowing what to expect, I have enjoyed it so much more. Instead of trying to figure out how one story is connected to the next, I was able to step back and see more of the overall picture. I really like how she categorizes her writings into the three sections: childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and that within these sections one can learn through Cisneros’ down-to-earth writing style about what life is truly like for chicanas, living on either side of the Mexican border.

My favourite of the three sections would have to be “There Was a Man, There Was a Woman”, and I particularly was drawn in by the title story “Woman Hollering Creek”. I had the same reaction while reading this narrative as I did when I read “Y no se lo tragó la tierra”; I wanted to reach out and help both books’ protagonists escape from the hard realities of life that they faced. Cleófilas, our female protagonist is off to marry the man she thought she had waited all her life for. However, she is unaware of the downward turn her life is about to take when her new husband becomes abusive, and unfaithful. She ends up wishing she could return home despite the “chores that never ended, [her] six good for nothing brothers and one old man’s complaints” …this is the same “old man” who, though foreseeing her future filled with hardship, sent her off with the words “I am your father I will never abandon you”. These words of her father just melted my heart, and made me want to jump right into the story to tell Cleófilas she was making a grave mistake…and that she should at least stay where she is loved. I hated reading how poorly she was treated in her marriage and I felt that it would better to be single and (in her case) at home where she is accepted and loved rather than to be married to someone who is unloving and abusive…Anyways, I appreciated this narrative a lot because it is so relative to today…the choices you make, especially important ones such as marriage, can have such a drastic effect on your future…

Reading this book for the second time has been great…and I’m excited to revisit the second half this next week.