Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories 289Chicanas are influenced by bicultural and bina-
tional gender icons as well. In “Eyes of Zapata,” Cis-
neros describes the life of the Mexican revolutionary
Emiliano Zapata through his lover, Inés Alfaro.
Although Zapata is often regarded as a national
hero and defender of land rights, Cisneros com-
plicates his image by revealing the society’s sexual
double standards and the patriarchy that condones
Zapata’s extramarital affairs while killing women
(like Inés’s mother) who behave the same way.
Most of Cisneros’s stories focus on Mexican
motherhood and usually feature one or more of the
following three figures: La Llorona, La Malinche,
and La Virgen de Guadalupe (the Virgin of Guadal-
upe). The first two are bad mothers and the third one
is good only because she is passive and selfless. These
figures compose the whore/virgin dichotomy that the
culture uses to influence women’s behavior. Yet Cis-
neros’s characters challenge and revise each figure’s
attributes to construct more empowering feminist
interpretations. La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman,
is based on a Mexican folktale about a mother who
drowns her children out of vengeance for her cheat-
ing husband. In “Woman Hollering Creek,” Cleófilas
does not drown her children in the creek; rather, she
leaves her abusive husband. The story transforms
women like Cleófilas from weeping mothers into
hollering women who find the power to escape.
La Malinche was an indigenous woman who was
enslaved by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés
in 1519 and eventually bore his children. Because of
her role as translator and guide for the Spanish, she is
often blamed for the downfall of the Aztec Empire.
She is vilified by Mexican and Chicano culture as a
traitor because of her relationship with Cortés. In
“Never Marry a Mexican,” La Malinche is alluded
to when Clemencia’s Chicana mother tells her not
to marry a Mexican because of the difficulties she
had with Clemencia’s Mexican father. This first act
of betrayal is compounded later by the affair she
has with a white man while Clemencia’s father is
on his deathbed. Clemencia will follow her mother’s
example by also having an affair with a white married
man named Drew, who calls Clemencia “Malinalli”
(Malinche’s indigenous name). Clemencia’s behavior
hurts her when Drew refuses to leave his wife for her
because he could never marry a Mexican.
Any woman who rejects patriarchy is considered
to be a traitor and is called “Malinche”—such as
Rosario in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” who
refuses to be a submissive wife and mother. She
stops praying to the Mexican patron saint, La Vir-
gen de Guadalupe, because the Virgin represents
self-abnegation and passivity—the idealized quali-
ties of Mexican womanhood. Rosario resumes her
worship of the Virgin only after she learns about the
connection between the Virgin and the powerful
Aztec goddesses who preceded her.
Belinda Linn Rinconsex and sexuality in Woman Hollering
Creek and Other Stories
Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other
Stories explores the power and danger of female
sexuality and how institutions like family, marriage,
and the Catholic Church attempt to control it. Part
2 of the book focuses on stories of adolescence and
shows how a lack of knowledge about sex can lead
to tragedy. In “One Holy Night,” a girl’s curiosity
about sex and her family’s refusal to talk about it
lead to serious consequences when she is raped by a
37-year-old serial killer named Chato. He tells her
that he is the descendant of Mayan kings lamenting
the loss of cultural traditions. When the narrator
falls for his story and his tears, he takes advantage
of her naïveté. After he rapes her, she feels like a
Mayan queen and skips home, feeling content that
she has learned what sex is. Her reaction minimizes
the rape, but Chato’s extensive gun collection and
the extreme age disparity remind us that force and
violence have shaped the encounter. Her sense of
empowerment ends when her family learns that she
is pregnant. They take her out of the eighth grade
and send her to live in Mexico before her pregnancy
starts to show and can lead to family shame. Ironi-
cally, her own mother had been sent from Mexico to
the United States when she, too, became pregnant
from premarital sex. The story emphasizes how
families are invested in controlling female sexuality
and view it as a threat to their moral standards and
social status. The narrator’s family uses shame and
exile to penalize her. In this case, the punishment
may have helped save her life as Chato, who previ-
ously murdered 11 women, later returns to find her.