290 Cisneros, Sandra
In “My Tocaya,” a Catholic high school tries
to control the contact between boys and girls by
limiting interaction and promoting abstinence. The
13-year-old Patricia, who uses a British accent to
sound sexy, rebels against this backdrop and an
abusive home by running away. Many fear the worst
after the body of a young girl is found in a ditch.
Again, Cisneros shows how sex is treated as a mys-
tery and social taboo and how girls deal with social
restrictions and street violence.
In part 3, Cisneros focuses on stories about
adults where violence and female sexuality remain
dominant themes. “The Eyes of Zapata” tells the
story of Inés, a mistress of the Mexican revolution-
ary Emiliano Zapata who contemplates the differ-
ence between love and sex in a time of war. During
the Mexican Revolution, women become war booty
as many are raped by soldiers from both sides and
men like Zapata exercise the socially condoned male
prerogative of having multiple lovers (and children)
outside of marriage. Zapata is a “mujeriego,” or
womanizer, and although Inés is one of his lovers,
she questions why society condones male infidelity
yet condemns it among women. Her own mother
serves as the ultimate example of this violent double
standard. Years earlier, she was gang-raped, muti-
lated, and killed by a group of men (and former
lovers) as punishment for having extramarital sex.
The attack’s brutality emphasizes the community’s
anxiety over an unrestrained female sexuality that
dares to challenge male privilege and control.
Cisneros’s stories also examine eroticism in male
characters. For example, Zapata may be a “mujer-
iego,” but he is also eroticized through Inés’s detailed
descriptions of his body. Through such intimate
details, Cisneros transforms Zapata from a national
legend to a sexualized, vulnerable man. The title
of the story “Bien Pretty” refers to a man—not a
woman—named Flavio. He poses for Lupe, a Chi-
cana artist who uses him as a model for a painting
of a popular Mexican myth which, in her version,
exploits the male anatomy.
The most erotic male character is Rudy in
“Remember the Alamo.” Onstage, Rudy is known
as “Tristán,” a dancer in a drag show who mesmer-
izes audiences with sensual dances that combine
desire and death, longing and loneliness. When he
becomes “Tristán” (a play on the word triste, which
means “sad”), Rudy wields power over adoring fans.
He also dances metaphorically with Death, suggest-
ing that the transgressive sensuality of a gay man’s
performance can lead to potential violence in an
unforgiving straight society. This power he has over
the audience and Death compensates for the pow-
erlessness he feels over a life of poverty, rejection,
childhood memories of sexual abuse, and potential
homophobic violence. The stage is a safe place for
Tristán’s display of sensuality, and it is Rudy’s emo-
tional refuge from a brutal reality.
Belinda Linn RinconsuFFerinG in Woman Hollering Creek and
Other Stories
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, by Sandra
Cisneros, opens with a series of vignettes that por-
tray children who suffer the hardships of poverty. In
“Salvador Late or Early,” Salvador is a young boy
who dutifully takes care of his younger brothers, yet
his own childhood is cut short by the weight of his
responsibilities. While he plays the role of a caring
older brother admirably, the narrator subtly reveals
the difficulties Salvador faces as his childhood is
marked by poverty and isolation. He holds within
him a history of pain and scars whose causes remain
unknown to us, yet we can guess that they involve
his experience as a Latino boy whose economic and
ethnic background account for why his teacher does
not recall his name, why he feels or is made to feel
inferior every time he speaks, and why he has no
friends. In other stories, the effects of poverty are
obscured by Cisneros’s use of child narrators who
describe economic hardships in naive ways. For
example, the narrator in “My Lucy Friend Who
Smells Like Corn” is envious of the fun Lucy must
have sleeping with her eight sisters in one bed, but
she does not realize the arrangement is by necessity
and not by choice.
Cisneros also shows how suffering has a cul-
tural and gendered dimension within Mexican and
Chicano communities. Mexican telenovelas, which
are similar to soap operas, often feature female
characters who suffer for love. In “Woman Holler-
ing Creek,” Cleófilas watches a telenovela called Tú
o Nadie, You or No One, whose female protagonist