SOURCE: "What is Called Heaven": Identity in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. 415-24.

In the following essay, Thomson surveys the strong, feminist, female characters in Cisneros's second short fiction collection.

"The wars begin here, in our hearts and in our beds" says Inés, witch-woman and "sometime wife" to Emiliano Zapata in "Eyes of Zapata," the most ambitious story of Sandra Cisneros's second collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. In Inés, Cisneros presents a narrator who is capable of seeing both at a distance and up close, who is able to encompass both the physically violent world of Zapata's revolution and the emotionally violent world of love. She is able to see both worlds and, more importantly, understands how the pain of both worlds is merely a manifestation of the same disease—a failure of love. Cisneros...