SOURCE: Fitts, Alexandra. “Sandra Cisneros's Modern Malinche: A Reconsideration of Feminine Archetypes in Woman Hollering Creek.” International Fiction Review 29 (January 2002): 11-22.

In the following essay, Fitts discusses the portrayal of Mexican American women in three stories from Woman Hollering Creek.

Sandra Cisneros's collection of stories Woman Hollering Creek (1991) depicts the situation of the Mexican-American woman: typically caught between two cultures, she resides in a cultural borderland.¹ The topics of the stories range from the confusions of a bicultural and bilingual childhood to the struggles of a dark-skinned woman to recognize her own beauty in the land of Barbie dolls and blond beauty queens. While Cisneros does not attempt to force easy resolutions on such complex subject matter, she does search for a “place” that will respect Spanish and Indian heritage along with Mexican tradition without resorting to a nostalgic longing for a distant motherland (a Mexico that, in...