SOURCE: Griffin, Susan E. “Resistance and Reinvention in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown, pp. 85-96. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

In the following essay, Griffin considers how cultural influences shape and limit the lives of the women in Woman Hollering Creek.

In her prefatory poem to My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Sandra Cisneros asks, “What does a woman [like me] inherit that tells her how to go?” (x). This question about the cultural inheritance of Mexican American women and how it shapes their perceptions of the choices available to them is central to Cisneros' work. Throughout her poetry and fiction, she has depicted the material and ideological forces that circumscribe Mexican American women's lives.¹ In her novel The House on Mango Street, and in several of the poems in My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Cisneros portrays women who are trapped...