SOURCE: Brady, Mary Pat. “The Contrapuntal Geographies of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.” American Literature 71, no. 1 (March 1999): 117-50.

In the following essay, Brady examines the representation of space in Woman Hollering Creek, arguing that “Cisneros's stories perform their critique of the production of space in multiple ways, within individual stories and through the interplay between and among them.”

Driving down streets with buildings that remind him, he says, how charming this city is. And me remembering when I was little, a cousin's baby who died from swallowing rat poison in a building like these.

That's just how it is. And that's how we drove. With all his new city memories and all my old. Him kissing me between big bites of bread.

—Sandra Cisneros, “Bread”

The conclusion of Sandra Cisneros's “Bread,” a story from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) in which the narrator remembers an afternoon...