SOURCE: Carroll, Michael, and Susan Maher. “‘A Las Mujeres’: Cultural Context and the Process of Maturity in Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek.” North Dakota Quarterly 64, no. 1 (winter 1997): 70-80.

In the following essay, Carroll and Maher maintain that the stories in Woman Hollering Creek traverse artistic and cultural borders in that “her narratives unfold within a temporally variegated framework of Latina sisterhood, stretching back to mythic Aztlan yet detailing the very real confines of contemporary barrio life.”

This is a powerful time we're living in. We have to let go of our present way of life and search for our past, remember our destinies, so to speak. Like the I Ching says, returning to one's roots is returning to one's destiny.

(Woman Hollering Creek [Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories] 149)

Along with such other Chicana writers as Gloria Anzaldua and Pat Mora, for whom border-crossing stands as a major...