SOURCE: Payant, Katherine. “Borderland Themes in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek.” In The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving out a Niche, edited by Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose, pp. 95-108. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Payant explores the borderland theme in the stories comprising Woman Hollering Creek.

For a writer with quite a small oeuvre—a novella, a volume of poems, and a book of short fiction—Chicana feminist Sandra Cisneros has become widely read and known. Cisneros blurs lines between genres, calling her fiction, often vignettes rather than structured narratives, “lazy poems” (“Do You Know Me?” 79). Her Bildungsroman, The House on Mango Street, is read both as a young adult novel and as a work of adult fiction, and her most recent book of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), includes prose poems similar to those in Mango Street...