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

In the following essay, Fitts discusses Cisneros's representations of three Hispanic female icons in the stories of Woman Hollering Creek: La Malinche in “Never Marry a Mexican;” the Virgin of Guadalupe in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises;” and La Llorona in “Woman Hollering Creek.”

Sandra Cisneros's collection of stories Woman Hollering Creek [Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories] (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...