Sandra Cisneros Woman Hollering Creek

In “Woman Hollering Creek”, Sandra Cisneros demonstrates, like in many of her stories the oppression women are faced with. Sandra Cisneros, a Mexican American woman who tells short stories often describing Hispanic culture, began writing at the age of ten. She manipulates two languages, creating new expressions in English by literally translating Spanish phrases. Cisneros’s characters seem to have a naive humorous quality. Her characters are usually affected by how femininity and female sexuality are defined within the Hispanic patriarchal value system and how they struggle to redefine themselves. She is a significant voice in feminist literature.
In this story, she demonstrates how men are more dominant than women within the Hispanic culture.

Through watching telenovelas (Spanish soap operas), she builds ideas, which are far from what actually takes place in her culture. She couldn’t wait to pursue this dream even if it meant marrying a man she barely knew anything about, escaping the daily chores of taking care of her father and six brothers. In Hispanic culture young girls are raised and groomed to be someone’s wife and mother. They are supposed to take care of the house, laundry, cooking, and wait on her man. Her father, a widow, visualizing the opposite “his daughter would raise her hand over her eyes, look south, and dream of returning to the chores that never ended, six good for nothing brothers, and one old man’s

Soon after her marriage her fairy tale becomes her nightmare, “the moment came, and he slapped her once, and then again, and again; until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood”. She didn’t react like she thought she would. She has ideas of what she will and will not accept. However, when that totally unexpected moment came she was shocked and spun into denial, as most abused women do. Then later, symbolically shattering all her dreams, “He had thrown a book. Hers. From across the room. A hot welt across the cheek. She could forgive that. But what stung more was the fact that it was her book, a love story by Corin Tellado, what she loved most now that she lived in the U.S., without a television set, without the telenovelas”. Feeling empathy for this character is inevitable. That was a devastating