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Eyes of Zapata
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love, The Joy of Life, & Interconnection
Female Objectification & Power
Cultural & National Identity
Loss, Longing, & Grief
Coming of Age
Summary
Analysis
The narrator of "Anguiano" warns readers that the owner of a certain religious store is a “crab ass.” In need of a Virgen de Guadalupe statue one day, she knocks on his shop door and sees him sitting in the dark, ignoring her. When he finally opens up, he looks at her like she’s “one of those ladies from the Cactus Hotel […] com[ing] to rob him.” Once inside, the narrator has trouble deciding what to buy. Interrupting her decision, the owner approaches, saying, “I can see you’re not going to buy anything.” In response, she says, “I just need a little more time to think.” Unconvinced, the owner replies, “[…] you just go across the street to the church to think—you’re just wasting my time and yours thinking here.” Disgusted, the narrator yearns to tell him to go to hell, but decides not to, figuring “he’s already headed there” anyway.
This story centers around the narrator’s rage at the fact that Anguiano dares to pass judgment about her based on her looks. Because she doesn’t provide a description of herself to readers, it’s difficult to say why, exactly, Anguiano is so eager to banish her from the store, but the fact that he looks at her like she’s somebody from the Cactus Hotel suggests that he thinks she’s some sort of prostitute or drifter (since the narrator references the Cactus Hotel in such a negative way). Above all, his gruff attitude implies that he thinks only certain kinds of people belong in a religious store, and clearly the narrator doesn’t match the stereotype he has in mind. As such, this is a vignette about what it means to belong somewhere, and Cisneros proves that people often form their own opinions about what somebody else can or can’t be.
Themes
