Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Themes

In Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros is interested in exploring how romance can inspire characters to appreciate the joy of being alive. Of course, this recognition doesn’t always arise from completely positive situations. In fact, messy, discordant, and heartrending relationships often encourage Cisneros’s characters to reexamine their circumstances, ultimately opening their eyes to the world and realizing that all of humanity experiences love. By doing this, they gain a sense of interconnectedness, coming together in…

In Woman Hollering Creek, female characters both accept and push back against how men treat them. Sometimes they acquiesce to gendered expectations, but more often than not they find ways to subvert negative treatment and disingenuous attention, leveraging misogyny to gain power. For many of these women, this means embracing and even accentuating their own sexual attractiveness and, in doing so, reclaiming control over an otherwise imbalanced relationship. By highlighting this process, Cisneros suggests…

The stories in Woman Hollering Creek often center around loss, but the nature of this loss varies greatly. Some characters pine over having lost control of a loved one due to infidelity. Others feel an acute loss of culture after having moved from Mexico to the United States. When faced with these feelings, many turn to religion with high expectations, hoping God or a saint will help them regain what they’ve lost or perhaps even…

Many of the stories in Woman Hollering Creek portray growing up as a process full of contradiction and uncertainty. The children in these pages are striving to understand many things at once: social class, sexuality, cultural and national identity, religion, and attraction. Often times they ignore the complexity of things they don’t completely understand, as is the case when—for example—the narrator of “Mexican Movies” says that she enjoys being told to leave the movie…