Cisneros, Style

In my last post I mentioned how I was able to read Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories quickly, which is thanks to Cisneros' unencumbered style and accessible language, the shortness of the stories and their ability to convey powerful emotions and vivid images succinctly, at least for the most part. But you can’t confuse a quick read with a simple read, because the more you examine this collection of stories, the more their sub-surface messages and clever narrative techniques emerge. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is like a stylistic laboratory – it has a little bit of everything mixed into one powerful concoction. There are stories written in first and third person, stream-of-consciousness, little vignettes that capture a slice of someone’s life, and stories with a cast of characters and a plot with action. Some passages describe tender and beautiful scenes in poetic language and others are brutal or crass and use street language. But what makes this book great is not just the complex and varied style but the fact that there is always an underlying message – sometimes the message is clear and other times it’s obscured and you have to dig to get at it – you have to question each element in the passage and why it was written that way. It surprised me how much we were able to get out of our analysis of “The Marlboro Man” – how deceptively simple the passage was initially in comparison to what it had to offer. I would like to revisit other stories in more detail – even though I read them once I have the feeling that half of them is still lying under the surface.

Telenovela meets La Malinche

Today I sat down with Woman Hollering Creek and I didn’t get up until I was halfway through, and even then I was reluctant to stop reading. Cisneros has such a powerful and fluid writing style that I quickly read through these stories while being completely engrossed in each of them. The first section, which is composed of girlhood vignettes, made me smile because the language is so evocative that it called up many of my own memories. Cisneros doesn’t neglect any of the senses, from the larger-than-life colours and objects seen from the eyes of a child, to the smell of Lucy and theatre popcorn, to the awful itch of the red sweater and being physically overtaken by emotion about an inconsequential and irrational thing. There were certain experiences and emotions I could relate to in the adolescent and adult sections of the book, but more commonly I felt dismay and frustration to be experiencing second-hand these terrible realities that are thankfully not my own, but are to many Chicanas.

Living in a deeply misogynist society is one of these realities. Not only do we read about the spousal abuse suffered by Cleofilas, but in both “My Tocaya” and “Woman Hollering Creek” the female characters mention how the newspapers are filled with accounts of women beaten and killed by their husbands, lovers, and male family members. When this happens it is not a surprise, but with a sickening resignation it is accepted as business as usual. Another reality that Chicanas must deal with is how their femininity and sexuality is constructed by the cheesy romanticism of telenovelas and ballads on the one hand and the Mexican and Southwestern myths of la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Llorona, and la Chingada on the other. The ways, often profoundly damaging ones, that these manifest themselves in women’s lives can be seen multiple times in the first half of the book, most painfully when a Chicana actually jokingly reenacts the Malinche/Cortez relationship with a white man she’s having an affair with.

The last reality that I’ll mention is that of being caught between two countries, not really being from one or the other, and feeling like you’re failing in both. There are strange and sad moments of dissonance when, for example, a bumbling tourist takes a picture of “authentic” Mexican children only to find out that they’re actually “Mericans,” and how the family in “One Holy Night” sends its female members back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. when they accidentally get pregnant, a migration forced by family honor in which the women have no say.

Overview

This has been an interesting class for me so far, having never read Chicano literature. Progressing through the texts we have come across similar themes, but what is most interesting is how the representation of each theme contributes to the greater message about Chicano identity in each text. For example, we talked last class about the differences between …y no se lo tragó la tierra and The Salt of the Earth, and how the former found the root of Chicano exploitation in racism and the latter found it in class. Who Would Have Thought It?, …y no se lo tragó la tierra, and the pieces by Jose Marti posed questions without solutions: is the true home of mixed-raced people in Mexico or the U.S., how can the incessant toiling of campesinos be ended, or can Latin Americans be content in the “soulless” culture of the U.S.? The film, on the other hand, established that while racial tensions exist, class is at the root of exploitation, and that liberation lies in unionization. In the second half of the course we can be sure that different questions about Chicano history/identity/destiny will surface. I am particularly looking forward to the subject of Chicana subjectivity that will come out in Woman Hollering Creek.

El Pueblo as Protagonist

I really enjoyed ... y no se lo trago la tierra. The anecdotes are well written individually, with their tales of maturation from childhood and the ironic and heartbreaking situations the characters find themselves in, but the way that Rivera weaves them all together is masterfully done. It took me awhile to appreciate the structure of the book because at first all I could see was a collection of unrelated fragments. At first the protagonist feels that he had lost a year, and he feels unsettled and disoriented, but at the end he is at peace because “se dio cuenta de que en realidad no había perdido nada.” The book is a process through which Rivera draws upon the experiences of many fictional characters to describe the authentic Chicano experience. This series of random events, when seen together at a distance, form a portrait of a people.

Given the importance of this narrative technique, can we even say that the boy is the central character? We do not even know his name. But we do know the names of Ramon and Juanita, the quarreling lovers, the children of the unfortunate Garcia family, Chuy who died at war. We also hear their voices – the book is largely composed of criss-crossing conversations, fragments of dialogue by unknown speakers, stories related second-hand by gossiping neighbors. The events in the book are the collective life of el pueblo and they are narrated through its many voices. There are many identities and attitudes within this collective, this much is clear from the penultimate chapter when we overhear the private thoughts of the stranded migrants. Some angrily curse their situation and others let their thoughts wander peacefully – you can see both resignation and rebellion, but always hope of something better. I’ve never read a book where you could say that an entire group was the protagonist instead of a single character. Could anyone give me any other examples of books written this way?