"What is called Heaven": identity in Sandra Cisneros's 'Woman Hollering Creek.'

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1994 by Jeff Thomson

Lupe Arredondo, narrator of "Bien Pretty," shares with Ines and other women of this collection a life of wounded love. She moved from San Francisco to San Antonio to keep from "dragging [her] three-legged heart" around (142). Solitary and separated, she is distanced from everything she knows and then, suddenly, Flavio Galindo, the exterminator, enters her life. Although uneducated, he is a poet, self-assured and centered, everything she is not. Flavio inherently understands the various philosophical constructs Lupe explains to him; he sums up the duality of yin/yang in a mexicano word taught to him by his grandmother. And where Lupe needs the trappings of Mexican culture to establish her identity, Flavio dresses in Izod shirts and Reeboks and is unfazed by her questioning. "I don't have to dress in a sarape and a sombrero to be a Mexican," he says. "I know who I am" (154). In response

[she] wanted to leap across the table, throw Oaxacan black pottery pieces across the room, swing from the punched tin chandelier, fire a pistol at his Reeboks, and force him to dance. I wanted to be Mexican at that moment, but it was true. I was not Mexican. (151-52)

Flavio is grounded while Lupe is searching; she has no identity that isn't purchased.

Finally, Flavio agrees to work for Lupe as a model for a painting that updates the "Prince Popocatepetl/Princess Ixaccihuatl volcano myth, that tragic love story" (144). After a number of requests he agrees, and as the painting progresses so does their emotional involvement, echoing the tragic love of Prince Popocatepetl and Princess Ixaccihuatl. When Flavio has to return to Mexico, to the family obligations of his seven sons and two ex-wives, Lupe is despondent; she has lost the part of her that was grounded. She retreats into foolish, New Age healing devices that are ultimately ineffectual:

I looked for my rose-quartz crystal and visualized healing energy surrounding me. I lit copal and burned sage to purify the house. I put on a tape of Amazonian flutes, Tibetean gongs, and Aztec ocarinas, tried to center on my seven chakras, and thought only positive thoughts, expressions of love, compassion, forgiveness. But after forty minutes I still had an uncontrollable desire to drive over to Flavio Munguia's house with my grandmother's molcajete and bash in his skull. (157)

The mishmash of religions and cultures exemplifies her failure of identity; she is so many things she is nothing. She had her personality validated by this beautiful man, and now, without him her "nights are Gethsemane. That pinch of the dog's teeth just as it nips. A mean South American itch somewhere I can't reach" (159-60). She says, "I have always been in love with a man" (160). With the help of a supermarket cashier she begins to pull out of her self-imposed stupor.

One must believe that, from Flavio, Lupe has learned a great deal about the nature of self-definition, as she moves toward an acceptance of responsibility for her own salvation. In search of her identity, she begins to look, not to others, not to men, but to what she as a woman knows to be true. She finds bracing words in soap operas and pop songs, the elements of a feminine system of romantic identity that for Cleofilas had proved devastating. However, the difference between Lupe and Cleofilas is that Lupe takes what she finds and redefines the world through her own feminine lens. As she says,