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

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1994 by Jeff Thomson

One way or another. Even if it's only the lyrics to a stupid pop hit. We're going to right [also write] the world and live. I mean live our lives the way lives were meant to be lived. With the throat and wrists. With rage and desire, and joy and grief, and love till it hurts, maybe. But goddamn, girl. Live.(163)

And this is exactly what she does; she goes back to the Prince Popocatepetl/Princess Ixaccihuatl painting and reinvents it. She remakes the myth as it now must apply to her life, not her life to it.

After all who,s to say the sleeping mountain isn't the prince, and the voyeur the princess, right? So I've done it my way. With Prince Popocatepetl lying on his back instead of the Princess. I think I'm going to call it El Pipi del Popo. I kind of like it.(163)

She has arrived, as an artist and as a woman, where she is finally grounded and able to create her world according to her definitions; she is celebrating life, and living, "because God-bless-it another day has ended, as if it never had yesterday and never will again tomorrow. Just because it,s today, today. With no thought of the future or past. Today. Hurray. Hurray!" (165). Small celebration is what Cisneros can offer. There is no major epiphany, just a series of daily tasks that allow women to extend themselves into the male world and make a new bed for themselves there. This is what Ines defined as "a little of what is called heaven" (89). As Esperanza had found escape from Mango Street through her writing, Lupe has found her way out in her art.

However, because there is no ultimate salvation, no triumph, that does not mean there is no connection to "something bigger than our lives" and no possibility that the forces that control identity and shape the possible can be confronted. This connection is made between women, like the cashier and Lupe, and it can also be made between men and women, as it is with Ines and Zapata. As Cisneros has shown us in Ines and Lupe, the masculine world can be confronted, both in terms of romantic commitments and social positions, and alterations can be made. If, as Ramon Saldivar suggests, Cisneros,s children,s stories form the basis for an understanding of identity based on opposition to the dominant politic, then her newer, "adult" stories focus on overcoming such a politic and finding a unitary center (186).(2) Woman Hollering Creek speaks from the silence, speaking freedom into existence and possible identity into being.

Works Cited

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Houston: Arte Publico, 1985. _____. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1991. Harlow, Barbara. "Sites of Struggle: Immigration, Deportation, Prison and Exile." Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Eds. Hector Calderon and David Jose Saldivar. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. 149-63. Herrera-Sobek, Maria. "The Politics of Rape: Sexual Transgression in Chicana Fiction." The Americas Review 15 (1988): 177-82. Prescott, Peter S. "Seven for Summer." [Incl. rev. of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories] Newsweek 3 June 1991:60 Sagel, Jim. "Sandra Cisneros." Publishers Weekly 29 Mar 1992:74-75. Saldivar, Ramon. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.