Haunting the borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek"

Frontiers, 1996 by Doyle, Jacqueline

Aiiii aiiii aiiiii

She is crying for her dead child

the lover gone, the lover not yet come:

Her grito splinters the night

-- Gloria Anzaldua, "My Black Angelos,"

Borderlands/La Frontera(1)

"If I were asked what it is I write about," Sandra Cisneros commented in a lecture in 1986, "I would have to say I write about those ghosts inside that haunt me, that will not let me sleep, of that which even memory does not like to mention."(2) Poverty, the unrecorded lives of the powerless, the unheard voices of "thousands of silent women," are some of the ghosts that haunt The House on Mango Street,(3) dedicated in two languages, "A las Mujeres/To the Women." Cisneros's narrator Esperanza chronicles the unhappy histories of "the ones who cannot out," women immobilized by poverty, cultural and linguistic barriers, restrictive gender roles, and domestic violence. Gazing out of windows they cannot open, standing in doorways they cannot exit, woman after woman on Mango Street is trapped at the threshold or boundary of a room or house not her own. Marin moons in the doorway, "waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life." Mamacita "sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show," afraid to go outside because she doesn't speak English. Because Rafaela is young and beautiful, her husband locks her in her room each Tuesday night while he plays dominoes. Minerva comes over each week "black and blue" with the "same story." Sally claims her father "never hits

her

hard," but she marries to escape, only to sit alone in her husband's house "because she is afraid to go outside without his permission." She looks "at the walls, at how neatly their comers meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake."(4)

The story of Cleofilas in Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek" extends and revises such histories, opening a borderland space where old myths take on new resonance and new forms and where new stories are possible. Haunted by the legendary wail of la Llorona, Cleofilas seeks a language to articulate her own story and the stories of the mute feminine victims of male violence in the newspapers. As Adrienne Rich writes in "Natural Resources," "we have lived with violence so long":

Am I to go on saying

for myself, for her

This is my body

take and destroy it?(5)

Reconstituting the "communion of saints" as a community including women, Cisneros transfigures the grito of la Llorona and mines new natural resources for the expectant mother Cleofilas and her sisters and comadres. Felice's joyous holler as she and Cleofilas cross Woman Hollering Creek releases new mother tongues. "What kind of talk was that coming from a woman," Cleofilas marvels of her border crossing. "But then again, Felice was like no woman she'd ever met. Can you imagine, when we crossed the arroyo she just started yelling like a crazy, she would later say to her father and brothers. Just like that. Who would've thought?"(6)

In an interview in 1988, Cisneros discussed the difficulties of growing up as a Mexican American woman, "always straddling two countries...but not belonging to either culture," "trying to define some middle ground" where revision and reinvention of cultural and sexual roles might be possible, only to be "told you're a traitor to your culture."(7) Gloria Anzaldua constructs her "new mestiza identity" in just such a "middle ground" or borderland area, where languages, cultures, religions, and gender identities collide and cross. The "borderlands," as Anzaldua defines them, encompass both geographic and psychic spaces, a polyglot interzone that is "physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy."(8) This borderland terrain exists both inside and outside the individual; Anzaldua maps the competing cultural, national, racial, sexual, and linguistic discourses occupying the spaces within and surrounding the Mexican American woman, even as she undoes the static oppositions that would confine and immobilize her. Moving beyond the "virgen/puta (whore) dichotomy," Anzaldua reconstructs mestiza identity as dynamic and multiple,(9) the borderlands as a region of constant transition and transformation, where "languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized...die and are born."(10) The new mestiza speaks "a forked tongue, a variation of two languages" and numerous dialects.(11) "She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths."(12) She remothers herself and refashions her gods to give birth to her own identity.

The issue of "redefining myself or controlling my own destiny or my own sexuality," Cisneros said in an interview, is the "ghost I'm still wrestling with."(13) In the stories in Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros reshapes the myths that define Chicana identity, conjuring the ghostly apparitions of what Anzaldua calls "Our Mothers": la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, la Llorona.(14) Norma Alarcon compellingly argues that these highly charged "symbolic figures" have been used as "reference point