|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Border Crossings
| Article
# : |
19683 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
2,068 Words |
| Author
: |
Kaye Northcott
Kaye Northcott, a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
writes frequently on the arts. |
WOMAN HOLLERING CREEK AND OTHERS STORIES
Sandra Cisneros
New York: Random House, 1991
165 pp., $18
Sandra Cisneros' second book of stories and vignettes is keen to the senses and full of juice. Some of the offerings are only a page or two long, and their brevity makes one yearn for fuller treatment. One of the major stories, "Little Miracles, Kept Promises," consists of quilted fragments of prayer notes offered by an engaging bilingual cast of petitioners at a South Texas shrine. Taken as a whole, however, the work has a thematic and emotional depth that transcends the slimness of the volume.
With deft comic touches and a keen ear for the vernacular, Cisneros draws from her childhood visits to her grandparents in Mexico City and the recent years she spent in Texas as a poet-in-the-schools, arts administrator, and writer. The Chicago-born daughter of a working-class Mexican father and Mexican-American mother, Cisneros set her first book of stories, The House on Mango Street, in the Midwest, most memorably the Chicago barrio. Third Woman Press also has published a book of her poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways. She now claims San Antonio, Texas, as home.
Like the women in her stories, Cisneros finds ways to spiritually embrace the Mexican-American culture while sidestepping its confinements. The characters range from a peasant sorceress who beguiles Emiliano Zapata to an edge-of-the-trend San Antonio artist who falls in love with the man who comes to exterminate her roaches.
Empowered heroines
Catholicism and the pre-Columbian religions of the Latin world saturate these offerings. In "Eyes of Zapata," her most ambitious story, Cisneros sketches an imaginary history for Ines Alfaro, one of the real-life mistresses of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. She gives the peasant woman powers beyond the bedroom by making her a nagual, a human who can transform herself into an animal. Obsessed with the seldom-present Zapata, Ines takes the form of an owl, flying over the devastation of revolution and keeping vigil from the branches of a purple jacaranda outside the home of Zapata's lawful wife.
On her first nocturnal visit, Ines
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
