Woman Hollering Creek

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1991

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Faithfulness and Infidelity in Love

Throughout the book, many characters struggle in their romantic relationships. Some of the characters, such as Clemencia, of “Never Marry a Mexican,” and Carmen, of “La Fabulosa: A Texas Operetta,” knowingly commit adultery with married men. Others, such as Cleofila, of “Woman Hollering Creek,” and Lupe, of “Bien Pretty,” are startled and distraught to learn of their beloved’s unfaithfulness or that they’re married to other women. Ines, of “Zapata’s Eyes,” alone seems to accept that she loves a man who does not exclusively love her.

The expectations that the women have for their romantic partners are often based on ideas they see modeled by their parents. Clemencia, of “Never Marry a Mexican,” looks at her mother’s unhappiness in marriage and feels sure that if she wed she would also end up unhappy because of her spouse. Ines excuses some of Zapata’s infidelity because Ines’s mother took a lover, one who later betrayed her. Cleofila, of “Woman Hollering Creek,” is searching for a man as honest and steadfast as her father. Shea and Lupe, of “Bien Pretty,” are also strongly influenced by the romances they witness on their telenovela programs. Faithfulness generally seems to be elusive in the book, or else it is appreciated too late, as is the case for the widower of “Los Boxers,” who appreciates his wife’s unwavering devotion but not until after she is gone.

Personal and Political Revolutions

Many of the female characters are looking for escape, searching for ways to break out of lives they find suffocating, lives that offer little chance of self-actualization. They attempt to escape in different ways. For Patricia, of “My Tocaya,” running away is the only way to get free from a life of abuse and labor at her family’s restaurant. Ruby, of “Remember the Alamo,” escapes her female identity through dance and her own imagination, where she is free to become the empowered male figure, Tristan. Clemencia, of “Never Marry a Mexican,” attempts to flout convention by not marrying and pursuing a career in art. Ines, of “Zapata’s Eyes,” is caught up in a political revolution as well as a personal one. She has to disobey her father in order to be with Zapata and she has to become self-reliant to care for herself and her children when Zapata is gone, ultimately using the magic taught to her by her similarly independent Tia Chucha.

Mestizo Identity/Culture Clashes

The Chicana figures of the book often grapple with what parts of their identities are American, what parts are Mexican, and how are those two halves are supposed to co-exist or coalesce. The child narrator of “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn” feels less Mexican than her friend, whose dark skin she admires and pledges to try and attain. Micaela and her brothers, in “Mericans,” are straddling two cultures in one setting as they are not as pious as their “awful grandmother” nor are they as American as the tourists who mistake them for “authentic” Mexican kids. In “Never Marry a Mexican,” Clemencia reports that one problem her Mexican-American mother faced in her marriage was that her husband was Mexican, born and raised, and by his family’s standards she would never be Mexican enough. Conversely, it is the authentic Mexican identity of Flavio that makes him so attractive to Lupe in “Bien Pretty.”