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

Abstract

If were asked what it is write about, Sandra Cisneros commented in a lecture in 1986, I would have to say 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, unrecorded lives of powerless, unheard voices of thousands of silent women, are some of ghosts that haunt The House on Mango Street,3 dedicated in two languages, A las Mujeres/To Women. Cisneros's narrator Esperanza chronicles 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 threshold or boundary of a room or house not her own. Marin moons in doorway, waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life. Mamacita sits all day by window and plays 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 same story. Sally claims her father never hits [her]