Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories

...Certainly, although at times one has the feeling that she is exploiting literature as a militant activity to call atten- tion to ethnicity, to cry against unfairness and injustice...

...Woman Hollering Creek," the story that gives the title to the book, is about an abused wife who dreams, while constantly stumbling against the cruelties of her true companion, of having a handsome husband like the ones in the Spanish-speaking television soap operas...

...They are verbal photographs, memorabilia, reminiscences of growing up in a Hispanic milieu...

...ILAN STAVANS, a Mexican novelist and crit- ic, is the editor of the forthcoming Tropical Synagogues: An Anthology of Jewish-Latin American Short Stories (Holmes and Meier...

...After that, Cisneros wrote My Wicked Wicked Ways, a book of poetry...

...Esperanza Cordero, Cisneros's protagonist, is a sen- sitive young Mexican-American girl eager to climb the social ladder, not in terms of money and reputation but with regard to her personal education and self-esteem as an individual of an ethnic minority and as a female...

...It's a mosaic of voices of Mexican-Americans who joke, love, hate, and comment on fame and sexuality...

...But beneath this ideological REVIEWERS DAVID CASTRONOVO is professor of English at Pace University of New York, and author of several books of criticism including Edmund Wilson (Fredrick Ungar...

...With the Pulitzer Prize given to The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos, and a National Book Award Nomination to Chromos by Felipe Alfau, 1990 may well have been one of the most eventful years in the history of Hispanic letters in the United States...

...Her semiautobiograph- ical novel The House on Mango Street, sometimes referred to as a collection of interconnected vignettes, was just reissued by Vintage Contemporaries, but it appeared almost ten years ago under the imprint of Arte Publico Press, a small press affiliated with the University of Houston that devotes its entire catalogue to minority writers of Latin American origin who write in English...

...The image of Hispanic men, for instance, is grim and depressing: while the guys are always abusive, alco- holic, and egotistical, the girls are naive, doll-like, occasionally in control yet obsessed with how nature transforms itself, how relationships deteriorate, and how peo- ple escape their responsibilities to meet a different, although not a better fate...

...The House on Mango Street eventually became a hot item among publishers...

...Violence is inflicted on her characters by macho men or by people outside of their immediate geography...

...Her style is candid, engag- ing, rich in language...

...Although the content is at times amateurish, the volume, a composite of evocative snapshots that manages to pas- sionately recreate the milieu of the poor quarters of Chicago, is a pleasurable read...

...Published by Third Woman Press, the poems present a female voice discovering and discussing her individual and collective background and seeing herself as an independent woman, mother of nobody's children and wife only to her own shadow...

...Like Alice Munro's and Joyce Carol Oates's, Cisneros's texts are most convinc- ing when they have a little girl as protag- onist or narrator...

...ROBERT E. WHITE, U.S...

...llan Stavans ost educated readers of literature in this country can name a national author of Jewish origin, or black, Asian, or Italian heritage...

...But Hispanics have had a hard time making their narrative voice heard...

...These two authors have reminded many that not only can South American novelists deliver, but their conationals who immigrated north of the Rio Grande also have a voice...

...Back then, it was reviewed in only three or four newspapers and journals, yet it acquired enough stature to be the recipient of the "Before Columbus American Book Award" (a title whose name, I confess, I have trouble understanding...

...Most of the entries are short: between one and fifteen pages...

...The Marlboro Man," for instance, is a dialogue between two girls about the ambiguous identity of the male lover of a third friend...

...At times one longs for longer, more sophisticated pieces, yet Cisneros dislikes length...

...And not any woman, but a Mexican-American, a voice hard to find in the professional literary arena...

...My Tocaya," again, is about a friendship between two girls, one of whom disappears and is presumed dead until she appears at the police station, to the surprise of everybody in town...

...Three reasons: First and foremost, it's written by a woman...

...Its major flaw, nev- ertheless, is that she bases most of her cast on stereotypes...

...Sandra Cisneros, born in Chicago in 1954, is being promoted by Random House, her new publisher, as the "new" Hispanic literary revelation...

...And sex is innocent but also violent...

...ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay during the Carter administration, is president of the Center for International Policy in Washington, D. C. PAUL ELIE is writing a collection of short stories...

...WOMAN HOLLERING CREEK AND OTHER STORIES Sandra Cisneros Random House, $18, 165 pp...

...Her fiction is akin to delicate porce- lain figures, fragile yet capable of carrying symbolic weight...

...Is her prose worth reading...

...UNA NUEVA VOZ THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET Sandra Cisneros Vintage Contemporaries, $9, 110 pp...

...The author's intention, it seems, is to explain a trauma or to recreate a certain flavor of childhood or a long-lost feeling for a beloved or an acquaintance...

...and third, it is a straightforward narrative...

...Now comes Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a few pieces of which appeared previously in journals and literary supplements...

...To call them "stories" may not always be accurate...

...Second, its prose and images make use of folkloric, idiosyncratic expressions typical among Hispanics of Aztec origin...

...524: Commonweal...

...Is Cisneros a good writer...