Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954 to a Mexican father and a Mexican American mother, the only daughter among seven children. Her upbringing was marked by the constraining influence of her brothers—because they insisted that she play a traditional female role, she often felt like she had “seven fathers” (Cisneros in Matuz, p. 150). She also contended with the displacement caused by her family’s frequent moves between the United States and Mexico. So, from an early age Cisneros confronted the questions about her identity as a female and a Mexican American that would become central to her writing as an adult. Cisneros has dealt with many of these questions in books of poetry and in her widely acclaimed collection of vignettes, The House on Mango Street (1985). In Woman Hollering Creek, written mainly while Cisneros was living in San Antonio, Texas, she focuses on the varied experiences of girls and women with a Mexican heritage—characters who are distinguished by their different levels of income, education, independence, and Americanization, but united by similar histories, needs, and desires.
Some of the events included in this section take place before the action of the stories, but the effects of these events have proved long-lasting.
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