One way of reading Sandra Cisneros' fiction is to examine some of the central themes it seems repeatedly to deal with, several of which inform both The House on Mango Street and "Woman Hollering Creek" and Other Stories. Three of the most striking are sexual love as an exercise of power; alienation and displacement; and conflicts between the individual and cultural/familial tradition. These themes seem to be interrelated in that the first and second named grow directly out of the third.
The theme of love as power is most apparent in some of the "Woman Hollering Creek" stories, but it appears even in Mango Street, in the lives of Esperanza's acquaintances and in her own youthful experience. Rafaela, Minerva, Mamacita, and Sally — after her marriage — are all overpowered by their husbands, physically or otherwise, as a matter of course. Whatever the relationship between her own parents, it seems that Esperanza sees a normal love-and-marriage relationship as one in which the man holds and exercises complete power over "his" woman. The only alternative, she believes, would have the woman holding complete power. In "Beautiful and Cruel" she decides that she prefers that option, but a possible relationship in which power is held equally by both partners, a more-or-less equal give-and-take relationship, or even one in which power is not a major factor (or weapon) seems not to occur to her. Interestingly, the love-equals-power relationship is figured here in several instances as visual gaze: Boys stare at Marin, and she boldly returns the gaze; Sire looks at Esperanza, and she affects not to be frightened; women who have been disempowered (or who have never had any power) look out through a window at what they cannot have.
In the "Woman Hollering Creek" stories the love-equals-power theme is further explored, with Juan Pedro in the title story seeing Cleófilas, taking her from her father, and beginning to hold complete power over her. Other women protagonists, however (and one man, Tristán in "Remember the Alamo"), exercise the "beautiful and cruel" option, keeping power in their own hands and in their gaze — even, in the cases of Clemencia in "Never Marry a Mexican" and Lupe in "Bien Pretty," extending that power by "possessing" their men in their art and in effect distributing it to others who look at the men's images in their paintings.
