The story “Woman Hollering Creek” turns on Cleófilas’s question about the creek’s name—why is the woman hollering, from anger or from pain? The name in Spanish, “La Gritona,” means the same as the English phrase; it is echoed by the names of Cleófilas’s neighbors, Dolores and Soledad (Sorrow and Loneliness) and—as it turns out—also by the names of her two benefactors, Felice and Graciela (Happiness and Grace). It also reminds Cleófilas of “La Llorona,” the Weeping (or Wailing) Woman, a figure in Mexican folklore, who according to critic Ana Maria Carbonell, is associated with water, is a maternal figure related to pre-conquest mother goddesses, and is said in some versions of her legend to have drowned her children. Sitting with her child by the creek, Cleófilas seems likely to follow the example of this folkloric “La Gritona,” for she is desperate and feels she has nowhere to turn. The surprise for her is that there is an alternative to anger and pain, which she discovers when Felice drives her and the child across the creek and hollers for the pure joy of it, laughing at the name.
Felice and Graciela could be the two women in “The Marlboro Man,” which is a satirical sketch about pop culture and the cult of celebrity. And one of them might be the narrator of “La Fabulosa: A Texas Operetta,” which transforms Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (but not radically) into, well, a Texas operetta, with Carmen as Carmen, José as Don José, and the senator Camilo Escamilla as the toreador Escamillo. The grand-opera ending of the original, with Carmen dead and the soldiers leading José away, however, is ironically flattened here with José supposedly going to Mexico to become—what else?—a bullfighter. Perhaps Cisneros is suggesting that everyday life in Texas is sometimes operatic.
“Remember the Alamo” is an enigmatic character sketch. Its narrator mentions long-ago sexual abuse—not the abuser’s identity—only obliquely, near the final paragraph, in connection with the ugly world he wipes out when he dances. His tone throughout is one of swaggering bravado, tempered perhaps by a touch of self-mockery. Several times he refers to himself as “Tristán,” in third person, suggesting both conceit and self-alienation. He is not, as one reviewer believes, a drag queen—that is, he does not adopt a female stage persona. His Tristán persona, as the name suggests, is hyper-masculine, not with the crude machismo of the “low rider types” he claims not to fear but with an elegant, disdainful—and dangerous—edge. He is proud of his appeal to both men and women, and (like some drag queens) he wears his persona off-stage; his life is part of his act.
Like his performance on stage, his off-stage life seems to involve taking chances—dancing, as he puts it, with death. His name for his stage dance partner is “thin death,” and she symbolizes death itself. He seems to find her disgusting and despicable but believes she—like everyone else—can’t help being “crazy about him.” He knows she wants him. Perhaps the ongoing list names others whom death has wanted enough to take.
