From soap-operas to reality: violence against Latin-American woman in Sandra Cisnero’s “Woman hollering creek

Abstract

: In order to illustrate and prompt a discussion on feminicide in Latin America (highlighting Mexico and Brazil), this article makes use of  hideous events experienced by the protagonist of “Woman hollering creek”’: a Latin American woman, ignorant of English language and victim of domestic violence in a Texan Chicana Community, who is literally compared to the mythic La Llorona. Being so, the text highlights the role of Latin-American soap-operas of disseminating and perpetuating concepts like “idealized love” and prosperity in the USA (American Dream) for the sake of a heteronormative family paradigm. Devoted to the ideal of perfect happy family, the Latin woman is confined to domesticity, being secluded from intellectual enterprises and from participating in the marketplace. By intensifying the feminist perspective on the Latin woman’s idiosyncrasies, topics peculiar to the Post-colonial Theory, and Post-colonial Feminism like misplaced and marginal identities, cultural resistance, interculturality, linguistic and cultural untranslatability as well as the diasporic practice for the sake of a better life will be stressed. Likewise, given that uneventful representations of blurred borders between Englishness and Hispanicity are also at stake in the short-story, this analysis will show how strongly readings about the Fantastic, Magic Realism and Post-colonial Gothicism point to a multicultural portrayal of the Latin-American hollering woman, an icon of resistance, subservience and suffering thanks to Latin American patriarchal structures.