Latina Humor in the Works of Sandra Cisneros

2014

While some literary critics, such as Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Susan Griffin, Ana María Almería1 and Belkys Torres2 analyze the telenovela in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek, they focus exclusively on this collection of short stories and have overlooked the fact that while Cisneros' initial engagement with the telenovela is evident in her short fiction and poetry,3 she provides a more extensive and critical examination of the popular cultural form in her novel Caramelo (2002). Cisneros explicitly directs readers’ and critics’ analysis and interpretation of her fiction in relation to the telenovela by inserting a lengthy footnote in the novel in which she explains the importance and socio-historical function of the telenovela as a national medium through which mythologies about heterosexual romance are disseminated. By defining the telenovela genre and theorizing the importance of the form, within the Mexican culture specifically, Cisneros helps to shape the critical, academic ...

For Encyclopedia on Latin American Women Writers, edited by Maria Claudia André and Eva Bueno

THE REFLECTION OF POWER OF MEN IN SANDRA CISNEROS’S “CARAMELO”, “THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET” AND “WOMAN HOLLERING CREEK AND OTHER STORIES”, 2014

This paper focuses specifically on the connections between Cisneros's male and female characters. For centuries, men and women relations have varied regarding the societies in which they maintained their lives. Societies have adopted various beliefs and these beliefs have affected their members in very different manners. As in the case of the societies where Cisneros puts her characters, we clearly witness male characters enjoying social, economic and cultural privileges while women characters continually being subjected to discrimination, inequality and prejudice. This article aims to reveal male characters in relation to female characters and to uncover the motivations leading them to be the sole power. In this context, it will look into the author's "Caramelo", "The House on Mango Street" and "The Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories".

Review of Latin American Women Writer's Humor for Routledge Encyclopedia - 2007

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2021

Unlike previous feminist critics who were seeking ways to reduce the otherness of the women to help them be the same as men, the subject, Luce Irigaray, strongly emphasizes the irreducibility of the women's place as the "other." Concerned with the concept of sexual difference and the otherness of women, Irigaray occupies a unique position among feminist critics. Irigaray aims not to be the "same," but to make a clear border between these two sexually different creatures. Based on sexual difference, both men and women should stand in their bordered place, and they cannot be substituted for the other. Accordingly, Irigaray seeks irreducible alterity for women in all aspects, which is the most crucial objective of this paper. Being a feminitst by spirit, Sandra Cisneros, the prize-winning chicana writer, in her novel, Caramelo (2002), dramatizes what Irigaray theorizes in her Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). In this light, the current study analyzes Caramelo ...

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2007

Philologia Mediana, 2021

This paper explores elements of popular culture in Sandra Cisneros' novel The House on Mango Street. The theoretical approach in the first section of the paper introduces the most relevant aspects of early U.S. popular culture, while the second section discusses U.S. popular culture with respect to ethnic minorities, predominantly Chicanas portrayed in Cisneros's novel. The paper highlights certain ambiguities of popular culture in relation to minorities in the U.S., as well as the fact that, though having embraced egalitarian ideals and having general progressive views, popular culture nevertheless has failed to integrate specific cultural and gender perspectives of Latinas, as demonstrated by the lack of representation and stereotyping of female characters in the novel.

Humor in Global Contemporary Art, 2024

"Reír por no llorar," which translates as ‘laugh to keep from crying’, is an expression pertinent to contemporary Venezuela, a country subsumed in prolonged crises that are much economic as existential, dating to the election of Hugo Chávez to the presidency in 1998. Against this backdrop, contemporary Venezuelan artists have activated humor in various ways: as a strategy of resistance against the government, as a manner of making sense of the (absurd) world around them, and as a critique of Venezuela’s heroic tradition of geometric abstraction, with its false promises of utopia. This essay focuses on the work of two performance artists, Deborah Castillo and Érika Ordosgoitti, whose humorous and distinctly feminist forms of social protest activate the body in daring ways, challenging not only the current political regime, but also heteronormative patriarchal culture, canonical Venezuelan aesthetics, and sexist hierarchies in Venezuelan arts and letters.

Ataturk Universitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitusu Dergisi, 2013

is one of the most prominent writers of American and Hispanic literary world. Her successful novel titled The House on Mango Street recounts the life, the milieu and the compelling experiences encountered by women from the eyes of Esperanza, the protagonist of the novel. However, there are a large number of resemblances between houses and the women figures. Esperanza thinking that she does not belong to there at the beginning of the novel is determined to make the women on Mango Street educated and optimistic about their future.