by Teresa Hernández-Reed, PhD, Department of English

There are few writers who stir in me what Cisneros has across my life, career, and scholarship, and I knew I could not write my dissertation project without her. To that end, the CSWS research grant has made possible the work I engage with in my forthcoming essay, “Mapping the Decolonial,” in the first critical companion to Sandra Cisneros’s oeuvre, ‘¡Ay Tú!’: Critical Essays on the Work and Career of Sandra Cisneros (University of Texas Press). In addition, I pair my reading of her work alongside a community mapping project in Hidalgo County (Texas) of the pioneer Guadalupe Cemetery, which was the first cemetery in South Texas to “permit” the burial of “newcomers,” Mexican immigrants. Across these projects, I engage Cisneros’ literary geography, the literary spaces drawn from memory and invention, and the spatial possibilities of her work within Chicanx and Latinx feminisms. 

As readers of Sandra Cisneros’ collections know, there is a fluidity and dynamism in the literary geographies she crafts from memory and puro cuento. Cisneros transports us as readers within and across the Américas—while also often rupturing national boundaries, making her writing distinctly diasporic among American letters. Consequently, Cisneros’ work has become, I argue, essential to our understanding of Latinx and Chicanx feminisms through her contributions to the re/imagining of space in relation to questions of gender, class, language, and community. Her work also complicates these categories with characters that defy and disorient, but also guide and orient our understanding of intimate community relationships. Cisneros’ use of narrative space and place brings us to various forms of social mappings that give us new orientations by which we can begin to map the limits and the possibilities of the decolonial in our 21st-century moment.  

In this forthcoming essay, I focus on the making of a community cartography in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek (1991). In particular, I examine the short stories “Tepeyac” and, the title story, “Woman Hollering Creek” to further consider how Cisneros’ writing opposes conceiving of space and geography as something to possess or rule. Similarly, I suggest that Cisneros’ narrators and mappings show us the limits and thresholds of nationalisms and the necessary risks they pose to the decolonial. Furthermore, I consider how Cisneros’ community cartography illustrates a shared responsibility between numerous colliding communities across Mexico and the United States. As Emma Pérez writes of the “diasporic configuration” in spaces like Texas where “populations dispersed through a land named, renamed, bordered, measured, mapped, and fenced” (77), Cisneros’ cuentos shows us that to practice the decolonial we must first renegotiate what it means to enter border narratives as both colonized and settler.  

The 2015 South Texas community mapping project of Guadalupe Cemetery is particularly fascinating in relationship to the work that Sandra Cisneros attends to in her short fiction because it fails to bridge together “official” archives, such as obituary notices and funeral home records, and the oral history records that could have been accessed in this border space. While the project depended upon community members to survey the land, read plot markers and gravestones, and collate official documents, the limits of the project are that they only considered these tangible and material archives as potential resources to count the dead. Because the plots don’t have documented “ownership” beyond a burial marker, if those families could afford one, the city holds no official record of how many are actually buried at this community cemetery.  

In response to the project, San Antonio librarian Romeo Rosales Jr. writes in a piece for the Public Library Association, “The Departed” (2015), how the information collected was merged with GIS (Geographic Information System) technology in order to create an accessible digital archive. Rosales notes that “several graves were in bad condition so names and dates were not legible” and “those simply read as ‘unknown’ on the online database.” When I went to access the program for this project, I found only one name listed for my family that is buried across three plots. There is no way, at present, for me to add or edit the data, the history, or the count.  

I position myself in my work as a way to merge social geography, ethnography, and testimonio alongside Cisneros who maps, from memory rather than from official geographical data, the intimate community relationships at work within the setting of her prose. Even as border narratives, including those within the genres of fiction and memoir, typically pay homage to particular sites, cities, towns, neighborhoods, or regions, Cisneros utilizes such spaces only as beginnings. Thus, I argue that Cisneros’ literary mappings allow us to initially enter a narrative space, and these spatializations ultimately reveal community mappings beyond the decolonial. 

In June 2022, I traveled to Texas State University where I was a part of a colloquium on Sandra Cisneros and engaged in a collaborative writing workshop with the other contributors to the collection including esteemed Latinx scholars such as Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Mary Pat Brady, Richard T. Rodríguez, Macarena D. Hernández, Belinda L. Rincón, and Olga L. Herrera. While my research plans have been long delayed given the COVID-19 pandemic, in June I finally accessed Sandra Cisneros’ archival materials housed within the Wittliff Collections (Texas State University) in San Marcos, Tejas, thanks to the generous grant by the Center for the Study of Women in Society.    

—Teresa Hernandez-Reed completed her English PhD in the spring. She received a 2021–22 Graduate Research Grant from CSWS. 

References 

Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History. Indiana UP, 1999. 

Rosales Jr., Romeo. “The Departed: One Library’s Innovative Cemetery Project.” Public Libraries Online, 10 Nov 2015, http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2015/11/the-departed-one-librarys-innovative-cemetery-project/.