Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros Create Sandra Cisneros

¶ … Woman Hollering Creek," Cisneros create

Sandra Cisneros provides a thorough excavation into the psychology of a mistress in her short story "Never Love A Mexican." This prolonged look into the pathology involved in constantly being a secondary, and never the primary, woman in a lover's life, leads the reader to some fairly scary conclusions about what that sort of thing must be like. What is most interesting about this narrative is the fact that Cisneros depicts both the suffering of the wife of her lover, as well as that of the mistress, Clemencia, in this tale. A careful evaluation of the distress of all parties involved, including that inherently incurred by the male lover, Drew, demonstrates that the distress is most profound in the mistress.

While Cisneros alludes to this fact throughout the majority of this short story, this particular finding because the most obvious in the conclusion of the tale in which Clemencia yields to a form of craziness that manifests itself in what is best termed as disturbing behavior. The following quotation demonstrates that the pathological fixation she has as a result of her role as a mistress (for a married man who she has not dated for years) has overwhelmed her to the point where she cannot help but suffer. "What is it inside me that makes me so crazy at 2 a.m. I can't blame it on alcohol in my blood when there isn't any. It's something worse. Something that poisons the blood and tips me…" (Cisneros). This quotation indicates that the author is crazy, due to her preoccupation with the lover that she could not have as a husband, Drew. Whatever the experience of cheating on his wife with Clemencia did for Drew and for his wife's having to endure her husband's infidelities with one of his former students, it is safe to assume that years later, they are not "crazy" due to such experiences, as Clemencia is.

What is even worse for poor Clemencia is the fact that this degree of insanity, which she claims to be able to restrain for most of her waking moments, is solely attributed to a lack of affection she must endure as a mistress. Mistresses receive men; they do not get to keep them. The lack of affection in Clemencia's life as a result of her not having any man to claim her, and who she in turn can look after, is demonstrated in the following quotation.

Human beings pass me on the street, and I want to reach out and strum them as if they were guitars. Sometimes all humanity strikes me as lovely. I just want to reach out and stroke someone and say, There, there, it's all right, honey. There, there, there (Cisneros).