25 pages • 50 minutes read
Sandra CisnerosWoman Hollering Creek
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “One Holy Night”
Story Summary: “One Holy Night”
Ixchel, the first-person narrator, recounts her meeting with a man who goes by different names. To the narrator, he is Chaq Uxmal Paloquin, or Chaq for short, or Boy Baby, which is what he tells Ixchel his name means in Mayan. Ixchel and Boy Baby meet one day when she is working at the family pushcart, selling fruits and vegetables. It was not her day to be working and her abuelita blames her Uncle Lalo, whose designated shift it really was, for much of the trouble that follows.
Boy Baby takes Ixchel back to the room he rents, a single dirty room behind the auto repair station, and shows her his extensive collection of guns. He tells her elaborate, emotional stories about his family lineage. He claims to be a great and mighty heir to the Mayan throne and informs Ixchel that as a child he was taken to a dark temple ruin where he swore to work to restore Mayan culture. He weeps and promises to make her his queen. On his dirty, newspaper-strewn bed, Boy Baby, a grown man, takes the virginity of Ixchel, who is still in the eighth grade.
Ixchel only realizes after she is home again that she left the family pushcart outside Boy Baby’s rented room. Neighbors quickly report this gossip to Ixchel’s grandmother. Her abuelita forbids Ixchel from leaving the house. Soon, Ixchel misses her period and her abuelita weeps and burns the pushcart to ashes, forlorn and furious.
Ixchel, however, is unphased when she has to be pulled out of school because her uniform is too tight around the waist. She goes along with a “witch woman,” who prays over her and designs elaborate meals and drinks for Ixchel to consume. Ixchel feels in the know about a secret that’s been kept from her, the secret of sex and passion. She feels smug and superior to her younger cousins. She decides she will have five children.
Ixchel even remains unphased when she finds out the truth about Boy Baby. She learns that he is 37 years old and that his name is Chato, which means “fat face.” He has no Mayan blood and comes from a tiny, nameless place, and an impoverished family. Chato’s sister, a Carmelite nun, confesses all this to Ixchel and her abuelita via letter and also writes that she prays for Ixchel’s soul.
Later, this same Carmelite sister sends along a newspaper clipping. In it is Boy Baby’s picture, alongside a story that Ixchel processes only in words and phrases: “the Caves of the Hidden Girl…eleven female bodies…the last seven years” (34). Despite this, Ixchel is still in love. She says she is breathing it in and out all night, wheezing with it.
Story Summary: “My Tocaya”
Teenaged narrator Patricia tells the story of her tocaya, or name twin. The Patricia who is the main focal point of the story infuriates the narrator because “she died and came back from the dead” (37). Besides their shared name, the two classmates don’t have a lot in common. The narrator’s only real interest is a boy, Max Lucas Luna Luna, a friend of the tocaya’s brother, who is rumored to be romantically interested in the narrator. The narrator pins her hopes on her tocaya’s ability to set the two of them up and is irritated by the events in the tocaya’s life that interfere with these hopes.
Patricia, the tocaya, is the youngest in her grade, having been doubly promoted at an earlier age. She fills in for her brother at her family’s Father and Son Taco Palace, even before her brother runs away from home. Unlike the narrator, she wants to go by Trish, and attempts to talk in a soft English accent. She wears rhinestone earrings and glitter-covered high heels to school. All of these decisions make her strange, according to the narrator.
Shortly after telling the narrator about Max Lucas Luna Luna’s interest in her, Patricia the tocaya disappears one day. No one knows why exactly, but the narrator suspects Patricia was miserable working at the taco shop and going home reeking of fried food. Rumor has it that Patricia’s father beat up her brother and the narrator wonders if he beat Patricia, too. The narrator is not so much sympathetic as inconvenienced and wanting more information out of Patricia the tocaya to fuel her own love life.
A body is found in a nearby ditch and the school enters a stage of intense mourning. They hold a special Mass and purchase a giant, elaborate banner made of white gladiolus. Then, out of nowhere, Patricia the tocaya shows back up. The parents decided they were hasty in identifying the body. The narrator never gets to meet up with Max Lucas Luna Luna. Patricia the tocaya enjoys undeserved fame in the narrator’s mind. It’s unfair, the narrator feels, since this other Patricia doesn’t even know how to die right.
Part 2 Analysis
The second section of the book presents the experiences of female teenagers who are trying to understand the adult realms of romance and sex. They feel trapped in their lives and are willing to make hasty or risky decisions to escape the narrow perimeters they feel hemmed in by. They don’t fully understand the rules they are breaking but feel sure that a better future is waiting for them if they can only get to it.
Ixchel, of “One Holy Night,” embodies this desperation to get away from a mundane life at any cost. She fails to ask any real probing questions about the identity of the statutory rapist who promises to make her his Mayan queen. She is gullible because she is sick of her life of working at the family pushcart and living under her abuelita’s rules. Her rebellion results in pregnancy at age 13 but the reader learns that it could have been worse yet, since the man she knows as Boy Baby has raped and murdered other teenaged girls. However, even this is not enough to make her snap to because she is so desperate to escape to a fantasy of romance and adulthood.
Patricia, of “My Tocaya,” also tries to escape, quite literally, by running away from home. Like Ixchel, she is forced into working in the family business. Rumor has it that she is also being physically assaulted by her father. Patricia’s desperation to find a new life is evident in her flashy wardrobe choices. The narrator’s passing mention of Patricia skipping grades in school suggests Patricia has a capable mind but is stuck in limited circumstances. For Patricia, running away affords her some local fame, with her picture and story in the paper, but it is likely that this is only fleeting, and Patricia will soon be back to her regular, unsatisfying life at the Taco Palace.
Both of these teenaged female narrators find themselves in an awkward stage of life, trapped between the innocence of childhood and the autonomy of adulthood. Ixchel, of “One Holy Night,” feels smug and knowing after she has sex with Boy Baby and looks at her younger cousins with derision, inwardly laughing at what she feels is their cluelessness about life. She, however, is clearly also clueless about many aspects of life, especially the potential dangers of predatory men.
Patricia and the narrator of “My Tocaya” both feel put upon by adult authority figures. Patricia’s father alternates by being an abusive taskmaster and calling her his “little princess” when it is clear that she is not interested in either of those roles (40). The narrator resents the authority figure of Sister Virginella, the principal of their Catholic school, who views the girls as too swayed by unruly hormones to let them have regular youth-exchange visits to the nearby boys’ school (38).
The young women of this section of the novel are newly sexual beings. They are trying to figure out what that means and what appropriate boundaries are. They are also coming to the unfortunate realization that being female in contemporary culture often means being limited to the role of virgin or whore.
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