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“Woman Hollering Creek” has two primary settings: Monclova, Mexico and Seguin, Texas. The story begins in Monclova, Cleófilas’s childhood home. Her father, family, and friends all live here. The narrator describes the town as a place where there is little to do. It has a low-budget cinema where the weekly film seems to always be “speckled and with one hair quivering annoyingly on the screen.” At the center of the town, one can order milkshakes. Store windows display frilly dresses. And there is a church where women gossip on Sunday mornings. The zócalo, or town square, is “leafy.” To Cleófilas, the name Monclova, Coahuila, sounds “ugly.” In contrast, Seguin, Tejas, “has a nice sterling ring to it.” Notice that Tejas is not misspelled. Tejas is the Spanish spelling of Texas, and it means “friend.” Cleófilas uses this name not just because she does not speak English but also for the positive connotation it holds for her before she moves there.
Before long, though, Cleófilas feels that Monclova and Seguin resemble each other. She calls Monclova “[t]he town of dust and despair” and Seguin “[t]his town of dust, despair.” She thinks the biggest difference is that perhaps the houses in Seguin are not as close together. In Monclova, Cleófilas could at least walk to the homes of her friends and family; here she is isolated, more reliant on her husband. People in both places gossip, except that in Monclova the women gossip on Sunday morning on the church steps while in Seguin the women gossip at sunset at the ice house. The contrast suggests hypocrisy in her hometown, its people gossiping on church grounds. Seguin is perhaps less hypocritical; its people gossip openly in bars where sin is more expected. Nonetheless, Seguin proves to be fundamentally no different from Monclova. To Cleófilas, Seguin, like the town she sought to escape, becomes a place with “nothing, nothing, nothing of interest.”
