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The Significance of Borders
Cleófilas’s story contains both literal and figurative borders. Readers see two important borders in the opening paragraph. First is the threshold of Don Serafín’s house, the point where people enter and leave it. When Cleófilas crosses the threshold, she leaves behind her father and family, her childhood and safety. The other important border is between Mexico and the United States. The line separates not only two countries, but two cultures as well: Mexican and Tejano (Texan of Mexican descent). Don Serafín calls the U.S. el otro lado, the other side. Cleófilas is like the archetypical hero who sets out from home and into the unknown. She leaves the culture she knows and understands, crossing into one she does not.
Another important border in the story is Woman Hollering Creek. Cleófilas must cross it to enter her new home in Seguin. The creek is like the River Styx in Greek mythology, which separates the land of the living from the land of the dead. The ferryman Charon takes the souls of the dead across the river. When Juan Pedro drives Cleófilas across Woman Hollering Creek in his truck, she metaphorically enters her own underworld. She wonders if the hollering woman cries in anger or pain. The world that Cleófilas enters is filled with both. When Cleófilas escapes, Felice drives her back across Woman Hollering Creek. She metaphorically ferries Cleófilas back into the land of the living. Cleófilas leaves behind her life of anger and pain. Felice yells when they cross the creek, but her holler is joyful and triumphant. Cleófilas will complete her hero’s journey when she again crosses the U.S.–Mexico border, back to her native country, and crosses the threshold to Don Serafín’s house, to family and safety.
The Acceptance of Domestic Abuse
Cleófilas’s married life is marred by violence, and the culture in which she lives accepts and encourages it. When Juan Pedro first hits Cleófilas, “she didn’t cry out or try to defend herself.” In the telenovelas, women fight back or run away, but she cannot. Juan Pedro is physically stronger than her and she is isolated with no means of escape. Her pride and shame also keep her from leaving her husband. In the neighborhood, violence seems deeply rooted. For example, nights at the ice house are lucky to end with the men just crying, but just as likely, they end with physical fights among the men.
The neighborhood men treat domestic violence as something to laugh about. Maximiliano, “the foul-smelling fool across the road,” brags about killing his wife in an ice house brawl, apparently facing no consequences. He claims self-defense, despite the clear disparity between her attacking him with a mop and his shooting her dead with a gun. Juan Pedro and the other men laugh along with him. They find the idea funny, not horrifying. Juan Pedro thinks Cleófilas’s fears are exaggerated. The newspapers Cleófilas reads are “full of such stories” in which women are severely beaten or killed by the men in their life. She begins to think that this may be her fate if she doesn’t escape.
Expectations vs. Reality
Cleófilas grows up on a steady diet of romance books, love songs, and telenovelas. They give her false expectations for her future. In Mexico, Cleófilas believes that Juan Pedro is a man with a “very important” job, a new pickup truck, and a house. Cleófilas believes that he will take her away from her dull life in Mexico to a better life in the U.S. She thinks he is the love of her life who will give her “passion in its purest crystalline essence,” which she “has been whispering and sighing and giggling for” since she was very young. She expects that she will face “all kinds of hardships of the heart,” like the telenovela heroines, but that “to suffer for love is good.” If her man were to strike her, as happens to the telenovela heroines, she would fight back or run away. She envisions Seguin, Texas, to be akin to her dreams, where she can dress like the women in the telenovelas and live in a nice home.
In reality, Cleófilas’s new life is not romantic. Juan Pedro’s job is not so important; it barely pays their bills. He is still making payments on the new pickup truck. They rent their rundown house with its “curtains for the doorways without doors.” Juan Pedro “farts, belches, and snores” and has no interest music, telenovelas or romantic gestures. When Juan Pedro beats her, she is left “speechless, motionless, numb.” Seguin is a desolate town with nothing of interest, a stark contrast to her idyllic dreams. Because her expectations were high, Cleófilas feels all the more disillusioned and hopeless about reality.
