Analyzing Seguin's Argument

"Woman Hollering Creek" fictionally articulates a Chicana feminism that simultaneously decenters predominantly white feminisms and destabilizes class assumptions.

One crucial element of Seguin's argument lies in this passage where she describes Cleofilas' context and already interprets her significance as a "border" character as it relates to the Chicana feminism she will come to represent:

"WHC" also problematizes an unacceptable dichotomy that US scholars often inscribe between gender conditions in the US and those in Mexico...This is a story in which Cleofilas, a young Mexican woman, moves from one Third World patriarchal context to another with the hope of escaping economic limitations and fulfilling romantic illusions. In Cleofilas' migrations Cisneros suggests that the material and gendered conditions of domination and exploitation imposed on subaltern Mexican women in the US are connected to the exploitation and domination from which they seek to escape in the pueblos/towns of Mexico" (449).

Already, Cleofilas is "decenterizing predominantly white feminisms" by articulating the struggles of a Mexican woman in an Anglo world where she is fighting similar, but not identical, struggles against a patriarchy that persists in both economic worlds. Seguin's claim that Cleofilas' moving from one "Third World patriarchal context to another with the hope of escaping economic limitations and fulfilling romantic illusions" is central to her argument that Cleofilas feminism crosses the borders of both race and economic class and presents a feminism that flows through both boundaries.