Little Miracles, Kept Promises (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Mexican-American History

Mexican Americans, who form the subject of Cisneros’s fiction, are the largest group of Hispanic Americans in the United States. In the 1990 census, approximately 13.5 million people identified themselves as Mexican Americans. In addition, an estimated two to three million illegal Mexican immigrants live in the United States, mostly in the southwest. In 1980, when Cisneros was about to begin her literary career, 74 percent of Mexican Americans lived in Texas or California. Arizona and Illinois accounted for more than a third of the remainder. For the most part, these Mexican Americans were not new immigrants. In 1980, three out of four Mexican Americans had been born in the United States, a far higher figure than that for other Hispanic groups.

The characters in Cisneros’s fiction are mostly poor, and poverty has long been a characteristic of Mexican-American life in the U.S., ever since large-scale immigration began in the early twentieth century. Living standards were well below that of the general population, and for the most part Mexican Americans lived outside the cultural mainstream of America, often subject to discrimination.

With the coming of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Mexican Americans also began to organize to improve their situation. In the 1960s, what became known as the Chicano movement tackled economic and civil rights issues pertaining to Mexican Americans. The movement worked for better housing and jobs, provided legal aid and protested against what they claimed was police brutality.

A significant development began in 1962 when a determined Mexican American named Cesar Chavez organized the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), a farmworkers’ union in California, where thousands of Mexican-American agricultural workers struggled to survive on very low wages. In 1965, the NFWA came to the aid of Filipino farm workers who had gone on strike at a vineyard near Delano, California. (This is the strike alluded to in Rosario’s letter in the story.) A bitter five-year struggle ensued, which ended in victory for the union, now called the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. For the first time, Mexican Americans and other Hispanics became aware of the power they could wield when they banded together as a group.

Despite these gains, however, Mexican Americans remained low on the socio-economic scale. Much of this was due to low educational attainment. In 1990, about the time Cisneros was writing Woman Hollering Creek, the rate of high school completion for Hispanics (62 percent of whom were Mexican American) in the United States was 54.5 percent, compared to 82.5 percent for whites and 77 percent for African Americans. The low graduation rate was in part due to language difficulties; many Mexican Americans, adults as well as children, have only limited proficiency in English. In many Mexican-American homes, Spanish remains the language of choice.

Another issue affecting Mexican Americans was that in the 1970s and 1980s there was a sharp rise in the number of illegal immigrants from Mexico who entered the southwestern United States. This created political tensions between the two countries. A U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement was passed with the aim of creating jobs in Mexico. It was hoped that this would reduce the flow of illegal immigrants since most crossed the border in search of work.

The concern in the United States about illegal immigration produced a backlash against Mexican Americans, and there were calls for tighter restrictions on legal and illegal immigration. Also, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many states passed laws designating English as the sole official language. This was seen by Hispanic groups, especially Mexican Americans, as being aimed at them. The effect was to galvanize the Mexican-American community into action. Mexican-American groups became active in defending affirmative action and bilingual education programs, and in opposing further restrictions on immigration.

Mexican-American Literature

For many decades Mexican-American literature was not part of the mainstream literary culture of America. Before the 1960s, only one work, Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village (1945), had reached a general readership. But the Chicano movement that began in the 1960s stimulated Mexican-American writing. Several publishing houses were formed to give Mexican-American writers an opportunity to present their work. As a result of this, Tomas Rivera published his well-known novel Y No Se Lo Trago la Tierra/And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1970). This story about Mexican-American migrant workers broke new ground in its theme of the search for cultural identity. Then in 1972 Rudolfo Anaya published Bless Me, Ultima, which has become one of the most widely read of all Mexican-American novels. In 1990 poet Octavio Paz became the first Chicano to win a Nobel Prize for literature.

The 1980s witnessed a further boom in Mexican-American literature, and the movement known as multiculturalism ensured that these works received more attention from mainstream critics and readers than had formerly been the case. Poets such as Jose Montoya and Gary Soto made their mark nationally, and a group of Mexican-American women writers found their literary voices. Dealing with issues of gender and ethnicity, writers such as Lorna Dee Cervantes and Denise Chavez, as well as Cisneros, created powerful, authentic literature that articulated the desires and experiences of Mexican-American women. These authors challenged the values of the patriarchal societies in which they were raised while at the same time affirming their distinctive Mexican-American heritage.