| Sumario: | This essay intervenes in contemporary scholarship on Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek (1991) by examining the canciones she uses as epigraphs and their relationship to the midtiple nationalisms that Chicanalos actively negotiate. I argue that Cisneros's decision to include powerfully nationalist Mexican canción traditions areas the reader-listener to the role that mexicanidad plays in the collection's stories and in Chicanal ? nationalism and identity more generally. This examination of the songs reveals Cisneros's critique of a wholesale adoption of discourses of Meneo that depict mexicanidad as either romanticized or despised, representations she regards as potentially flattening. The s tories draw out the complex dimensions of class, race, gender, and generational difference that color each of the songs in its lyrical effect, musical genesis, and performance. Cisneros 's deft and sophisticated treatment of the relationship between song and story resonates in Chicanal ? nationalism and identity as pochajo voice, an articulation of experience that asrupts discourses of a reified Mexico and mexicanidad while joining them to historical circumstances particular to the experiences of Chicanalos and Mexicana/os living in the United States.
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