LITTLE MIRACLES, KEPT PROMISES
by Sandra Cisneros, 1991

Rosario De Leon of Austin, Texas, the conscience and consciousness at the literary pith of Sandra Cisneros's "Little Miracles, Kept Promises," does not actually appear in the story until its last section. Like Esperanza Cordero, the sensitive young narrator of The House on Mango Street (1984), Cisneros's poignant coming-of-age novel, Rosario is a near alter ego of the author in her fierce rebellion against both a macho Hispanic culture and a Catholic religion that tend to undervalue, even exploit, their passive women.

But the method employed here, though not far removed from the series of vignettes that pattern the novel, is structured around the clever conceit of a string of offerings and notes left at a church. They are addressed to familiar idols, including saints and the Black Christ, by a variety of mostly working-class Mexican-Americans: "So many milagritos, safety-pinned here, so many little miracles dangling from red thread … so many petitions, so many promises made and kept."

The written pleas, arranged to represent a panorama of voices and lives, range from a naive young man's simple request for a "job with good pay, benefits, and retirement plan" to a pitiful prayer for "clothes, furniture, shoes, dishes" from a bewildered mother whose dwelling has been gutted by fire and whose defiant daughter wants to pursue an education rather than help out around the house. Many of the notes enable the reader to reconstruct entire family chronicles, and they alternate between the catastrophic and the ordinary, whether treating a horrendous bus accident or the minor tragedy of a pimple for a besieged teenager.

It is Chayo (Rosario's nickname from childhood), depositing a long braid of her hair in a glass as her offering to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who emerges from the chorus to sing her aria of protest, a feminist hymn and battle cry that energizes all of Cisneros's fiction and poetry. The cutting off of her hair, which had never been cut before, is a primal revolutionary gesture meant to signal her determination to jettison the traditional female roles of wife and mother in favor of a career as a painter.

Chayo's rejection of sexist stereotyping, her refusal to become like her mother, who was the scapegoat for her drunken father's every failure, is too overt for the reader's comfort, and it almost degenerates into mere allegory. It helps explain why "Little Miracles, Kept Promises," despite its impressive manipulation of diverse sensibilities, never manages to achieve the sort of resonance, of perceptual depth, expected from literature.

Consequently, the drive to the story's climax is less than intense, more true to a political agenda than to nature or art. Chayo explains to the Virgin of Guadalupe why she had to flee from her and her religion: "Couldn't look at you without blaming you for all the pain my mother and her mother and all our mothers have put up with in the name of God." Branded a heretic, she would have preferred to worship a more savage goddess, one who leaped naked over the backs of bulls or held snakes in her hands, like the female deities swept away by patriarchal Christianity.

The resolution that follows seems didactic and unearned, predictable rather than inevitable. Chayo discerns behind and within the Madonna the powerful native goddesses that had been superseded, and she is magically set free, now unashamed "to be my mother's daughter, my grandmother's granddaughter, my ancestors' child." Nor does a coy addendum, her letter to the icon saluting it as the "Mighty Guadalupana Coatlaxopeuh Tonantzin" and thanking it with the symbolic braid of hair, escape the box of a blatantly coercive design.

—Edward Butscher