"A sensitive, compassionate witness, Cisneros re-creates the neighborhood in which she grew up, evoking the smells and tastes and feelings. The effects of sexism, poverty, racism, and the loss of culture and language are told with searing simplicity…Cisneros's telling is relentless, clear in its simplicity. Her anger is palpable, but no words of anger are actually written. Experiences about race and class and sex are put into word pictures. The entrapment of women is drawn in big, thick lines across the page. Sobreviviendo, bearing witness, out of love, so that what has been (and still is) will not be erased. The stories are pieced together like a quilt, arranged so that women can see how it is and has been, can see the lines of connection between themselves as women, as Chicanas, as poor people in the barrio, can think about how they might want it to be, how they could get there. That Cisneros, like Alice Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks, chose to piece her stories like a quilt speaks to the significance of the quilting process as a way of thinking. "Each day is a tapestry," Deena Metzger has written, the piecing a reflection of the structure of daily life."