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Sandra Cisneros

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Sandra Cisneros
OccupationNovelist, Poet, Short Story Writer
NationalityMexican American
Notable worksThe House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
Notable awardsAmerican Book Award,Clay McDaniel Fellowship
Website
http://www.sandracisneros.com

Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is a Chicana writer best known for her critically acclaimed novel The House on Mango Street (1984) and short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her works break away from literary norms, exploring new literary devices and emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell.[1] She is the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.[2]

Cisneros deals with the formation of Chicana identity in all of her works, which involves exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes inherent to both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. However, Cisneros has achieved recognition far beyond Chicano and Latino communities, to the extent that The House on Mango Street has been translated worldwide and is taught in American classrooms as a coming-of-age novel.[3]

Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions throughout her life (as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator) but has always maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes, evidenced by her establishment of the Macondo Foundation, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas.[4] Cisneros currently resides in San Antonio, Texas.

Early life and education

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago on December 20th 1954. Cisneros has 6 brothers and is the only surviving daughter in the family. She was considered the "odd number in a set of men."[5] Cisneros's roots go all the way back to her maternal grandfather who used to play the piano for the Mexican president, thus becoming a wealthy man, however losing it all due to gambling. Her paternal grandfather was a veteran of the Mexican revolution and with the money he had saved up, gave her father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral the opportunity to go to College. However, after her father had failed classes due to his lack of interest, he had run away to the United States, not able to withstand the fury of his father.[6]

While roaming the southern United States with his brother, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral had decided to go to Chicago to see what it was like.[7] There he had met Elvira Cordero Anguiano, Sandra's mother. After getting married, they had settled in one of Chicago's poorest neighbourhoods. Robin Ganz, a scholarly writer, explains that Sandra had acknowledged that while her mother family name came from a very humble background, rooting all the way back to Guanajuato, Mexico, while her father's was much more "admirable."[8]

Finding his career in upholstering, Sandra's father, after finding a way to maintain and support his family, began "a compulsive circular migration between Chicago and Mexico City that became the dominating pattern of Sandra's childhood."[9] This constant migration between two countries left Sandra having to find a new place to live and a new school to go to. Eventually this unstable environment left Sandra feeling loneliness and as the six brothers joined paired off in two's, Sandra was left being the odd "woman" out.[10] Her father was yet another cause as to why Sandra felt excluded from the family, denoting the fact that he had "seis hijos y una hija" instead of "siete hijos."[11] Ganz also notes that her loneliness was what shaped Cisneros's passion for writing.[9]

However, Cisneros’ one strong female influence was her mother, Elvira, who was a voracious in reading and was much more intelligent and socially aware than her husband was.[9] Ganz notes that although Elvira was quite restricted and too dependent on her husband to be able to expand her intelligence, she made sure that her daughter Sandra would have many more opportunities in her lifetime.[12]

When Cisneros was eleven, her family finally managed to put a down payment on their own home. This was the stop of her continuous migration from the USA to Mexico. They moved into a Puerto Rican neighbourhood called Humboldt Park.[12] Later on in life, this neighbourhood and her neighbours would be her inspiration to write the story and the character of The House on Mango Street. Even though Cisneros wrote her first poem around the age of ten, it was only in high school where she had a teacher who inspired and helped her write poems about the Vietnam War and thus eventually became known at school as the poet.[13]

Cisneros got her Bachelors of Arts from Loyola University in Chicago in 1976 and following that received her Masters of Fine Arts after finishing a writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. Furthermore Cisneros was also a member of PEN and an organizer for a women’s group called Mujeres Por La Paz.[citation needed]

Later life and writing career

Cisneros taught English and Creative Writing as a visiting professor at California State University, Chico in 1987–88, at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988–89, at the University of California, Irvine in 1990, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1990–91, and at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1991–92.

Writing style

Bilingualism

Cisneros is well known for her incorporation of Spanish into English texts. She often substitutes Spanish words for English ones where she feels that Spanish better conveys the intended meaning, and when possible constructs the sentence so that English-speakers can infer the meaning from the context. Cisneros enjoys manipulating the two languages, such as creating new expressions in English by literally translating Spanish expressions, thereby crating a playful hybrid of the two. Cisneros said of this hybrid: "All of a sudden something happens to the English, something really new is happening, a new spice is added to the English language."[14] For Cisneros, Spanish always has a role in writing, even when she writes in English. As she discovered after writing The House on Mango Street primarily in English, "the syntax, the sensibility, the diminutives, the way of looking at inanimate objects" were all characteristic of Spanish.[15] For Cisneros, Spanish does not only provide colourful expressions, but a distinct rhythm and attitude to her works.

Voice of the people

Sandra Cisneros recalls the moment, while attending a MFA seminar at the University of Iowa, when she was suddenly struck by the differences between herself and her classmates and how these would be fundamental to the development of her unique literary style: "It wasn't as if I didn't know who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But, I didn't think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, whereas it had everything to do with it! My race, my gender, and my class! And it didn't make sense until that moment, sitting in that seminar. That's when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn't write about."[16] Following this realization, Cisneros cast aside her attempt to conform to American literary canons, and instead turned to her own cultural environment for inspiration, including Mexican and Southwestern myths and popular culture, and wrote to convey the lives of people she identified with. Cisneros is centrally concerned with voice, which is manifested in her passion for hearing the personal stories that people tell, and her commitment to expressing the voices of marginalized people through her works, such as the "thousands of silent women" whose struggles are exposed in The House on Mango Street. [17]

Narrative modes, diction, and apparent simplicity

Not only does Cisneros's fiction come in many forms (novels, poems, and short stories), but she has a great breadth of style by which she powerfully and inventively challenges literary and social conventions. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a collage of narrative techniques that serve to engage and affect the reader in various ways. In these twenty-two stories, Cisneros alternates between different narrative modes (first person, third person, and stream-of-consciousness) and ranges from brief impressionistic vignettes to longer event-driven stories, and from highly poetic language to brutally frank realist language. One story is composed of fictional notes asking for the blessings of patron saints ("Little Miracles, Kept Promises") and another transcribes the phone gossip of two female characters ("The Marlboro Man"); in both cases there is no narrator to mediate between the characters and the reader, so the reader must interpret the meaning of the story through the written or spoken word of the characters directly.

Works by Cisneros can appear simple at first reading, but this is deceptive. Cisneros invites the reader to read beyond the text by recognizing larger social processes within the microcosm of everyday life, which is to say that phone gossip about the Marlboro Man is not mere fluff, but an opportunity to dig into the psyches of these characters and analyze their cultural influences. Various literary observers have noted how Cisneros tackles complex theoretical and social issues through the vehicle of apparently simple characters and situations. Saldívar, for example, notes how The House on Mango Street "represents from the simplicity of childhood vision the enormously complex process of the construction of the gendered subject."[18] Cruz describes how each individual interacts differently with this novel, and thus it elicits such varied responses as ""it is about growing up," to "it's about a Chicana's growing up," to "it is a critique of patriarchal structures and exclusionary practices."[19] Cisneros's writing is very rich not only for its lyrical form and diction, but also the social commentary that is by and large written between the lines.

Literary themes

Place

When Cisneros describes the aspirations and struggles of Chicanas, the theme of place often emerges. Place not only refers to geographic locations where the novels occur but positions the characters hold within their social context. Chicanas frequently occupy Anglo-dominated and male-dominated places where they are subject to a variety of oppressive and prejudicial behaviors. Cisneros is particularly interested in the home and the relation that women have to it. For Chicanas, the home can be an oppressive place where they are subjugated to the will of male heads-of-household, or in the case of their own home, an empowering place where they can be autonomous and express themselves creatively. In The House on Mango Street, for example, the young protagonist Esperanza longs to have her own house: "Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after."[20] Esperanza feels discontented and trapped in her family home, and witnesses other women in the same position. As Cisneros communicates through this character, a woman needs her own place in order to realize her full potential. In this case, the home is not a site of patriarchal violence, but "a site of poetic self-creation."[21] Esperanza, an aspiring writer, yearns for "a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem."[22] Critics such as Doyle[23] and Cruz [24] have compared this theme in Cisneros's work to the key concept in Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own." A source of conflict and grief for Cisneros's Chicana characters is that the male-dominated society in which they live denies them this place for self-creation and self-fulfillment.

Cisneros not only explores the issue of place in relation to gender, but to class as well. As Saldívar has noted, "Aside from the personal requirement of a gendered woman's space, Esperanza recognizes the collective requirements of the working poor and the homeless as well."[25] Saldívar refers to Esperanza's determination not to forget her working-class roots once she obtains her dream house and to open her doors to those who are less fortunate. Esperanza says "Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house."[26] This passage alludes to "the necessity for a decent living space" that is fundamental to all people despite the different oppressions they face.[27]

Construction of femininity and female sexuality

Patriarchal norms of femininity and female sexuality, mostly Mexican but also Anglo-American, shape the lives of all of Cisneros’s female characters.[28] Cisneros shows how women internalize these norms at a young age, through informal education by family members and by popular culture. For example, in The House on Mango Street the girls speculate about what function a woman’s hips have: “They’re good for holding a baby when you’re cooking, Rachel says… You need them to dance, says Lucy… You gotta know how to walk with hips, practice you know.”[29] In this way traditional female roles (childrearing, cooking, attracting male attention) are understood by the girls to be the biological destiny of their bodies. Disillusionment, confusion and anguish often occur when girls reach adolescence and womanhood and they must reconcile their education about love and sex with their own experiences. In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza describes her “sexual initiation,” which was her being assaulted by a group of Anglo-American boys while awaiting her friend Sally at the fairground.[30] Esperanza feels stricken and powerless after this, but above all betrayed, not only by Sally who was not there for her but “by all the women who ever failed to contradict the romantic mythology of love and sex.”[30] This romantic mythology is fueled by popular culture which weaves stories of harmonious relations between men and women, romantic love and happily-ever-after scenarios that women buy into even though they bear no resemblance to real life. Cisneros illustrates this fact in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, where multiple references to romantic telenovelas obsessively watched by the female characters are juxtaposed with the abuse and poverty they face in their own lives.

Borderland

Though Cisneros does not explicitly locate her stories and novels on the Mexico-U.S. border, this border is perhaps her most salient theme due to the constant border crossings, both real and metaphorical, of characters in all of her works.[31] The House on Mango Street takes place in Chicago where the narrator lives, and in Mexico City where she visits extended family. Various characters in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories also make trips to Mexico to reunite with family members. However, to quote Benito and Manzanas, the "image of the border has become fully meaningful not only when we consider it as a physical line but when we decenter it and liberate it from the notion of space to encompass notions of sex, class, gender, ethnicity, identity, and community."[32] Cisneros frequently divorces the border from its strictly geographic meaning and uses it metaphorically to explore how Chicana identity is an amalgamation of both Mexican and Anglo-American cultures. The border represents the everyday experiences of people who are neither fully from one place nor the other; at times the border is fluid and two cultures can coexist harmoniously within a single person, but at other times it is rigid and there is an acute tension between them. Payant, for example, has analyzed the border metaphor in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, which manifests in references to the Chicano/a characters' Mexican roots and the (im)migration between the two countries, the recurrence of overlapping pre-Columbian, mestizo and Southwestern Chicano myths, and the portrayal of Chicano/as as "straddling two or three cultures."[33] Payant makes use of Anzaldúa's concept of living "on the borderlands" to describe the experience of Cisneros's Chicana characters who, in addition to their struggle to overcome patriarchal constructs of their gender and sexual identity, must negotiate linguistic and cultural boundaries.[34]

Awards

Sandra Cisneros has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982 and 1988. In 1985 she had received the American Book award for her first book "The House on Mango Street" by the Before Columbus Foundation.Afterwards she had recieved the Paisano Dobie Fellowship Award in 1986. She has also come first and second in the Segundo Concurso Nacional del Cuento Chicano, sponsored by the University of Arizona. Following that, in 1991, she had received the Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for her book "Woman Hollering Creek". As well she has received an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1993 and a MacArthur fellowship in 1995. In 2003, Cisneros became part of the second group of recipients of the newly formed Texas Cultural Trust's Texas Medal of Arts.[35][36][37]

List of works and Summaries

  • Cisneros, Sandra (1980), Bad Boys, San Jose, CA: Mango, OCLC 7339707
  • Cisneros, Sandra (1984), The House on Mango Street, Houston: Arte Público, ISBN 978-0934770200
  • Cisneros, Sandra (1987), My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Bloomington, IN: Third Woman Press, ISBN 978-0943219011
  • Cisneros, Sandra (1991), Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, New York: Random House, ISBN 978-0394576541

Woman hollering creek and other stories continues to explore the theme of patriarchy and gender within Chicano communities. The stories give snapshots of Mexican American lives from different perspectives, young and old, man or woman, and past or present. She beautifully writes from one story to another and in great detail captures the lives of Chicanos, but especially Chicanas. Whether the book is written in poetry or prose is an ongoing debate. All these stories bring out different themes related to being Chicano, including gender, race, sexuality, and the prescribed roles of Mexican women and men. The book is put forth by a series of vignettes that vary from being quite long or only a couple of paragraphs and while the stories have in context nothing to do with one another, they all share reoccurring themes.[citation needed]

Contributions

  • Days and Nights of Love and War (2000). By Eduardo Galeano. Contribution by Sandra Cisneros.
  • Family Pictures/ Cuadros de Familia (2005). By Carmen Lomas Garza. Introduction by Sandra Cisneros.
  • Emergency Tacos: Seven Poets Con Picante (2007). By Carlos Cumpian, Sandra Cisneros, Carlos Cortez, Beatriz Badikian, Cynthia Gallaher, Margarita Lopez-Castro, Raul Nino.

Notes

  1. ^ Doyle 1994, p. 6
  2. ^ Madsen 2000, p. 107
  3. ^ Cruz 2001, p. 910
  4. ^ Madsen 2000, p. 106
  5. ^ Ganz 1994, p. 19
  6. ^ Ganz 1994 p.20
  7. ^ Ganz 1994 p.20
  8. ^ Ganz 1994, p. 20
  9. ^ a b c Ganz 1994, p. 21
  10. ^ Ganz 1994 p.21
  11. ^ Ganz 1994 p.21
  12. ^ a b Ganz 1994, p. 22
  13. ^ Ganz 1994, p. 23
  14. ^ Dasenbrock 1992, p. 289
  15. ^ Dasenbrock 1992, p. 288
  16. ^ Doyle 1994, p. 6
  17. ^ Doyle 1996, p. 53
  18. ^ Saldívar 1990, p. 181
  19. ^ Cruz 2001, p. 914
  20. ^ Cisneros 1989, p. 108
  21. ^ Saldívar 1990, p. 108
  22. ^ Cisneros 1989, p. 183[clarification needed]
  23. ^ Doyle 1994, p. 6-7
  24. ^ Cruz 2001, p. 923
  25. ^ Saldívar 1990, p. 183
  26. ^ Cisneros 1989, p. 81
  27. ^ Saldívar 1990, p. 184
  28. ^ Madsen 2000, p. 108
  29. ^ Cisneros 1989, p. 49
  30. ^ a b Madsen 2000, p. 114
  31. ^ Sadowski-Smith 2008, p. 33
  32. ^ Benito & Manzanas 2002, p. 3
  33. ^ Payant 1999, p. 95
  34. ^ Payant 1999, p. 96
  35. ^ Associated Press. "Talented Texans to be honored," Houston Chronicle, February 7, 2003, page 2.
  36. ^ "Thanks for telling the story of Texas through the arts" (editorial), Austin American-Statesman, February 9, 2003.
  37. ^ "Legislature honors 13 artists, patrons," San Antonio Express-News, March 26, 2003, page 2B.

References

  • Benito, Jesús; Manzanas, Ana María (2002), "Border(lands) and Border Writing: Introductory Essay", in Benito, Jesús; Manzanas, Ana María (eds.), Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 1–21, ISBN 978-9042015098.
  • Cisneros, Sandra (1989), The House on Mango Street, New York: Vintage, ISBN 978-0679734772.
  • Dasenbrock, Reed Way (1992), "Interview: Sandra Cisneros", in Jussawalla, Feroza; Dasenbrock, Reed Way (eds.), Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 287–306, ISBN 978-0878055722.
  • Madsen, Deborah L. (2000), Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, ISBN 9781570033797.
  • Payant, Katherine (1999), "Borderland Themes in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek", in Payant, Katherine B.; Rose, Toby (eds.), The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche, Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 95–108, ISBN 978-0313308918.
  • Saldívar, Ramón (1990), Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, ISBN 978-0299124748.
  • Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (2008), Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ISBN 978-0813926896.
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