Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros
Occupation	Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer
Nationality	Mexican American
Notable works	The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
Notable awards	American Book Award,Clay McDaniel Fellowship
Website
http://www.sandracisneros.com

Sandra Cisneros (born 20 December 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. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

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 present in 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.

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. Cisneros currently resides in San Antonio, Texas.

Early life and education

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago on 20 December 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." 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.

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. 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."

After finding a way to maintain and support his family through his career in upholstering, Sandra's father began "a compulsive circular migration between Chicago and Mexico City that became the dominating pattern of Sandra's childhood." 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. 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" ("six boys and a girl") instead of "siete hijos" ("seven children"). Ganz also notes that her loneliness was what shaped Cisneros's passion for writing.

However, Cisneros’s one strong female influence was her mother, Elvira, who was voracious in reading and tended to be more enlightened and socially conscious than her husband was. 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.

When Cisneros was eleven, her family finally managed to put a down payment on their own home. This was the end of her continuous migration from the USA to Mexico. They moved into a Puerto Rican neighbourhood called Humboldt Park. 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.

Cisneros got her Bachelors of Arts from Loyola University in Chicago in 1976 and following that received her Master 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.

Later Life

Career in Education

Besides being an author and poet, Cisneros has held many different positions in her career. After finishing her MFA degree in 1978 Cisneros taught former high-school dropouts at the Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago. Since The House on Mango Street was published in 1984, Cisneros has taught creative writing as a writer in residence at a number of different universities in the United States including the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Cisneros has also worked as a a college recruiter and an arts administrator. More recently Cisneros has been a Writer-in-Residence at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

Family and Community

After being asked why she has never married nor started a family Cisneros once said in an interview "I've never seen a marriage that is as happy as my living alone [. . .] My writing is my child and I don't want anything to come between us." Cisneros has said that she enjoys living alone because it gives her time to think and write.

In the Introduction to the Third Edition of Gloria E. Anzaldua's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Cisneros wrote: "It's why I moved from Illinois to Texas. So that the relatives and family would allow me the liberty to disappear into myself. To reinvent myself if I had to. As Latinas, we have to[…]Because writing is like putting your head underwater." Cisneros currently lives in San Antonio, Texas in a Mexican-pink home with “many creatures little and large.” In San Antonio she has created and contributed to a strong community among other artists and writers through her work with the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation.

Legacy and Contribution to the Chicano Literary Movement

Cisneros founded the Macondo Foundation initially through a small workshop, the Macondo Workshop, which began in her kitchen in 1998. The workshop, which has become an annual event, brings together writers "working on geographic, cultural, economic, social and spiritual borders." Cisneros also founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation in 2000. This foundation, which is named after her father, awards grants to writers from Texas.

Cisneros, who has been called “perhaps the most famous Chicana writer", was the first Mexican-American female writer to have her work published by a mainstream publisher. In 1991 Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek was published by Random House, and a second edition of ‘’The House on Mango Street’’ (originally published by Arte Público Press in 1984) was published by Vintage Press also in 1991. Previous to these two books being printed by mainstream publishers there had only been male Chicano authors who had made the crossover from smaller publishers. Cisneros spoke of her success and what it means for Chicana literature in an interview on National Public Radio on September 19,1991:

I think I can't be happy if I'm the only one that's getting published by Random House when I know there are such magnificent writers-both Latinos and Latinas, both Chicanos and Chicanas-in the U.S. whose books are not published by mainstream presses or whom the main-stream isn't even aware of. And, you know, if my success means that other presses will take a second look at these writers…and publish them in larger numbers then our ship will come in.

Cisneros proved to the mainstream that she could fill a literary void by writing the stories that had not yet been written. With her first novel, ‘’The House on Mango Street’’ she moved away from the poetic style that was common in Chicana literature at the time and began to define a “distinctive Chicana literary space”, challenging familiar literary forms and addressing subjects such as gender inequality and the marginalization of cultural minorities . The House on Mango Street is a book that is easily approachable for Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans alike because it is free of anger or accusation .

Cisneros’s writing is very influential to both Chicana and feminist literature. Her fiction is a form of social commentary, contributing to a literary tradition that resembles the work of contemporary cultural anthropologists by attempting to authentically represent the cultural experience of a group of people. Cisneros’s work has helped to improve Chicana feminist aesthetics by writing stories that bring women to the center as empowered protagonists.

Writing style

Bilingualism

Cisneros often incorporates Spanish into her English texts. She 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." 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. For Cisneros, Spanish does not only provide colourful expressions, but a distinct rhythm and attitude to her works.

Voice of the people

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." 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.

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." 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." 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." 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." Esperanza, an aspiring writer, yearns for "a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem." Critics such as Doyle and Cruz 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." 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." This passage alludes to "the necessity for a decent living space" that is fundamental to all people despite the different oppressions they face.

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. 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.” 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. 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.” 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.

Construction of Chicana identity

The challenges faced by Cisneros’s characters on account of their gender cannot be understood in isolation from their culture, for the norms that dictate how women and men ought to think and behave are culturally determined and thus distinct for different cultural groups. Through her works, Cisneros conveys the experiences of Chicanas confronting the “deeply rooted patriarchal values” of Mexican culture through interactions not only with Mexican fathers, but the broader community which exerts pressure upon them to conform to a narrow definition of womanhood and a subservient position to men.

A recurrent theme in Cisneros’s work is the triad of mythical figures that Gloria Anzaldúa has referred to as "Our Mothers": la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, and la Llorona. These three “symbolic figures” are of great importance to identity politics and popular culture in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest and have been used, argues Alarcón, as reference points “for controlling, interpreting, or visualizing women" in Mexican-American culture. According to this theory, supported by many cultural theorists, the gender identity of Mexican and Chicana women is complexly constructed in reference to the gentle and pure Virgen de Guadalupe, the violated and treacherous la Malinche, and the eternally grieving la Llorona. This gives rise to a “fragmentary subjectivity” often experienced by Chicanas, and their need to come to terms with these entities, renegotiate them on their own terms, or reject them altogether.

The three “Mothers” come out most clearly in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. In the stories “Never Marry a Mexican” and “Woman Hollering Creek” the female protagonists grapple with these “Mexican icons of sexuality and motherhood that, internalized, seem to impose on them a limited and even negative definition of their own identities as women.” The protagonist in “Never Marry a Mexican” is haunted by the myth of la Malinche, who is considered a whore and a traitor, and defies la Malinche's passive sexuality with her own aggressive one. In “Woman Hollering Creek” the protagonist reinvents the la Llorona myth when she decides to take charge of her own future, and that of her children, and discovers that the grito of la Llorona can be a “joyous holler” rather than a grieving wail. It is the borderland, that symbolic middle ground between two cultures, which "offers a space where such a negotiation with fixed gender ideals is at least possible.”

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. 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." 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." 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.

Awards

Sandra Cisneros has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981 and 1988. In 1985 she received the American Book Award for her first book The House on Mango Street from the Before Columbus Foundation. Subsequently she received a Frank Dobie Artists Fellowship. She has also come first and second in the Segundo Concurso Nacional del Cuento Chicano, sponsored by the University of ArizonaShe received the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award,the PEN Center West Award for best fiction and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. The book was also selected as the noteworthy book of the year by The New York Times and The American Library Journal. Another book of hers Loose Woman won the Mountain & Plains Booksellers' Award. 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, Caramelo, Cisneros's book published in 2002, was highly regarded by several journals including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Times which led to her Premio Napoli Award in 2005 and received critical acclaim for the Dublin International IMPAC award, as well as nominated for the Orange Price in England. Cisneros became part of the second group of recipients of the newly formed Texas Cultural Trust's Texas Medal of Arts.

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
• Cisneros, Sandra (1994), Hairs = Pelitos, New York: Knopf, ISBN 978-0679890072
• Cisneros, Sandra (1994), Loose woman: Poems, New York: Knopf, ISBN 978-0679416449
• Cisneros, Sandra (2002), Caramelo, or, Pure Cuento: A Novel, New York: Knopf, ISBN 978-1400041503
• Cisneros, Sandra (2004), Vintage Cisneros, New York: Vintage, ISBN 978-1400034055

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.

References

• Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.

• Alarcón, Norma. "Chicana's Feminist Literature: A Re-vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1982. 182-189.

• 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, Sandra Cisneros, retrieved 2008-11-09.

• Cisneros, Sandra (1994), The House on Mango Street, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. {{citation}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help).

• Cruz, Felicia J. (2001), "On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street", Modern Fiction Studies, 47 (4): 910–946, retrieved 2008-10-31. (Project MUSE subscription required for online access.)

• 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.

• Doyle, Jacqueline (Winter 1994), "More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street", MELUS, 19 (4): 5–35, retrieved 2008-10-18{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link). (JSTOR subscription required for online access.)

• Doyle, Jacqueline (1996), "Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek"", Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 16 (1): 53–70, retrieved 2008-10-18. (JSTOR subscription required for online access.)

• Ganz, Robin (Spring 1994), "Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings and Beyond", MELUS, 19 (1): 19–29, retrieved 2008-09-30{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link). (JSTOR subscription required for online access.)

• 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.

• Rodríguez Aranda, Pilar E. (Spring 1990), "On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-three: An Interview with Writer Sandra Cisneros", The Americas Review, 18 (1): 65–80{{citation}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link).

• 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.

• Vitale, Tom. Interview with Sandra Cisneros. Morning Edition. National Public Radio. KUNM, Albuquerque. 19 Sept. 1991.

• Wyatt, Jean. (1995). “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros's "Never Marry a Mexican" and "Woman Hollering Creek".” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 14 (2): 243-271.