After
graduating from Chicago’s Loyola University (B.A., 1976), Cisneros attended the
University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (M.F.A., 1978). There she developed what
was to be the theme of most of her writing, her unique experiences as a
Hispanic woman in a largely alien culture.
Cisneros’s
first book was Bad Boys (1980), a volume of poetry. She gained international
attention with her first book of fiction, The House on Mango Street (1983),
written in a defiant youthful voice that reflected her own memories of a
girlhood spent trying to be a creative writer in an antagonistic environment.
More poetry—including The Rodrigo Poems (1985), My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987),
and Loose Woman (1994)—followed. The children’s book Hairs = Pelitos (1994)
uses the differing hair textures within a single family to explore issues of
human diversity. The volume was based on an episode related in The House on
Mango Street and was told in both Spanish and English.
Her
collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991),
contains tales of beleaguered girls and women who nonetheless feel that they
have power over their destinies. She returned to long fiction with Caramelo; o,
puro cuento (2002), a semiautobiographical work that echoes her own peripatetic
childhood in a large family. Have You Seen Marie? (2012) concerns the efforts
of a middle-aged woman to help her friend find a lost cat while meditating on
her mother’s death. The tale, which mirrored similar experiences in Cisneros’s
own life, was illustrated with images by the artist Ester Hernandez. A House of
My Own: Stories from My Life (2015) is a wide-ranging memoir. Inspired by
Cisneros’s travels when she was an aspiring author, Martita, I Remember You
(2021) follows twentysomething Corina, who leaves her Mexican family in Chicago
to pursue her literary dreams in Paris, where she befriends other expatriates.
In 2022 she published Woman Without Shame: Poems, her first collection of
poetry in nearly three decades. When asked whether she had been writing poems
during that period, she told The New Yorker that “I wasn’t writing them every
day. I just wrote them when I had to. If I didn’t have poetry, I would have to
be on Xanax or Prozac. It’s my medicine.”
Writing
process
Cisneros'
writing is often influenced by her personal experiences and by observations of
many of the people in her community. She once confided to other writers at a
conference in Santa Fe that she writes down "snippets of dialogue or
monologue—records of conversations she hears wherever she goes." These
snippets are then mixed and matched to create her stories. Names for her
characters often come from the San Antonio phone book; "she leafs through
the listings for a last name, then repeats the process for a first name."
By mixing and matching she is assured that she is not appropriating anyone's
real name or real story, but at the same time her versions of characters and
stories are believable.
Cisneros
once found herself so immersed in the characters of her book Woman Hollering
Creek that they began to infiltrate her subconscious mind. Once while she was
writing the story "Eyes of Zapata," she awoke "in the middle of
the night, convinced for the moment that she was Ines, the young bride of the
Mexican revolutionary. Her dream conversation with Zapata then became those
characters' dialogue in her story."
Her
biculturalism and bilingualism are also very important aspects of her writing.
Cisneros was quoted by Robin Ganz as saying that she is grateful to have
"twice as many words to pick from ... two ways of looking at the
world," and Ganz referred to her "wide range of experience" as a
"double-edged sword." Cisneros's ability to speak two languages and
to write about her two cultures gives her a unique position from where she is
able to tell not just her story, but also the stories of those around her.
Community
legacy
Cisneros
has been instrumental in building a strong community in San Antonio among other
artists and writers through her work with the Macondo Foundation and the
Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. The Macondo Foundation, which is named
after the town in Gabriel García Márquez's book One Hundred Years of Solitude,
"works with dedicated and compassionate writers who view their work and
talents as part of a larger task of community-building and non-violent social
change." Officially incorporated in 2006, the foundation began in 1998 as
a small workshop that took place in Cisneros's kitchen. The Macondo Writers
Workshop, which has since become an annual event, brings together writers
"working on geographic, cultural, economic, social and spiritual
borders" and has grown from 15 participants to over 120 participants in
the first 9 years . Currently working out of Our Lady of the Lake University in
San Antonio, the Macondo Foundation makes awards such as the Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Milagro Award honoring the memory of Anzaldúa, a fellow Chicana writer who died
in 2004, by providing Chicano writers with support when they are in need of
some time to heal their "body, heart or spirit" and the Elvira
Cordero Cisneros Award which was created in memory of Sandra Cisneros's mother.
Macondo offers services to member writers such as health insurance and the opportunity
to participate in the Casa Azul Residency Program. The Residency Program
provides writers with a furnished room and office in the Casa Azul, a blue
house across the street from where Cisneros lives in San Antonio, which is also
the headquarters of the Macondo Foundation. In creating this program, Cisneros
"imagined the Casa as a space where Macondistas could retreat from the
distractions of everyday life and have a room of his/her own for the process of
emotional, intellectual and spiritual introspection."
Cisneros
founded the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation in 1999. Named in memory of
her father, the foundation "has awarded over $75,500 to writers born in
Texas, writing about Texas, or living in Texas since 2007". Its intention
is to honor Cisneros's father's memory by showcasing writers who are as proud
of their craft as Alfredo was of his craft as an upholsterer.
Cisneros
co-founded with Bryce Milligan the Annual Texas Small Bookfair, the forerunner
to the Inter-American Bookfair.
Chicano
literary movement
Literary
critic Claudia Sadowski-Smith has called Cisneros "perhaps the most famous
Chicana writer",[30] and Cisneros has been acknowledged as a pioneer in
her literary field as the first female Mexican-American writer to have her work
published by a mainstream publisher. In 1989, The House on Mango Street, which
was originally published by the small Hispanic publishing company Arte Público
Press, was reissued in a second edition by Vintage Press; and in 1991 Woman Hollering
Creek was published by Random House. As Ganz observes, previously only male
Chicano authors had successfully made the crossover from smaller publishers.
That Cisneros had garnered enough attention to be taken on by Vintage Press
said a lot about the possibility for Chicano literature to become more widely
recognized. Cisneros spoke of her success and what it meant for Chicana
literature in an interview on National Public Radio on 19 September 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 mainstream 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.
As
a pioneer Chicana author, Cisneros filled a void by bringing to the fore a
genre that had previously been at the margins of mainstream literature. 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. According to literary critic Alvina E Quintana, The
House on Mango Street is a book that has reached beyond the Chicano and Latino
literary communities and is now read by people of all ethnicities. Quintana
states that Cisneros's writing is accessible for both Anglo- and
Mexican-Americans alike since it is free from anger or accusation, presenting
the issues (such as Chicana identity and gender inequalities) in an
approachable way. Cisneros's writing has been influential in shaping both
Chicana and feminist literature. Quintana sees her fiction as a form of social
commentary, contributing to a literary tradition that resembles the work of
contemporary cultural anthropologists in its attempt to authentically represent
the cultural experience of a group of people, and acknowledges Cisneros's
contribution to Chicana feminist aesthetics by bringing women to the center as
empowered protagonists in much of her work.
Writing
style
Bilingualism
Cisneros
often incorporates Spanish into her English writing, using Spanish instead of
English where she feels that Spanish better conveys the meaning or improves the
rhythm of the passage. However, where possible she constructs sentences so that
non-Spanish speakers can infer the meaning of Spanish words from their context.
In Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Cisneros writes: "La Gritona.
Such a funny name for such a lovely arroyo. But that's what they called the
creek that ran behind the house."[41] Even if the English-speaking reader
does not initially know that arroyo means creek, Cisneros soon translates it in
a way that does not interrupt the flow of the text. She enjoys manipulating the
two languages, creating new expressions in English by literally translating
Spanish phrases.[40] In the same book Cisneros writes: "And at the next
full moon, I gave light, Tía Chucha holding up our handsome, strong-lunged boy."
Previous sentences inform the reader that a baby is being born, but only a
Spanish speaker will notice that "I gave light" is a literal
translation of the Spanish "dí a luz" which means "I gave
birth." Cisneros joins other Hispanic-American US writers such as Gloria
Anzaldúa, Piri Thomas, Giannina Braschi, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and Junot Díaz,
who create playful linguistic hybrids of Spanish and English.[43] Cisneros
noted on this process: "All of a sudden something happens to the English, something
really new is happening, a new spice is added to the English language."
Spanish always has a role in Cisneros's work, 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 brings to her work not only colorful expressions, but also a
distinctive rhythm and attitude.
Narrative
modes, diction, and apparent simplicity
Cisneros's
fiction comes in various forms—as novels, poems, and short stories—by which she
challenges both social conventions, with her "celebratory breaking of
sexual taboos and trespassing across the restrictions that limit the lives and
experiences of Chicanas", and literary ones, with her "bold
experimentation with literary voice and her development of a hybrid form that
weaves poetry into prose". Published in 1991, Woman Hollering Creek and
Other Stories is a collection of twenty-two short stories that form a collage
of narrative techniques, each serving to engage and affect the reader in a
different way. Cisneros alternates between first person, third person, and
stream-of-consciousness narrative modes, and ranges from brief impressionistic
vignettes to longer event-driven stories, and from highly poetic language to
brutally frank realist language. Some stories lack a narrator to mediate
between the characters and the reader; they are instead composed of textual
fragments or conversations "overheard" by the reader. For example,
"Little Miracles, Kept Promises" is composed of fictional notes
asking for the blessings of patron saints, and "The Marlboro Man"
transcribes a gossiping telephone conversation between two female characters.
Works
by Cisneros can appear simple at first reading, but this is deceptive. She
invites the reader to move beyond the text by recognizing larger social
processes within the microcosm of everyday life: the phone conversation in
"The Marlboro Man" is not merely idle gossip, but a text that allows
the reader to dig into the characters' psyches and analyze their cultural
influences. Literary critics have noted how Cisneros tackles complex
theoretical and social issues through the vehicle of apparently simple
characters and situations. For example, Ramón Saldívar observes that The House
on Mango Street "represents from the simplicity of childhood vision the
enormously complex process of the construction of the gendered subject".
In the same vein, Felicia J. Cruz describes how each individual will interact
differently with Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, thus eliciting such
varied reader 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 rich not
only for its symbolism and imagery, deemed by critic Deborah L Madsen to be
"both technically and aesthetically accomplished", but also for its
social commentary and power to "evoke highly personal responses".
this helped her achieve the way she taught.
Literary
themes
Place
When
Cisneros describes the aspirations and struggles of Chicanas, the theme of
place often emerges. Place refers not only to her novels' geographic locations,
but also to the positions her 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; one of these places
that is of particular interest to Cisneros is the home.[50] As literary critics
Deborah L. Madsen and Ramón Saldívar have described, the home can be an
oppressive place for Chicanas where they are subjugated to the will of male
heads-of-household, or in the case of their own home, it can be an empowering
place where they can act autonomously and express themselves creatively. In The
House on Mango Street 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." An aspiring
writer, Esperanza yearns for "a space for myself to go, clean as paper
before the poem."[52] She feels discontented and trapped in her family
home, and witnesses other women in the same position. According to Saldívar,
Cisneros communicates through this character that a woman needs her own place
in order to realize her full potential—a home which is not a site of
patriarchal violence, but instead "a site of poetic self-creation."
One source of conflict and grief for Cisneros's Chicana characters is that the
male-dominated society in which they live denies them this place. Critics such
as Jacqueline Doyle and Felicia J. Cruz have compared this theme in Cisneros's
work to one of the key concepts in Virginia Woolf's famous essay "A Room
of One's Own", that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if
she is to write fiction," or put another way, "economic
security" and personal liberty are necessary for "artistic
production."
Cisneros explores the issue of place in
relation not only to gender but also to class. 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."[55] He 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."[52] According to Saldívar, this
statement of Esperanza's 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
As
Madsen has described, Cisneros's "effort to negotiate a cross-cultural
identity is complicated by the need to challenge the deeply rooted patriarchal
values of both Mexican and American cultures." The lives of all Cisneros's
female characters are affected by how femininity and female sexuality are
defined within this patriarchal value system and they must struggle to rework
these definitions. As Cisneros has said: "There's always this balancing
act, we've got to define what we think is fine for ourselves instead of what
our culture says."
Cisneros
shows how Chicanas, like women of many other ethnicities, internalize these
norms starting at a young age, through informal education by family members and
popular culture. In The House on Mango Street, for example, a group of girl
characters 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." Traditional female roles, such as childrearing, cooking, and
attracting male attention, are understood by Cisneros's characters to be their
biological destiny. However, when they reach adolescence and womanhood, they
must reconcile their expectations about love and sex with their own experiences
of disillusionment, confusion and anguish. Esperanza describes her "sexual
initiation"—an assault by a group of Anglo-American boys while awaiting
her friend Sally at the fairground. She 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". Cisneros illustrates how this romantic mythology, fueled by
popular culture, is often at odds with reality 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.
When
Cisneros addresses the subject of female sexuality, she often portrays negative
scenarios in which men exert control over women through control over their
sexuality, and explores the gap she perceives between the real sexual
experiences of women and their idealized representation in popular culture.
However, Cisneros also describes female sexuality in extremely positive terms,
especially in her poetry. This is true, for example, of her 1987 volume of
poetry My Wicked, Wicked Ways. According to Madsen, Cisneros refers to herself
as "wicked" for having "reappropriated, taken control of, her
own sexuality and the articulation of it – a power forbidden to women under
patriarchy". Through these poems she aims to represent "the reality
of female sexuality" so that women readers will recognize the
"divisive effects" of the stereotypes that they are expected to
conform to, and "discover the potential for joy in their bodies that is
denied them".
Cisneros
breaks the boundary between what is a socially acceptable way for women to act
and speak and what is not, using language and imagery that have a
"boisterous humor" and "extrovert energy" and are even at
times "deliberately shocking". Not all readers appreciate this
"shocking" quality of some of Cisneros's work. Both female and male
readers have criticized Cisneros for the ways she celebrates her sexuality,
such as the suggestive photograph of herself on the My Wicked, Wicked Ways
cover (3rd Woman Press, 1987). Cisneros says of this photo: "The cover is
of a woman appropriating her own sexuality. In some ways, that's also why it's
wicked: the scene is trespassing that boundary by saying 'I defy you. I'm going
to tell my own story.'" Some readers "failed to perceive the
transgressive meaning of the gesture", thinking that she was merely being
lewd for shock value, and questioned her legitimacy as a feminist. Cisneros's
initial response to this was dismay, but then she reports thinking "Wait a
second, where's your sense of humor? And why can't a feminist be sexy?"
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 figures that writer and
theorist Gloria Anzaldúa has referred to as "Our Mothers": the Virgen
de Guadalupe, La Malinche and La Llorona. These symbolic figures are of great
importance to identity politics and popular culture in Mexico and the southwest
United States, and have been used, argues theorist Norma Alarcón, as reference
points "for controlling, interpreting, or visualizing women" in
Mexican-American culture.
Many
theorists, including Jacqueline Doyle, Jean Wyatt, Emma Perez and Cordelia
Candelaria, have argued that the gender identity of Mexican and Chicana women
is complexly constructed in reference to these three figures. La Virgen de
Guadalupe, a Catholic icon of the manifestation of the Virgin Mary in the
Americas, is revered in Mexico as a "nurturing and inspiring mother and
maiden". La Malinche, the indigenous mistress and intermediary of
conquistador Hernán Cortés, has according to Wyatt "become the
representative of a female sexuality at once passive, "rapeable," and
always already guilty of betrayal". Cisneros describes the problematic
dichotomy of the virgin and the whore presented by these two figures:
"We're raised in a Mexican culture that has two role models: La Malinche
and la Virgen de Guadalupe. And you know that's a hard route to go, one or the
other, there's no in-betweens." Madsen has noted that these 'good' and
'bad' archetypes are further complicated by the perception, held by many
Chicana feminists, that they would be guilty of betraying their people, like La
Malinche, if they attempt to define their femininity in more "Anglo"
terms. Through her work, Cisneros critiques the pressures Chicanas face to
suppress their sexuality or channel it into socially acceptable forms so as to
not be labeled "Malinchista[s] ... corrupted by gringa influences which
threaten to splinter [their] people".
The
third figure, La Llorona, who derives from a centuries-old Mexican/Southwestern
folktale, is "a proud young girl [who] marries above her station and is so
enraged when her husband takes a mistress of his own class that she drowns
their children in the river". She dies grief-stricken by the edge of the
river after she is unable to retrieve her children and it is claimed that she
can be heard wailing for them in the sound of the wind and water. These
entities, from the gentle and pure Virgen de Guadalupe, to the violated and
treacherous la Malinche, to the eternally grieving la Llorona give rise to a
"fragmentary subjectivity" often experienced by Chicanas, and their
need to come to terms with them, 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 the myth, which is the Spanish word for the sound made by la Llorona,
can be interpreted as 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
Even
though that Cisneros does not explicitly locate her stories and novels on the
Mexico-U.S. border, Sadowski-Smith identifies the concept as perhaps Cisneros's
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. Caramelo primarily takes place in those settings as
well, but part of the book details the narrator's experiences as a teenager in
San Antonio, TX. Various characters in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
also make trips to Mexico to reunite with family members. However, to quote
literary critics Jesús Benito and Ana María 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, using 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. Literary critic Katherine Payant has analyzed
the border metaphor in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, which manifests
in references to the Chicana/o 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 Chicanas/os as
"straddling two or three cultures." Payant makes use of Gloria
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.
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