Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros (born 20 December 1954) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist whose debut novel The House on Mango Street (1984) has sold more than six million copies, become one of the most widely assigned books in American schools, and established Cisneros as the most prominent and influential Latina literary voice in the United States. The book — a series of forty-four lyrical vignettes about Esperanza Cordero, a Chicana girl growing up in a Chicago barrio — achieves its power through its combination of a child’s directness, a poet’s compression, and a social critic’s eye for the way poverty, gender, and ethnicity constrain the lives of its characters.

Life and Career

Cisneros was born in Chicago, the only daughter among seven children in a Mexican American family. Her father, Alfredo, was Mexican; her mother, Elvira, was Mexican American. The family moved frequently between Chicago and Mexico City — a restlessness that, Cisneros has said, prevented her from forming lasting childhood friendships and drove her to books and to writing.

She attended Loyola University Chicago and then the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where the experience of being one of very few students of colour — and the only one whose background bore no resemblance to the suburban or small-town childhoods her classmates wrote about — gave her both her subject and her sense of mission. She has described a pivotal moment in a seminar on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, in which the discussion of “the house” as a symbol of comfort and safety made her acutely aware that her experience of houses — cramped apartments, transient rentals, the desire for a house of one’s own — was entirely different from her classmates’. “I knew then,” she later wrote, “that I had something to say that nobody else could say.”

The House on Mango Street (1984) — originally published by Arte Público Press, a small Houston press dedicated to Hispanic literature, and later reissued by Vintage — is a coming-of-age novel told in vignettes that range from a single paragraph to a few pages. Each vignette has the density of a prose poem: “My Name” (Esperanza reflects on the Spanish and English meanings of her name), “Those Who Don’t” (about outsiders’ fear of the barrio), “Sally” and “Red Clowns” (about sexual violence and betrayal). The book’s language is simple enough for young readers and complex enough for scholars — a combination that accounts for its extraordinary dual readership.

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) — published by Random House, bringing Cisneros into the mainstream — is her finest single work: twenty-two stories set along the Texas-Mexico border that explore the lives of Mexican American women with a range of voices, registers, and emotional textures. Stories like “Never Marry a Mexican,” “Eyes of Zapata,” and the title story (about a woman who escapes an abusive marriage and discovers the hollering creek of the title) demonstrate a writer working at the height of her powers.

Caramelo (2002) — a multigenerational novel following a Mexican American family between Chicago and Mexico City — is her most ambitious work: sprawling, digressive, voice-driven, and packed with the material culture of two countries. A House of My Own (2015) is a memoir in essays and photographs.

Poetry

Cisneros is also a poet. My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987) and Loose Woman (1994) are collections of accessible, emotionally direct poems about desire, independence, cultural identity, and the pleasures and costs of refusing to conform to either Anglo or Mexican expectations of femininity.

Themes and Style

Cisneros’s prose style is compressed, rhythmic, and deeply influenced by poetry — her sentences are short, her images precise, and her diction draws on both English and Spanish without the self-consciousness that marks some bilingual writing. Her central themes are the experience of growing up female and Chicana in America, the desire for a room — and a house — of one’s own, the violence that men do to women, and the power of storytelling as a means of survival and self-definition.

She was the first Chicana writer to receive a major publishing contract from a New York house, and her success opened doors for a generation of Latino/a writers.

Key Works

• The House on Mango Street (1984)
• Woman Hollering Creek (1991)
• Caramelo (2002)
• Loose Woman (1994)

Collecting Cisneros

The House on Mango Street (1984, Arte Público Press) — the true first edition, in wrappers — brings $200–$800 and is increasingly scarce. The 1991 Vintage reissue is widely available. Woman Hollering Creek (1991, Random House) in first edition brings $20–$50. My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987, Third Woman Press) brings $30–$80.