Biography of Sandra Cisneros

Drawing heavily upon her childhood experiences and ethnic heritage Sandra Cisneros (born 1954) creates characters who are distinctly Hispanic and often isolated from mainstream American culture by emphasizing dialogue and sensory imagery over traditional narrative structures.

Born in Chicago, Cisneros was the only daughter among seven children. Concerning her childhood, Cisneros recalled that because her brothers attempted to control her and expected her to assume a traditional female role, she often felt like she had "seven fathers." The family frequently moved between the United States and Mexico because of her father's homesickness for his native country and his devotion to his mother who lived there. Consequently, Cisneros often felt homeless and displaced: "Because we moved so much, and always in neighborhoods that appeared like France after World War II--empty lots and burned-out buildings--I retreated inside myself." She began to read extensively, finding comfort in such works as Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Cisneros periodically wrote poems and stories throughout her childhood and adolescence, but she did not find her literary voice until attending the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop in the late 1970s. A breakthrough occurred for Cisneros during a discussion of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space and his metaphor of a house; she realized that her experiences as a Hispanic woman were unique and outside the realm of dominant American culture. She observed: "Everyone seemed to have some communal knowledge which I did not have--and then I realized that the metaphor of house was totally wrong for me.... I had no such house in my memories.... This caused me to question myself, to become defensive. What did I, Sandra Cisneros, know? What could I know? My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city's cracks."

Shortly after participating in the Iowa Workshop, Cisneros decided to write about conflicts directly related to her upbringing, including divided cultural loyalties, feelings of alienation, and degradation associated with poverty. Incorporating these concerns into The House on Mango Street, a work that took nearly five years to complete, Cisneros created the character Esperanza, a poor, Hispanic adolescent who longs for a room of her own and a house of which she can be proud. Esperanza ponders the disadvantages of choosing marriage over education, the importance of writing as an emotional release, and the sense of confusion associated with growing up. In the story "Hips," for example, Esperanza agonizes over the repercussions of her body's physical changes: "One day you wake up and there they are. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the key in the ignition. Ready to take you where?" Written in what Penelope Mesic called "a loose and deliberately simple style, halfway between a prose poem and the awkwardness of semiliteracy," the pieces in The House on Mango Street won praise for their lyrical narratives, vivid dialogue, and powerful descriptions.

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-two narratives revolving around numerous Mexican-American characters living near San Antonio, Texas. Ranging from a few paragraphs to several pages, the stories in this volume contain the interior monologues of individuals who have been assimilated into American culture despite their sense of loyalty to Mexico. In "Never Marry a Mexican," for example, a young Hispanic woman begins to feel contempt for her white lover because of her emerging feelings of inadequacy and cultural guilt resulting from her inability to speak Spanish. Although Cisneros addresses important contemporary issues associated with minority status throughout Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, critics have described her characters as idiosyncratic, accessible individuals capable of generating compassion on a universal level. One reviewer observed: "In this sensitively structured suite of sketches, [Cisneros's] irony defers to her powers of observation so that feminism and cultural imperialism, while important issues here, do not overwhelm the narrative."

Although Cisneros is noted primarily for her fiction, her poetry has also garnered attention. In My Wicked Wicked Ways, her third volume of verse, Cisneros writes about her native Chicago, her travels in Europe, and, as reflected in the title, sexual guilt resulting from her strict Catholic upbringing. A collection of sixty poems, each of which resemble a short story, this work further evidences Cisneros's penchant for merging various genres. Gary Soto explained: "Cisneros's poems are intrinsically narrative, but not large, meandering paragraphs. She writes deftly with skill and idea, in the `show-me-don't-tell-me' vein, and her points leave valuable impressions." In her poetry, as in all her works, Cisneros incorporates Hispanic dialect, impressionistic metaphors, and social commentary in ways that reveal the fears and doubts unique to Hispanic women. She stated: "If I were asked what it is I write about, I would have to say I write about those ghosts inside that haunt me, that will not let me sleep, of that which even memory does not like to mention.... Perhaps later there will be a time to write by inspiration. In the meantime, in my writing as well as in that of other Chicanas and other women, there is the necessary phase of dealing with those ghosts and voices most urgently haunting us, day by day."

Sandra Cisneros' father migrated from Mexico leaving a family of some privilege and means; her mother's family, also of Mexican stock, albeit humbler and working class, had been in the U. S. for several generations. The married couple and their seven children travelled constantly between Chicago and Mexico, having to find new living quarters after each trip. Cisneros' childhood was spent in a variety of run-down Hispanic neighborhoods which offered experiences that have found their way into her writing. Constant moves, and changes of schools made Cisneros an introspective child who retreated to books and the writing of poetry. In 1966, her parents purchased their first home, a small two-story bungalow, painted red, in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. Experiences in this north side of Chicago served as inspiration for many of the tales in The House on Mango Street. The poet admits she had no awareness of being different from classmates, or even of being Chicana, until her graduation from Loyola University. At best she felt Mexican, maybe even part Puerto Rican because of the neighborhood she had grown up in. All her education had been mainstream English, as had her reading and writing.

Cisneros admits that at the beginning of her graduate studies in Iowa she was very young, immature, and insecure as a person and as writer. She floundered, while imitating a variety of writing styles: her teachers', established authors', even her classmates' in the writing program. None of these approaches worked. At this time Cisneros came to the awareness that she was very different from her elite and privileged classmates, educated in private schools and groomed for the arts. The styles, structures and themes which the workshop encouraged, just did not fit her; she felt like a weed amidst a collection of cultivated hot-house blooms. By probing into her past inner-city life and those experiences she had always been embarrassed about, she found within, the child-voice that emerged in the short tales from Mango Street. That side of her life inspired many poems, as well.

Bad Boys is a short collection of poems which demonstrates the early stage of Cisneros' writing. The poem "South Sangamon," talks about a wife-beating scene in the inner city, overheard by a neighboring child and recounted by that child's voice. "Blue Dress" recounts the awkward encounter of a young man with the girl he made pregnant; the visual images are vivid, the lines brief and clipped.

The Rodrigo Poems is a collection that reflects a more mature writer, many texts inspired dur ing Cisneros' travels in Europe. Gone are the child's voice and humorous observations. Instead, one reads about amorous encounters with roguish European men, all of whom can be identified by the name "Rodrigo." In this collection, Cisneros uses much of the style, imagery, and technique that characterizes her most recent work. She uses words as a painter would use brief strokes of a brush; each word, its sound, its shape and placement on the paper, serve to produce a sensation for the reader. Her style could be called minimalist, for its compactness, whether the text take the shape of a poem or of prose; in the balance, Cisneros is essentially a poet. The poem "No Mercy" presents a theme common to Cisneros, that of the unfaithful man who hurts women, who in turn must somehow vindicate themselves. In this text two previous wives have abandoned a pitiful man, plucking from the kitchen sink their long hair, their rings and domestic comb. "You must've said something cruel / you must've done something mean / for women to gather / all of their things."

The Rodrigo poems were included in a later collection of poems titled My Wicked, Wicked Ways. In addition to the group of Rodrigo-type poems, there are others, similar in content, based on European travels. Only a few of these texts are voiced by the small child who observes people and events in her neighborhood.

By the time Cisneros publishes The House on Mango Street, she has developed her very own style of poetic prose. The short tales recounted by Esperanza, a fictional adolescent girl, reflect the incisive musings of this young person as she observes other women around her, and then matches their existential situation with what may possibly await Esperanza herself in the future. While humorous in many ways, each story offers a brief portrait of young women in Esperanza's immediate neighborhood, most of whom have less than ideal lives. Thus, the persona observes adolescent girls who are rushing into adult experiences, others who already face the dilemmas of a domineering husband or father, the raising of children, being trapped in a life situation that offers little hope for improvement or growth. In essence, the tongue in cheek humor of each story also reveals a tragic side. This book earned Cisneros a national award as well as important recognition as an author. Her next work received the important recognition of being published by a major U. S. publisher--quite a triumph for a minority writer many of whom must struggle to get published.

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a very rich album of female portraits. The dedication reads: "for my mama....y para mi papa...." signalling both the bicultural and bilingual nature of this work. Although written totally in Cisneros polished inimitable style of English, there appear enough Spanish references or words to root the stories in a long tradition of Mexican-American culture. The tales show a progression in narrative voice and in the fictional world depicted. They begin with the voice of the adolescent narrator, found in early poems, and in Mango. "Mericans" is a very representative story recounting the dilemma faced by Chicano authors in life and in their art. The protagonists are children born and raised in the U. S., who travel to visit grandmother in Mexico. While one of them recounts her observations of religious rituals and superstitious beliefs practiced by the older generation, they are addressed in broken Spanish by an American tourist who offers them chewing gum in exchange for taking a snapshot of lovely "native" children. The tourist is perplexed when she hears the children dialogue amongst themselves in perfect English; of course, they admit they are "mericans," a curious neologism signifying a mixture of Mexican and American.

Only the first seven of the twenty-two stories deal with childhood scenes, akin to those in Mango. The remaining stories progress through a variety of Hispanic womens' experiences coming from all social and educational classes, as well as many regions of the U. S. Only "The Eyes of Zapata," offers the portrait of the Mexican revolutionary hero's wife; she is the only character in the book who is totally Mexican, and untouched by contact with U. S. cultural values and customs. This narrative is extremely rich in descriptive detail, and while it purports to talk about the man Zapata, it tells even more about the woman narrator, her character strengths, and the power she unobtrusively holds in a culture that is traditionally patriarchal and sexist.

The outstanding fact about all of the stories is that they focus on the conditions of women, are narrated from a woman's vantage point, and describe how women adjust, submit, rebel, or perhaps work through the dynamics of the interrelationship of the sexes. The lead story, which gives the book its title, tells about a young Mexican woman who marries a Mexican-American. Her life goes from poor to wretched, yet towards the end, it is a female network that saves her and shows her there are other ways to exit from her life situation. The beauty and richness in this book is that Cisneros has intricately woven together a myriad of cultural details, popular sayings, folk traditions and legends, in a way not seen before.

Sandra Cisneros considers herself a poet and a short-story writer, although she has also authored articles, interviews, and book reviews concerning Chicano writers. She began writing at age ten, and she is one of the few Chicano authors trained in a formal creative-writing program. At the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1978. She has taught creative writing at all levels and has experience in educational and arts administration. Her creative work, though not copious, has already been the subject of scholarly papers in the areas of Chicano and women's studies. She has read her poetry at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City; at a symposium on Chicano literature at the Amerikanistik Universitat in Erlangen, Germany; and over Swedish Educational Radio. Some of her poetry is included in a collection of younger Chicano poets published in Calcutta, India. She has garnered several grants and awards in the United States and abroad, and her book The House on Mango Street (1983) was praised, winning the 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award.

Cisneros is a native of Chicago, where she grew up and attended Loyola University, graduating in 1976 with a B.A. in English. Her father was born in Mexico City to a family of means; his wanderlust and lack of interest in schooling led him to travel broadly and to venture into the United States. By chance he traveled through Chicago, met Sandra's mother, and decided to settle there for life. He and his family were influential in Sandra's maturation. Her mother came from a family whose men had worked on the railroad. Sandra grew up in a working-class family, as the only girl surrounded by six brothers. Money was always in short supply, and they moved from house to house, from one ghetto neighborhood to another. In 1966 her parents borrowed enough money for a down payment on a small, ugly, two-story bungalow in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. This move placed her in a stable environment, providing her with plenty of friends and neighbors who served as inspirations for the eccentric characters in The House on Mango Street.

The constant moving during her childhood, the frequent forays to Mexico to see her father's family, the poor surroundings, and the frequent changing of schools made young Cisneros a shy, introverted child with few friends. Her love of books came from her mother, who saw to it that the young poet had her first library card before she even knew how to read. It took her years to realize that some people actually purchased their books instead of borrowing them from the library. As a child she escaped into her readings and even viewed her life as a story in which she was the main character manipulated by a romantic narrator.

"I don't remember reading poetry," Cisneros admits. "The bulk of my reading was fiction, and Lewis Carroll was one of my favorites." As she wrote her first poems, modeling them on the rhythmic texts in her primary readers, she had no notion of formal structure, but her ear guided her in matters of rhyme and rhythm. After the sixth grade, however, Cisneros stopped writing for a while. In her junior year in high school she was exposed to works by the finest of British and American writers and by Latin-American poets who impressed her deeply. Finally, in her junior year at Loyola University, she was introduced to writers such as Donald Justice, James Wright, and Mark Strand, poets who had influenced a whole generation of Spanish writers, thus bringing Cisneros into touch with her cultural roots. She was also introduced to the Chicago poetry scene, where there was great interest in her work. She was encouraged to study in a creative-writing program and was admitted to the Iowa Writer's Workshop; she had hoped to study with Justice but discovered that he and Marvin Bell were on sabbatical leaves that academic year.

Cisneros looks back on those years and admits she did not know she was a Chicana writer at the time, and if someone had labeled her thus, she would have denied it. She did not see herself as different from the rest of the dominant culture. Her identity was Mexican, or perhaps Puerto Rican, because of the neighborhood she grew up in, but she mostly felt American--because all her reading was of mainstream literature, and she always wrote in English. Spanish was the private language of home, and she spoke it only with her father. Cisneros knew no Chicano writers in Chicago, and although she was the only Hispanic majoring in English at Loyola, she was unaware of being different--in spite of her appearance, which was considered exotic by her female classmates.

The two years at Iowa were influential on Cisneros's life and writing. She admits that the experience was terribly cruel to her as well as to many of the other first-year students, but it was also liberating. She had her share and fill of intimidating teachers and colleagues as well as some marvelous ones who helped and encouraged her. This was a time for Cisneros to mature emotionally, something she had neglected to do for some years--always having considered herself as somebody's daughter, lover, or friend. The poet struggled in these years with finding a voice for her writings. She imitated her teachers, her classmates, and what she calls the "terrible East-coast pretentiousness" that permeated the workshop, without finding satisfaction. An important friend at this time was Joy Harjo, a Native American from Oklahoma, who was well centered in her southwestern heritage and identity and who also felt lonely and displaced in the Iowa workshop. This friendship offered Cisneros the assurance that she had something to write about that would distinguish her from her classmates.

The bulk of Cisneros's early writing emerged in 1977 and 1978. She began writing a series of autobiographical sketches influenced by Vladimir Nabokov's memoirs. She purposely delighted in being iconoclastic, in adopting themes, styles, and verbal patterns directly opposed to those used by her classmates. The House on Mango Street was born this way, with a child's narrative voice that was to be Cisneros's poetic persona for several years.

The poem "Roosevelt Road," written in the summer of 1977, is most important to Cisneros because it forced her to confront the poverty and embarrassment she had lived with all her previous years and to admit the distinctiveness of this background as a positive resource that could nourish her writing. In this poem the language is completely straightforward and descriptive of the tenement housing where the poet lived as a child. Lines run into one another, so that the reader is compelled to follow the inherent rhythm, while working on the sense of the message:

We lived on the third floor always
because noise travelled down
The milkman climbed up tired everyday
with milk and eggs
and sometimes sour cream.
Mama said don't play in alleys
because that's where dogs get rabies and
bad girls babies
Drunks carried knives
but if you asked
they'd give you money.
How one time we found that dollar
and a dead mouse in the stone wall
where the morning glories climbed....

Once the journals Nuestro and Revista Chicano-Riquena accepted her first poems, Cisneros gained enough confidence to submit her work to other publications. These early texts were more concerned with sound and timing, more with the how than with the what of what she was saying. A case in point is "South Sangamon," in My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987), a poem which, when read aloud, corroborates the fact:

His drunk cussing,
her name all over the hallway
and my name mixed in.
He yelling from the other side open
and she yelling from this side no.
A long time of this
and we say nothing
just hoping he'd get tired and go.

Cisneros's master's thesis, titled My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Iowa, 1978), is full of such poems on a diversity of topics--daily events, self-identity, amorous experiences, and encounters with friends. Her penchant for sound is obvious, as is her representation of a world that is neither bourgeois nor mainstream. Revised and enlarged, the thesis was published as a book in 1987.

While Cisneros taught at Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago (July 1978-December 1980), she spent time on writing but never finished projects fully as collections. Her involvement with many aspects of student life was too draining and consumed her creative energy. However, one poem she wrote was selected to be posted on the Chicago area public buses, thus giving her much-needed exposure and publicity. Cisneros was also seduced by the adulation and applause awarded to writers who read their material at public performances. After a period of "too much performing" (in her words) in coffee-houses and school auditoriums, she gave up the lecture circuit to spend more time on her writing.

Another Chicano poet, Gary Soto, was instrumental in helping publish Cisneros's chapbook Bad Boys in 1980. The seven poems depict childhood scenes and experiences in the Mexican ghetto of Chicago. One poem, "The Blue Dress," is Cisneros's effort to paint a scene full of visual imagery that depicts a pregnant woman seen through the eyes of the expectant father. The language of these poems has a musical ring, with short, run-on lines and compact statements.

By the time that The House on Mango Street was ready for publication, Cisneros had outgrown the voice of the child narrator who recounts the tales in the book, but this 1983 work gave Cisneros her broadest exposure. It is dedicated to "the women," and, in forty-four short narratives, it recounts the experiences of a maturing adolescent girl discovering life around her in a Hispanic urban ghetto. There are many touching scenes that Esperanza, the young narrator, recounts: her experiences with the death of relatives and neighbors, for example, and with girl-friends who tell her about life. In "Hips," young Esperanza explains: "The bones just one day open. One day you might decide to have kids, and then where are you going to put them?" Esperanza identifies herself to her readers: "In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters." As the stories of Esperanza in her Hispanic barrio evolve, the child breezes through more and more maturing experiences.

The reader sees many portraits of colorful neighbors--Puerto Rican youths, fat ladies who do not speak English, childhood playmates--until finally Esperanza sees herself and her surrounding experiences with greater maturity. Thus the reader sees her at her first dance in the tale "Chanclas," where attention is first focused on the bulky, awkward saddle oxfords of a school-girl, then the vision is directed upward as Esperanza blossoms into a graceful and poised dancer, who draws everyone's glances. Esperanza retells humorous experiences about her first job and her eighth-grade girlfriend who marries; then Esperanza reveals more of her intimate self in the last two tales. In "A House of My Own" and "Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes," it is revealed that the adolescent has been nurturing a desire to flee the sordid, tragicomic environment where she has grown up. The image of the house is also useful to reveal the need for the narrator to find a self-identity.

An important contribution by Cisneros to Chicano letters is that this book about growing up offers a feminine view of the process, in contrast to that exemplified by leading works by men. As critics Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and Tey Diana Rebolledo have aptly pointed out, young Esperanza is a courageous character who must combat the socialization process imposed on females; the character breaks from the tradition of the usual protagonist of the female bildungsroman by consistently rejecting the models presented to her and seeking another way to be Chicana: "I have begun my own kind of war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate." Esperanza's experiences parallel those depicted by other Chicana writers.

In conversations about her life, Cisneros admits that up through her college years she had always felt that she was not her own person. Thus Esperanza yearns for "a house all my own.... Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem." Cisneros's speaker feels the need to tell the world the stories about the girl who did not want to belong to that ugly house on Mango Street. Esperanza admits, at the conclusion of her stories, she is already too strong to be tied down by the house; she will leave and go far, only to come back some day for those stories and people that could not get away. The conclusion is that, in essence, Cisneros takes within her the memories from the house as she also carries her mementos from Mango Street, her bag of books and possessions. These are her roots, her inspirations, and the kernels of what Cisneros sensed, years ago in Iowa, that distinguished her from other American writers.

My Wicked Wicked Ways contains several texts that have been published singly. They show a different aspect of Cisneros's work. The speakers of several poems are adult women involved in relationships with a roguish male, Rodrigo. These poems are physically descriptive and sensuous--bordering on the erotic--and behind them lies a strong hand.

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) is a rare example of a work by a Chicana being published by a mainstream press. Writer Ann Beattie has said of this collection: "My prediction is that Sandra Cisneros will stride right into the spotlight--though an aura already surrounds her. These stories about how and why we mythologize love are revelations about the constant, small sadnesses that erode our facades, as well as those unpredictably epiphanic moments that lift our hearts from despair. A truly wonderful book."

Cisneros has been fortunate to earn several grants that have permitted her to devote herself full-time to her writing. In the spring of 1983 she was artist in residence at the Fondation Michael Karolyi in Vence, France. Earlier, in 1982, she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, which she used to travel through Europe. During that time she began work on a series of poems she included in her 1987 book. Several of them are evidently based on fleeting encounters with men she met in her European travels. They are whimsical mementos of fleeting instances either enjoyed or lost. Still present are the familiar rhythm and musicality; the major change is in the themes and voice. Most definitely, she has outgrown the adolescent form of expression of her earlier writing.

In the late 1980s Cisneros completed a Paisano Dobie Fellowship in Austin, Texas, and then spent additional time in Texas. She also won first and third prizes for her short stories in the Segundo Concurso Nacional del Cuento Chicano, sponsored by the University of Arizona. Cisneros as a writer is growing rapidly. She feels that writers like herself, Soto, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Alberto Rios belong to a new school of technicians, new voices in Chicano poetry. Cisneros wants to maintain her distinctiveness and her dual inheritance and legacy, and not fuse into the American mainstream. She cannot tell in which direction her poetry will lead her; most recently she has expanded her writing to include essays. She hopes that years from now she will still be worthy of the title "poet" and that her peers will recognize her as such.

In 1994, Cisneros broke into a new genre with the publication of her children's book, Hairs: Pelitos. The bilingual book draws children into a rhyme about all the different kinds of hair that exist, as a way to celebrate diversity. The importance of family ties is also a major theme that is presented.

That same year, Cisneros published another collection of poems titled, Loose Woman.The underlying emotion of the majority of the poems is joy; the dominant poetic voice is that of an exuberant, liberated female persona who basks in her womanhood. The work is a reaffirmation of the self, and continues to follow the short-lined, biting style of her other works.

Associated Works

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Sandra Cisneros (1954-)
• At the time of Cisneros's birth:
• Dwight D. Eisenhower is president of the United States
• Unification Church founded by Sun Myung Moon
• William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies published
• Ian Fleming's novel Live and Let Die published
• U.S. explodes hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll
• The times:
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• Cisneros's contemporaries:
• Harvey Fierstein (1954-) American gay writer and activist
• Al Sharpton (1954-) African-American religious leader
• Howard Stern (1954-) American "shock jock" radio personality
• Bill Gates (1955-) Microsoft founder
• Selected world events:
• 1955: Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof published
• 1961: First U.S. human-piloted space expedition
• 1963: John F. Kennedy assassinated in Dallas
• 1965: Race riots in Watts district of Los Angeles
• 1973: Erica Jong's Fear of Flying: A Novel published
• 1974: Richard Nixon resigns from office
• 1977: Elvis Presley dies
• 1987: PTL minister Jim Bakker resigns after sex scandal
• 1989: West Berlin and East Berlin are reunited
• 1991: Basketball star Magic Johnson diagnosed with HIV

Further Reading

• Americas Review, Spring, 1987, pp. 69-76.
• Bloomsbury Review, July-August, 1988, p. 21.
• Chicano-Riquena, Fall-Winter, 1985, pp. 109-19.
• Glamour, November, 1990, pp. 256-57.
• Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1991, p. F1.
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 28, 1991, p. 3.
• Mirabella, April, 1991, p. 46.