Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1984), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work includes experimentation with emerging subject positions, which she 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, she was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.
Cisneros's early life provided many experiences that she later drew on, as a writer: she grew up as the only daughter in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant movement of her family, between Mexico and the United States, instilled in her the sense of "always straddling two countries but not belonging to either culture." Cisneros's work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures, and experiencing poverty. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, 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 U.S. classrooms as a coming-of-age novel.
Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and she has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. In 1998, she established the Macondo Writers Workshop, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers. In 2000, she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas. Cisneros currently resides in Mexico.
Early life and education Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 20, 1954, to a family of Mexican heritage, the third of seven children. The only surviving daughter, she considered herself the "odd number, in a set of men". Cisneros's great-grandfather had played the piano for the Mexican president and was from a wealthy background, but he gambled away his family's fortune. Her paternal grandfather, Enrique, was a veteran of the Mexican Revolution, and he used what money he had saved to give her father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral, the opportunity to go to college. However, after failing classes, due to what Cisneros called his "lack of interest" in studying, Alfredo ran away to the United States, in an effort to escape his father's anger. While roaming the southern United States with his brother, Alfredo visited Chicago, where he met Elvira Cordero Anguiano. After getting married, the pair settled in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. Cisneros's biographer, Robin Ganz, writes that she acknowledges her mother's family came from a very humble background, tracing its roots back to the Mexican state of Guanajuato, while her father's was much more "admirable".
Taking work as an upholsterer to support his family, Cisneros's father began "a compulsive circular migration between Chicago and Mexico City that became the dominating pattern of Cisneros's childhood." Their family was constantly moving between the two cities, which necessitated their finding new places to live, as well as schools for the children. Eventually, the instability caused Cisneros's six brothers to pair off in twos, leaving her to define herself, as the isolated one. Her feelings of exclusion from the family were exacerbated by her father, who referred to his ("six sons and one daughter") rather than his ("seven children"). Ganz notes that Cisneros's childhood loneliness was instrumental in shaping her later passion for writing. Cisneros's one strong female influence was her mother, Elvira, who was a voracious reader and more enlightened and socially conscious than her father. According to Ganz, although Elvira was too dependent on her husband and too restricted in her opportunities to fulfill her own potential, she ensured her daughter would not suffer from the same disadvantages as she did.
Her family made a down payment on their own home in Humboldt Park, a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood on Chicago's West Side, when she was eleven years old. This neighborhood and its characters would later become the inspiration for Cisneros's novel The House on Mango Street. For high school, Cisneros attended Josephinum Academy, a small Catholic all-girls school. Here, she found an ally in a high-school teacher who helped her to write poems about the Vietnam War. Although Cisneros had written her first poem around the age of ten, with her teacher's encouragement, she became known for her writing throughout her high-school years. In high school, she wrote poetry and was the literary magazine editor, but according to Cisneros, herself, she did not really start writing until her first creative writing class in college, in 1974. After that, it took a while to find her own voice. She explains: "I rejected what was at hand and emulated the voices of the poets I admired in books: big male voices like James Wright and Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke, all wrong for me."
Cisneros was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from Loyola University Chicago in 1976, and she received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. At Loyola, she had an affair with a professor that she calls a “secret life [from] when I was a junior through Iowa that tormented me and that I wrote about, in my poetry”. She describes the abusive relationship as "very damaging to me" and is "why my writing is always dealing with sexuality and wickedness".
While attending the Workshop, Cisneros discovered how the particular social position she occupied gave her writing a unique potential, recalling: "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." She conformed to American literary canons and adopted a writing style that was purposely opposite that of her classmates, realizing that instead of being something to be ashamed of, her own cultural environment was a source of inspiration. From then on, she would write of her "neighbors, the people [she] saw, the poverty that the women had gone through."
Cisneros says of this moment:
So to me it began there, and that's when I intentionally started writing about all the things in my culture that were different from them—the poems that are these city voices—the first part of Wicked Wicked ways—and the stories in House on Mango Street. I think it's ironic that at the moment when I was practically leaving an institution of learning, I began realizing in which ways institutions had failed me.
Drawing on Mexican and Southwestern popular culture and conversations in the city streets, Cisneros wrote to convey the lives of people she identified with. Literary critic Jacqueline Doyle has described Cisneros's passion for hearing the personal stories that people tell and her commitment to expressing the voices of marginalized people through her work, such as the "thousands of silent women,” whose struggles are portrayed in The House on Mango Street.
Five years after receiving her MFA, she returned to Loyola University-Chicago, where she had previously earned a BA in English, to work as an administrative assistant. Prior to this job, she worked in Pilsen and Little Village, predominately Mexican neighborhoods, in Chicago, and teaching high school dropouts at Latino Youth High School.
Later life and career
Teaching In addition to being an author and poet, Cisneros has held various academic and teaching positions. In 1978, after finishing her MFA degree, she taught former high-school dropouts at the Latino Youth High School in Chicago. The 1984 publication of The House on Mango Street secured her a succession of writer-in-residence posts at universities in the United States, teaching creative writing at institutions such as the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. She was, subsequently, a writer-in-residence at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Cisneros has also worked as a college recruiter and as an arts administrator.
Family Cisneros currently resides in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, in central Mexico, but for years she lived and wrote in San Antonio, Texas, in her briefly controversialRimer, Sara (July 13, 1998). "San Antonio Journal; Novelist's Purple Palette Is Not to Everyone's Taste". The New York Times. "Mexican-pink" home, with "many creatures little and large". In 1990, when Pilar E. Rodríguez Aranda asked Cisneros, in an interview for the Americas Review, why she has never married or started a family, Cisneros replied, "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." She has elaborated, elsewhere, that she enjoys living alone, because it gives her time to think and write. In the introduction to the third edition of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's 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."
Writing process Cisneros's 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