Sandra Cisneros

The “About the Author” section of Sandra Cisneros’s second book, The House on Mango Street, includes the following description: “The daughter of a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother, and sister to six brothers, she is nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.” This autobiographical sentence epitomizes Cisneros’s oeuvre, acknowledging the significance of family and roots while defying stereotypes of Chicana women as defined by marriage and motherhood. Cisneros was born in Chicago on 20 December 1954. During her early childhood, her father moved the family between Mexico City and Chicago every few years, and Cisneros writes about how these perpetual disruptions and border crossings contributed to the cultural hybridity found in her work. Cisneros holds a BA from Loyola University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She has written about how her experience as an outsider in her graduate program—as Chicana, female, and working class—shaped her work. Cisneros charted new literary territory through both the form and content of her writing, beginning with the publication of The House on Mango Street, a series of vignettes narrated from the margins of society that defies categorization with its experimental form and simple prose style. It was at the vanguard of Chicana feminism and one of the first works by a Chicana writer to enter the literary mainstream. Cisneros’s emergence in the 1980s was part of a larger movement of Chicana writing, including authors such as Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chavez, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherrie Moraga. Debates about her work include criticism of her portrayals of Chicano men and culture, and accusations of self-exoticization and essentialism in her interviews and poetry. Cisneros has taught as a professor of creative writing at University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Irvine, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. She has written novels, poems, prose pieces, and children’s literature, and for numerous periodicals. Her awards include National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, the Lanan Literary Award, the American Book Award, the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Committed to working on behalf of creative writers, Cisneros is the founder of the Latino MacArthur Fellows (Las MacArturos), the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, the Elvira Cisneros Award, and the Macondo Foundation. For twenty-five years she lived in San Antonio, Texas, and was known for her social justice activism as well as for painting her historic home a delightful and unlawful shade of purple. She now resides in Guanajuato, Mexico.

The Hispanic Absence in the North American Literary Canon

I recently completed a book of interviews (Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers, co-edited with Juanita Heredia, University of New Mexico Press, 2000) with ten of the most prominent Latina writers in the US; Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Rosario Ferré, Cristina García, Nicholasa Mohr, Cherríe Moraga, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Esmeralda Santiago and Helena María Viramontes. These women, Cuban, Dominican, Mexican and Puerto Rican Americans, raised issues that ranged from the craft of writing to the inherent problems of national identities. The themes generated in our conversations with these women – their doubled ethnic identities, their complicated relationship to their communities, their difficulties in representing their communities and, finally, their work as part of the larger American canon – revealed a powerful discourse about what it means to be Latina American in the United States. After spending two years talking with these women, it is evident to me that Latina literature is a vital part of American literature and should be included in any study of comparative American literatures.