SOURCE CITATION
"Sandra Cisneros." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007
Photo © Ruben Guzman and provided by Random House

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
With her fiction and poetry Sandra Cisneros creates poignant stories and brings an original twist to universal themes, notably love. Yet, as Jim Sagel in Publishers Weekly pointed out, "Cisneros knows her characters live in an America very different from that of her potential readers." Proud of her heritage and gender, Cisneros offers compelling portraits of Chicanos and Latinos--Americans of Mexican and Latin-American descent respectively--and displays a powerful and lyrical use of language born of her training in poetry. The author's first fictional work, The House on Mango Street, revolves around a young, female protagonist and was acknowledged by Washington Post Book World contributor Susan Wood as "something of an underground classic." Ilan Stavans, writing in Commonweal, added that the book is "a composite of evocative snapshots that manages to passionately recreate the milieu of the poor quarters of Chicago." The author once indicated that with her 1991 publication, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, she "was trying to populate this book with as many different kinds of Latinos as possible so that mainstream America could see how diverse we are." Noting the success of this venture, Mirabella contributor Rachel Pulido deemed Woman Hollering Creek "moving, vivid, honest" and indicative of "an author who feels great love for the people she writes about."

Reviewers have said that Cisneros's masterful application of emotion in her works is one reason for its positive reception. Pointing to her heart, the author once remarked, "Anything that is truly powerful . . . comes from here," according to Adria Bernardi in Chicago Tribune. Her stories seem genuine because they have a realistic foundation. While conceding that some entries are semi-autobiographical, Cisneros commented that "everything I write is true, but it didn't all happen to me. I would have to describe it like a cloth in which there are strands which are my own, but there are also strands of other people." With this forthright documentation of both her own experiences and those of other Latinos, the author has the irrevocable position of literary champion of her race. Yet, Cisneros once confided that, "I don't feel any sense of self-consciousness about my role as a spokesperson in the writing, because I've taken that responsibility on from the very beginning. That isn't something I'm nervous about or begrudging about. Actually, the fact that I can write about the things I write about . . . I feel very honored to be able to give them a form in my writings, and to be able to have this material to write about is a blessing."

Cisneros surmounted barriers of social class, race, and gender to reach this stature. In a Mother Jones article, Cisneros explained that authors with backgrounds similar to her own have historically been "the illegal aliens of American lit" and "the migrant workers in terms of respect." Yet Cisneros was instrumental in changing this fate. Her signing with a major book publisher for a book by and about Chicanos--Woman Hollering Creek--signaled both the chance for expanded cross-cultural exposure to Cisneros's works and new possibilities for other Chicana (female Chicanos) writers. Critics found Cisneros particularly suited for introducing mainstream audiences to the complexities of Chicano life. Susan Wood, writing in Washington Post Book World, deemed the author "a writer of power and eloquence and great lyrical beauty," and added, "the chicana experience could not have found a voice more suited to its telling." And, in a Newsweek review, Peter S. Prescott remarked that Cisneros's "feminist, Mexican-American voice is not only playful and vigorous, it's original--we haven't heard anything like it before."

Before making her first attempts at writing, however, the author had to assert herself and validate her opinions in a male-dominated society. Born in 1954 in Chicago to a Mexican father and Mexican-American mother, the bilingual author was the only girl in a working-class family of nine. This, she wrote in a column for Glamour, "had everything to do with who I am today." Describing her childhood, Cisneros once recalled, "I spent a lot of time by myself by just the fact that I was the only daughter, and my brothers--once they became socialized--pretty much hung out with their own gender. They all kind of teamed up and excluded me from their games." When she was a youngster, the author continued, her brothers teased her, saying she was not a real Cisneros because she would eventually get married and take her husband's name. The author was able to avoid this. "Now when I see my name in print and my name on the side of the book, that makes me so happy. I'm the one who put it there. I just feel so proud of myself. . . . I've got it in print."

Because of familial circumstances, Cisneros was exposed to two cultures while growing up; her father periodically moved the family from Chicago to Mexico because he missed his homeland. The author once described this intermittent upheaval. "One day I'd get in the car and I'd say, 'where are we going?' and they'd say 'Mexico.' You'd look out of the rear window and say good-bye to your apartment." Elaborating on the effect of these sojourns in an interview with Jim Sagel for Publishers Weekly, Cisneros stated, "The moving back and forth, the new schools were very upsetting to me as a child. They caused me to be very introverted and shy. I do not remember making friends easily. . . . I retreated inside myself."

Cisneros did not find much support for her confidence and self-esteem in the Chicago school system. The parochial institutions she attended stressed discipline and, as part of their rigid structure, dismissed the importance of the minority experience. Although secretly writing at home, the author was afraid to display her creative talents in the classroom. "At the school I went to," Cisneros once explained, "it was best to blend into the crowd. You didn't want to be singled out, because to be singled out was to be set up as an example or to be ridiculed." She described her schooling as a "rather shabby basic education. If I had lived up to my teachers' expectations, I'd still be working in a factory, because my report card was pretty lousy. That's because I wasn't very much interested, or I was too terrified to venture or volunteer."

In high school Cisneros found positive recognition for her creativity. "When I was a freshman in high school, actually, that's when people first realized that I could read, I could express, I could interpret the written word in a very gifted way. That's something that I had taken for granted. I just assumed that everyone could read a poem the way it's supposed to be read, or heard what a writer meant on the page. So, by accident, in the class when they called on me, I read a poem in such a way that impressed everybody. I didn't have any idea that it was such a big deal. Then in my sophomore year a teacher was hired who was a would-be writer. I started writing for her. I became more public through that class, and she encouraged me to work on a literary magazine in high school--which I did--and I became the editor eventually."

Yet the school's generally dismissive attitude toward poor, minority students, Cisneros believes, was indicative of the opinions of the country at large. "(There is) so little that mainstream America knows about us," the author once declared, "and what they do know is that we're these wild mock-beast monsters. They have a whole skewed conception of who we are." Cisneros objects to the lack of attention and the misrepresentation of Latinos in literature. In an address to high school students excerpted in a Los Angeles Times article, Cisneros maintained, "You know some things growing up in your communities that heads of state are never going to see. And once you've seen it, you can't un-know it: Who's serving you. Who's washing the dishes. Who's sweeping the halls. What you know at a very early age gives you empathy and compassion." She continued, "When I was 11 years old in Chicago, teachers thought if you were poor and Mexican you didn't have anything to say. Now I think that what I was put on the planet for was to tell these stories."

Cisneros believes she is in the best position to write truthfully about her community. Anglo writers, she argues, are often markedly inaccurate in their descriptions of Latinos. The author once complained, "I can't stand when I read authors that don't know anything about our community writing about us, or even when I read men who do know our community but don't know the half of the community--don't know the women's half--writing about us. I feel like Latino men misrepresent Latina women." She continued, "I get very frustrated by the lack of women in history. Usually all you find--especially if you're looking up Latina women--is that they're somebody's mother or wife." Cisneros portrays her female characters differently. Like the protagonist of her story "Bien Pretty" in Woman Hollering Creek, the author wants to see "women who make things happen, not women who things happen to. . . . Not . . . women either volatile and evil, or sweet and resigned. But women. Real women. The ones I've loved all my life. . . . Those women. The ones I've known everywhere except on TV, in books and magazines. . . . Passionate and powerful, tender and volatile, brave. And, above all, fierce."

By defying stereotypes Cisneros became one of these women. Unlike other females of her age in the community, she attended college. In a column for Glamour, the author admitted that her father supported the idea because he thought she would find a potential husband there. Cisneros still harbored the idea of becoming a writer and, because her father did not pressure her about career objectives as he did her brothers, she was able to major in English. Cisneros once said that her abilities were not recognized immediately at college. "I was very busy just being a college student and getting all my requirements. It wasn't until I enrolled in a creative writing class (a writer was finally hired in my junior year) that again, all of a sudden, everyone started paying attention to what I was writing. They had no idea; they hadn't seen me in that identity. I had just been this English major, but I was only an English major because I didn't know what to do about my writing and my desire to be a writer. I just thought well I'll teach high school English and write on the side. No one really told me or advised me, and I was too ashamed to say that I really wanted to be a writer."

Despite these tentative beginnings, Cisneros did get support to continue writing. One of her undergraduate teachers was a poet, and this experience in the genre enabled Cisneros to attend the poetry section of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a master's program. Despite the prestige of the workshop, the author was not comfortable in the environment. Cisneros once explained, "In graduate school what I said was looked at as so wacky that you right away shut up. It didn't take me long to learn--after a few days being there--that nobody cared to hear what I had to say and no one listened to me even when I did speak. I became very frightened and terrified that first year."

Cisneros had to overcome insecurity when facing classmates older than her and from more privileged backgrounds. These feelings of imagined inadequacies surfaced one day during a discussion of the images connected with the word house. As the other students spoke of spacious and architecturally sound homes replete with attics and cozy niches, Cisneros felt alienated. "Everyone seemed to have some communal knowledge which I did not have," she commented in Publishers Weekly. Instead, Cisneros's image of a house was similar to the title dwelling in her book The House on Mango Street: "It's small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you'd think they were holding their breath. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in. There is no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by the curb. Out back is a small garage for the car we don't own yet."

The discovery of the fundamental differences between Cisneros and her classmates and the subsequent awareness that she had no equals in the program was a revelation for the author. She commented, "I discovered my otherness and what it was that made me different from everybody else--which at first really caused a panic. When I was sitting in that classroom and mentally went down the list of student and realized that I was the only one that did not have the house that we were talking about, then it occurred to me that my entire education had been like that--it had been this kind of charade. All of a sudden I realized the class difference and later the color and eventually the gender difference between myself and the materials that I had been reading or voices I had been trying to emulate. So to me it was panic at first, and after the panic a real sense of outrage. I thought, what the hell could I possibly write about? What do I know and how did I even wind up here? I had to search within myself for something which (my classmates) could not have learned in that school, in the country, or in the planet for that matter." Cisneros admitted in Publishers Weekly, "It was not until this moment when I separated myself, when I considered myself truly distinct, that my writing acquired a voice."

Cisneros's rediscovered pride in her culture and determination to unveil her individuality logically carried over to her writing assignments. "I chose a kind of rebellious stand of trying to write about things that were completely the opposite of the topic of my classmates," she once commented. "I tried to use a language that was completely opposite--a most unpoetic language possible. Instead of trying to use a lyrical voice . . . I'd use an anti-poetic voice. I liked the idea of creating a poetry out of a language that was ugly, and the ugliest language I could think of would be slang. I was carrying on this very quiet revolution. I was reading the worksheet and thinking, now what could I do that's just the opposite of this? I remember someone had a poem about swans (written with the) language of flowers and things. So what was the opposite of a swan? A rat! So I wrote a poem about a rat and 'Pink as a newborn rat' was the first line."

In addition to finding a voice--with an edge to it--Cisneros discovered a function for her art. Previously, she once expressed, "I didn't think the writing could be used to make some sort of change in people's lives because I had come from a school of thought that isolated itself from society. (I see this now that I'm articulating this for the first time.) There was so much that I despised about the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and part of it was its privileged class and part of it its lack of responsibility to the community at large. Its isolationism was a terrible thing, but that taught me so much about what I didn't want to be as an artist."

Cisneros began writing The House on Mango Street while at Iowa. The author once revealed that the book "took an autobiographical setting because the experiences I was living in Iowa were so painful that I couldn't write about them at that time. I took an early setting very far removed from Iowa. I was so terrified--had been so censored by the workshop itself--that in order to regain my voice, I had to take an earlier voice--a child's voice--and a setting that was one from an earlier time in my life. I began what I thought was going to be memoirs." By what Cisneros proclaims as destiny, however, the nature of the book changed. Only a week after leaving Iowa she happened upon a part-time job teaching literacy skills to Spanish speakers. "That period was so crucial to shaping my own writing--going into the community with the type of students that were just the opposite of the students I had been with in Iowa," Cisneros once said.

The setting for The House on Mango Street--the neighborhoods of Cisneros's childhood--remained the same, but she once explained that she "populated it with people from my present." Cisneros continued, "I went into the community and I had these students that were living lives that were so different from my own life--even though we grew up in parallel neighborhoods--who had taken routes that were the opposite of mine. I had these women students who reminded me so much of women that I'd gone to school with. I couldn't help but put their stories into this neighborhood that I had created. In essence the neighborhood (in The House on Mango Street) was like this chessboard from my past, but my present in my twenties is what started populating the neighborhood of my past, and it became fiction."

In The House on Mango Street, Cisneros paints heartbreaking pictures of other girls and women in the neighborhood: those who married young to escape domineering fathers, but only exchanged them for possessive and sometimes abusive husbands; women who had potential that has since disappeared. The title character in "Marin" bides her time baby-sitting her cousins and waiting for her aunt to return so she can assume a spot on the front porch, visible to local men. Esperanza observes that Marin "is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life." In "Minerva Writes Poems," Esperanza tells of her friend who "is only a little bit older than me but already she has two kids and a husband who left. . . . Minerva cries because her luck is unlucky."

Telling the stories in The House on Mango Street serves as catharsis for the narrator; by book's end she has gained a sense of power and determination to avoid the fate of others of her sex and class. In "Beautiful & Cruel" Esperanza defiantly reacts to her mother's assurance that as she matures she will become prettier, neater, and less awkward, by saying, "I have decided not to grow tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain." The narrator also learns that her escape from the neighborhood should not entail forgetting about those who remain. In the story "The Three Sisters" a character admonishes Esperanza: "When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are."

Cisneros told interviewer Martha Satz of Southwest Review that The House on Mango Street "seems to be marketed as a young people's book, but my readers range anywhere from second graders to university students to housewives. I like the fact that it has such a range." She added that the book is "a young girl's diary in a sense. All the stories are told from the point of view of a woman-girl who is in that nebulous age between childhood and adulthood. Some days she's a child and for a few days she might be an adult. That always struck me as a kind of mysterious time, so I chose her as the persona for these stories."

An older, more experienced woman serves as the narrator of Cisneros's 1987 volume of poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways. In this collection the author explores love relationships as well as women's quests for emancipation in a patriarchal society. The poem "I the Woman" is told in the voice of a brazen female who opens with, "I/ am she/ of your stories," and later brags of her sexual excursions revealed by "one earring/ in the car/ a finger-/ print/ on skin." In "Letter to Jahn Franco--Venice" the female speaker asks, "What does a woman owe a man/ and isn't freedom what you believe in?/ Even the freedom to say no?" Trying to emulate the independence of a man, the narrator of "For a Southern Man" says, "I've learned two things./ To let go/ clean as kite string./ And to never wash a man's clothes./ These are my rules."

To create the tales in her next work, Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros "added length and dialogue and a hint of plot to her poems," in the opinion of Barbara Kingsolver, writing in Los Angeles Times Book Review. "Nearly every sentence contains an explosive sensory image," Kingsolver observed. Alternately set in Mexico and the border region of the Southwest, the stories depict a wide range of Latinos. Campbell felt that Cisneros's portraits of women struggling for independence "traverse geographical, historical and emotional borders and invite us into the souls of characters as unforgettable as a first kiss." Cisneros once elaborated, "I knew this book was going to reach a lot of people so, with that in mind, I tried to write everybody's story down. The emotions of almost all the characters are the most autobiographical elements in the stories because I really had to look within myself to make all these characters." Her effort was successful and, for the first time, Cisneros's work was widely reviewed in national literary periodicals, earning an enthusiastic reception. Wood remarked, "The book seem(s) less a series of discrete stories than a kind of choral work in which the harmonic voices emphasize the commonality of experience." And Quill and Quire contributor Sally McKee commented that Cisneros writes "in a feisty and spirited style" and credited her voice with "resonat(ing) with the experience of all women."

Cisneros once commented that of all the stories in Woman Hollering Creek "the one that everyone--man, woman, white, brown, old, young--tells me, 'oh, that happened to me'" is "Eleven." In this piece, the birthday of Rachel, the narrator, is ruined by a heartless teacher who forces her to claim responsibility for an ugly, stretched-out sweater abandoned in the coatroom. Despite Rachel's protests that it is not hers, the teacher gets angry and forces her to wear it. This incident, while trivial for the teacher, is traumatic for Rachel and underscores her lack of power. The narrator recalls, "All of a sudden I'm crying in front of everybody. I wish I was invisible but I'm not. I'm eleven and it's my birthday today and I'm crying like I'm three in front of everybody. I put my head down on the desk and bury my face in my stupid clown-sweater arms."

Cisneros once confessed that "actually, in real life, that was my story except it didn't happen quite like that. It didn't happen at eleven (I was nine), and the sweater wasn't red, and I didn't have to put it on. But I did cry. Now I see what a racist school that was. Why did they pick me out? Because I was the one that looked like I belonged to something that shabby? We were the poorer kids. The Mexican kids were the poorer kids, and (that seems) so blatantly racist now, but at the time all you know is that you were right and that sweater doesn't belong to you, but nobody will listen to you and the only way that you can be right is to put it on the corner of your desk and refuse to acknowledge it regardless of what the system says."

Cisneros draws upon Latin-American mythology in Woman Hollering Creek. But, as the author once stated, "I'm very intent in revising mythology because it is male. I'm part of a generation of women that is looking at history in a revisionist manner--in a way that is going to help to empower women to rethink history." In her story "Eyes of Zapata," Cisneros focuses on Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican revolutionist and guerilla leader who lived in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. A champion of agrarianism, Zapata fought for land redistribution and was eventually ambushed and assassinated. Cisneros said fascination with Zapata was in part based on old photographs. Despite the faded pictures, she once remarked, "something of his energy came through in his eyes; very paradoxical energy came through." In her research the author found two vague references to Ines, Zapata's common-law wife. The couple had several children and Cisneros was able to conclude that they had a continuing relationship. Intrigued by this overlooked character, Cisneros made Ines the story's narrator and presented Zapata from her perspective.

"Eyes of Zapata" is a tragic love story set in the last days of Zapata's life. Ines, tells of their relationship while guarding over a sleeping Zapata. With quiet strength, Ines has weathered both her father's disowning of her and nine years of revolution, waiting for Zapata to return. His stays with her are brief because his dedication to the revolution exceeds his love for her. She considers Zapata her husband--although they are not legally married--and must also contend with the painful realization that he has fathered the children of several women and is even legally married to another woman. She tries to understand his commitment to the cause rather than his family by stating, "You don't belong to anyone, no? Except the land." Amazed at the fundamental difference between men and women, Ines wonders, "How can a woman be happy in love? To love like this, to love as strong as we hate." Cisneros understands Ines's anguish because, as she once commented, there have been men like Zapata in her own life, whom she "has come to admire and respect because of their politics, but also who torture me because the politics end once their relationships with women begin."

Switching to a present-day setting, another of Cisneros's stories in Woman Hollering Creek, "Bien Pretty," also recounts a love affair, but this one is laced with humor. Artist Lupe Arredondo meets exterminator and native Mexican Flavio Munguia, and their relationship grows into a love affair. Lupe heartily embraces Mexican culture while Flavio, already comfortable with his ethnicity, is amused by her efforts. She chides him one night for wearing an Izod shirt, but he retorts, "I don't have to dress in a sarape and sombrero to be Mexican. . . . I know who I am." The couple's social and philosophical differences build until one day, at a restaurant, Flavio announces that he has to return to Mexico and reveals that he has four sons from two marriages. In disbelief, Lupe can only stare through the window at a retching dog. Later, at home, she tries imagining "only positive thoughts, expressions of love compassion, forgiveness. But after forty minutes I still had an uncontrollable desire to drive over to Flavio Munguia's house with my grandmother's molcajete and bash in his skull."

Critics praised Cisneros's witty portrait of modern love and Lupe's subsequent reckoning with the failed relationship, but the author enjoyed writing the story for a different reason. Cisneros once commented that "Bien Pretty" is "one of my favorite ones, because in that story I was able to write about women like myself--women who are products of their education and who are conscious of their culture through their education--who are politically conscious and sometimes become more Mexican than the Mexicans. That was the real parody. I got to poke fun at a whole class of feminist chicanas like myself who can rattle off the names of the Aztec goddesses all in one breath--along with the global goddesses. It was fun for me to poke fun at that because I hadn't seen a woman like that in the pages of chicano literature. We're appearing for the first time and sometimes we take ourselves so seriously." The author added that "Bien Pretty" also served as her "little love story to San Antonio, to my neighborhood, to all the little things that make San Antonio real special."

When asked for the inspiration for the plots and characters of her stories, Cisneros once said, "One of the things I get most excited about, I suppose, is when someone says something that I know people can't believe that we as women or we as Latinos say. When I know it has never been said on paper before. . . . I always feel such incredible energy about writing about something that has never been set down on paper, hasn't been documented. There is a lot of virgin territory as far as that goes. To be sharing conversations with women--being with my friends at a diner--and they'll say something that I know people at the next table have no idea we're talking about this, that we even discuss this. Those kinds of things make me laugh, and I find it all amazing. I want to hurry and put it down on paper."

Cisneros followed Woman Hollering Creek with another book of poetry, Loose Woman. Many of the poems in this volume are frankly sexual, with titles such as "Black Lace Bra Kind of Woman" and "You Like to Give and Watch Me My Pleasure." "It has been said--far too often--that women love and men lust," commented Laurel Darrow in the Seattle Times. In 'Loose Woman,' poet Sandra Cisneros dares to make no distinction between the two emotions." Suzi Parker, a reviewer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, noted that "through this collection of 60 poems runs a sultry theme of hothouse intimate word-play and lust-filled passion." In the journal Contemporary Women's Issues, Gay Zielske-Davidson remarked that Cisneros uses words often considered "disparaging" to women and sometimes puts "herself (or her speaker) in decidedly unflattering roles. By making readers look again at this forbidden language and these negative roles, she manages to hilariously invite us to see them anew." Cisneros also continued working on a novel, Caramelo, through the 1990s; as of 2001, it was still unfinished. Cisneros has said the novel, covering three generations, will be the most autobiographical of her works.

Like Esperanza in The House on Mango Street, Cisneros has not forgotten her roots, and her literary success has not caused her to relinquish her identity as a member of the Latino community. Cisneros noted, "I expect myself as a writer, coming into this community, to write about it, because it is the way in which I can do something to make change in the world. I don't think that one could live the kind of life I've lived and witnessed and not take some responsibility. If I ignored it and didn't take some sort of social responsibility, I'd be part of the problem. I'm very fierce about people coming from the community having an obligation to the community. I feel that there is so much material that my community gives me--that the gender gives me--that there are so many stories out there that need to be set right. There are so many things I can give to other women to give them alternatives to their lives, to help make that change. There is so much that I can do as a writer to help meet my political aims. And the fact that I can do it from my art is so wonderful; I feel really blessed."

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born December 20, 1954, in Chicago, IL; daughter of Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral and Elvira Cordero Anguiano. Avocation: Sleeping, Chicano art. Education: Loyola University of Chicago, B.A., 1976; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1978. Politics: "Chicana feminist." Religion: "None of the above." Addresses: Home--San Antonio, TX. Agent--Susan Bergholz, 17 West 10th St. #5, New York, NY, 10023.

CAREER
Writer. Has taught at universities, including University of California at Berkeley and University of Michigan. Worked previously as a high school teacher, counselor, college recruiter, and arts administrator.