Sandra Cisneros

Writer and activist

• Born: December 20, 1954
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

Through her poetry and her novels, Cisneros has helped to bring the Mexican American experience to the attention of mainstream American readers. She also serves as a voice for women reared in the patriarchal traditions of her culture, encouraging them to become more independent and to work for change.

Early Life

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 20, 1954. Her father, Alfredo Cisneros del Moral, had left his home in Mexico after dropping out of college. In the United States, he gained legal status and US citizenship by serving in the armed forces during World War II. After the war, he found himself in Chicago, where he met and married Elvira Cordero Anguiano, a Mexican American. They settled on Chicago’s North Side, where Alfredo began working as an upholsterer. The death of a baby sister left Cisneros the only girl in the family. Since her six brothers preferred each other’s company, she usually was alone; however, with her mother’s encouragement, she became a voracious reader and began writing poems and stories.

Cisneros was educated at two Catholic parochial schools, St. Callistus and St. Aloysius. Her father took his family to Mexico for several months each year, so she learned a great deal about traditional life there. She also grew up completely bilingual.

Elvira played a major role in the later success of all her children, as she enrolled them in the public library and took them to museums and free concerts. A turning point for Cisneros came when she was twelve years old and her family finally moved into a house, giving her an assurance of permanence, a collection of interesting friends and neighbors, and, most importantly, a room of her own where she could think, read, and try her hand at writing.

In 1968, Cisneros entered Josephinum High School, a Catholic school in Chicago, where a teacher’s praise impelled her to publish some of her poems and to work on the school literary magazine, eventually becoming its editor. After graduating in 1972, she used a scholarhip she had won to enroll at Chicago’s Loyola University, majoring in English. In her junior year Cisneros took a writing workshop, where she received valuable training in the techniques of her profession. At the suggestion of several professors, she applied for the prestigious master of fine arts program in creative writing at the University of Iowa. She was accepted, and upon her graduation from Loyola in 1976, she made her way to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It was at a seminar there that she had an epiphany: although her definitions of a home and a neighborhood were very different from those of her classmates, she was convinced that her people, too, deserved a place on the printed page. Cisneros had found her subject.

Life’s Work

In 1978, with her master’s degree in hand, Cisneros was ready to become a professional writer; however, it would be almost two decades before she could support herself by writing. She began working with inner-city youths at the Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago. During that time, she became acquainted with Chicano poet Gary Soto, who helped her publish Bad Boys (1980), a chapbook containing seven poems. Cisneros then became a recruiter for Loyola University. Meanwhile, she continued to work on her poetry and on the sketches that eventually would become The House on Mango Street (1984).

In 1982, Cisneros received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled her to spend a year in Europe. By November, she had a manuscript ready to submit to Nicolás Kanellos of Arte Público Press, who had suggested that she compile and publish her stories. After extensive revision, in 1984, The House on Mango Street appeared. In 1985, it won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation, and by 2011 it had sold more than two million copies.

Over the next ten years, Cisneros worked for various institutions. She spent a year as literature director of the Guadalupe Cultural Art Center in San Antonio, Texas, then held teaching positions at California State University at Chico, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. In 1986, she won a Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowship, which enabled her to complete her first major poetry collection, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987). The next year, she won another fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1991, Cisneros published Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories, a collection of stories set in and around San Antonio, Texas. In addition to examining women trapped in a patriarchal culture, Cisneros touches on such issues as poverty, crime, racism, and religious faith. Woman Hollering Creek was a best seller and won the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction of 1991, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award.

Two books by Cisneros appeared in 1994: Hairs (Pelitos), a bilingual picture book for children, and Loose Woman, a collection of experimental poems. The following year, she won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, which at last made her financially secure. Cisneros bought a house in a historic section of San Antonio, infuriated many of her neighbors by painting it bright purple, and began writing a novel, Caramelo: Or, Puro Cuento (2002), her most ambitious work to date.

Caramelo is the story of Celaya Reyes, who, like Cisneros herself, spends her childhood in Mexico and Chicago. Celaya’s attempts to disentangle truth from fiction in the extended family histories narrated by her older relatives result in some of the most humorous scenes in what critics agree is an exceptionally vivid, lively novel. Caramelo received the 2005 Premio Napoli Award and was nominated for England’s Orange Prize. Cisneros was awarded the Texas Medal of the Arts in 2003. In 2009, she became writer-in-residence at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. Her works have been translated into more than one dozen languages.

In 2011 Cisneros published a children's picture book, Bravo Bruno!. With illustrations by Leslie Greene, the book tells the story of a Roman poodle named Bruno. The following year she published Have You Seen Marie?, a picture book illustrated by Ester Hernández intended as a fable for adults. In the book, a woman grieving for her mother helps a friend search for her missing cat, Marie. Cisneros wrote the book as a way of working through her own grief over her mother's death in 2007. In October 2014 Cisneros created an altar installation dedicated to her mother, A Room of Her Own: My Mother's Altar, for the National American History Museum. The following year, she published her first work of autobiographical nonfiction, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, which consists of a collection of pieces meant to cover common themes and memories over three decades of her life and writing. Her bilingual chapbook Puro Amor was published in 2018, and in 2019, she was honored with the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

The early 2020s saw Cisneros publish new material in both prose and poetry. After putting out the well-received novella Martita, I Remember You in a volume containing both the English and Spanish texts in 2021, she returned to poetry for the first time in many years with the 2022 collection Woman without Shame.

Significance

The adoption of The House on Mango Street as a text in schools and universities resulted in greater understanding of the problems faced by Chicanos, and when a major publishing house released Woman Hollering Creek, fiction by Mexican American women gained a new popularity. Through her works and through personal contacts, as well as through her foundations, Cisneros has continued to work actively in support of the rights of immigrants and women. The Macondo Foundation, which Cisneros founded in 2006, offers writing workshops, awards, and health insurance for members. President Barack Obama recognized her body of work in 2016 by honoring her with a 2015 National Medal of Arts.

Bibliography

Calderón, Héctor. “Como México no hay dos”: Sandra Cisneros’s Feminist Border Stories.” Narratives of Greater Mexico: Essays on Chicano Literary History, Genre, and Borders. U of Texas P, 2004.

Cisneros, Sandra. "Sandra Cisneros May Put You in a Poem." Interview by Yxta Maya Murray. The New Yorker, 21 Sept. 2022, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/sandra-cisneros-may-put-you-in-a-poem. Accessed 2 July 2024.

Eysturoy, Annie O. “The House on Mango Street: A Space of Her Own.” In Daughters of Self-Creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel. U of New Mexico P, 1996.

Graf, Amara. "Mexicanized Melodrama: Sandra Cisneros' Literary Translation of the Telenovela in Caramelo." Label Me Latina/o, volume 4, 2014, pp. 1–20.

Kevane, Bridget. “The Fiction of Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1984) and Woman Hollering Creek (1991).” Latino Literature in America. Greenwood Press, 2003.

Rivera, Carmen Haydée. Border Crossings and Beyond: The Life and Works of Sandra Cisneros. Praeger, 2009.

Silverstein, Jake. "The Artist and the City." Texas Monthly, vol. 41, no. 2, 2013, pp. 107+.