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Cisneros Questions

Source:  http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mangostreet/study.html

Cisneros Bio

Author:  Jane Juffer, Source: Modern American Poetry

In the introduction to Alfred A. Knopf's 1994, ten-year anniversary reprinting of her House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros recalls what initially inspired the now internationally acclaimed novel. As a graduate student in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Cisneros felt alienated by discussion of Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. She says, "What was this guy talking about when he mentioned the familiar and comforting 'house of memory'? It was obvious he never had to clean one or pay the landlord rent for one like ours" (xiii-xiv).

 Cisneros' alienation gave rise to anger, which in turn prompted the writing of House on Mango Street; the lyrical novel describing the life of a young Mexican-American girl growing up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, much as Cisneros herself did. In an attempt to establish the difference of this kind of home from the one her fellow students remembered, Cisneros sought what she calls an "anti-academic voice--a child's voice, a girl's voice, a poor girl's voice, a spoken voice, the voice of an American-Mexican" (yv). 

Ironically, this anti-academic novel has become widely acclaimed as a "literary masterpiece," beginning in 5985 when it won the Before Columbus Book Award. Furthermore, it has represented an important position in debates over multiculturalism--the ability to speak to specific cultural experiences and yet claim literary, even canonical, value. Since the late 1980s, House has been part of the university culture wars, perhaps most prominently at Stanford University, whose revamping of its traditional Western civilization requirement became the subject of much right-wing moralizing. 

Since then, numerous critical articles and further acclaimed publications by Cisneros have largely succeeded in quieting defenders of the canon who feared that texts such as House did not meet literary muster. By 1998, with multiculturalism largely integrated into English department curriculum, Cisneros was included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature for the first time; it excerpted six short stories, all told from a youth point of view, from her 1991 collection, Woman Hollering Creek. 

Cisneros has in many ways become the representative Chicana in the reconstruction of the canon, yet much of her work has been elided in the focus on House and the youth stories in WHC. Even as these texts appear regularly on American literature syllabi, Cisneros' three volumes of poetry and adult short stories, the latter appearing in the second half of WHC, have been largely ignored in academia. 

Although the acceptance of the youth stories has been an important step toward increasing access to Chicana literature, it has dramatically simplified Cisneros and suggests that the push for multiculturalism and inclusion does not always extend to the difficult intersections of adult sexuality and race nor to representations of "minorities" who are not "role models." Anthologies and even, to a somewhat lesser degree, critical articles, find it easier to focus on the more "universal" coming-of-age themes and stories that present ethnic role models than those texts that represent the sometimes angry and disenchanted, frankly sexual, often ambiguous and always complicated adult Chicana that speaks in much of Cisneros' work. 

An example of this voice appears in the Oxford anthologized poem "Little Clown, My Heart"; the poem speaks to the ambiguities of desire--the heart as both "fleshy undertongue of sorrows" and "Acapulco cliff diver." It comes from Loose Woman, whose title poem of the same name speaks to Cisneros' fierce sexual independence: "I'm an aim-well, / shoot-sharp, / sharp-tongued, / sharp-thinking, / fast-speaking, /foot-loose, /loose-tongued, /let-loose, /woman-on-the-loose / loose woman. / Beware, honey" (114). 

Cisneros' career is indicative of the slow but steady growth in the acceptance of Chicana/o and Latina/o writers throughout the 1990s, both in academia and more broadly; as such, it provides an important way to study the advantages and disadvantages of "mainstreaming." Cisneros' first book, a volume of poetry entitled Bad Boys, was published in 1980 by Mango Publications of San Jose, CA, in the Chicano Chapbook series edited by Gary Soto. 

[. . .] 

In 1996, Ms. published Cisneros' essay "Guadalupe the Sex Goddess," which also appears in Ana Castillo's edited collection, Goddess of the Americas/la Diosa de las Americas. The essay describes how the figure of la Virgen de Guadalupe has been used to regulate female sexuality, setting up a virgin/whore dichotomy for young Chicana struggling to learn about their bodies. Cisneros then rearticulates la Virgen by recovering the pre-Columbian goddesses upon which the myth of Guadalupe draws. Integrating ethnicity and sexuality, Cisneros declares that la Virgen for her is the "goddess who makes me feel good about my sexual power" (49). 

Cisneros now does have a house of her own--a bright purple house, no less, in San Antonio. In July of 1998, The New York Times featured an article describing the furor raised by her neighbors--belonging to the the King William neighborhood association--who declared that the color is "historically incorrect." Arguing that purple is indeed historically correct--that it is a pre-Columbian color celebrating pride in Mexican heritage, Cisneros has refused to concede anything to the Victorians (Rimer A8). She lives in the house with five cats, three dogs, and two parrots. True to the biography included in the 1991 edition of House on Mango Street, she is still "nobody's mother and nobody's wife."

	Voices From the Gaps:  Recently updated site with many good links.
	Sparknotes on House on Mango Street:  Sparknotes provides excellent in depth guides and ideas for studying this work.
	Modern American Poetry:  A good basic source with a nice biography and other information on Cisneros.