Sandra Cisneros facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

Quick facts for kids Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros speaking at an event in Phoenix, Arizona (2017)
Born	(1954-12-20) December 20, 1954 (age 70) Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist poet short story writer artist
Alma mater	Loyola University Chicago (BA) University of Iowa (MFA)
Period	c. 1980–present
Notable works	The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
Notable awards	American Book Award, MacArthur Genius Grant

Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is a famous American writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983). She is also known for her collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991).

Her writing explores new ways of telling stories. Sandra Cisneros says her unique stories come from growing up between two cultures. She also grew up experiencing economic inequality. She has won many awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is a very important writer in Chicano literature.

Cisneros' early life gave her many ideas for her writing. She grew up as the only girl with six brothers, which often made her feel alone. Her family moved a lot between Mexico and the United States. This made her feel like she was "always straddling two countries but not belonging to either culture."

Her work often talks about what it means to be a Chicana. This means exploring the challenges of being between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures. She also writes about facing unfair attitudes towards women and dealing with poverty. Because of her powerful writing and social comments, The House on Mango Street is read worldwide. It is taught in U.S. classrooms as a coming-of-age novel.

Sandra Cisneros has worked in many different jobs. She has been a teacher, a counselor, and a college recruiter. She has also worked as a poet-in-the-schools and an arts administrator. She cares deeply about her community and supporting other writers. In 1998, she started the Macondo Writers Workshop. This workshop helps writers who want to make a positive social impact. In 2000, she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation. This foundation gives awards to talented writers from Texas. Cisneros now lives in Mexico.

Early Life and Education
Later Life and Career
Writing Style
- Bilingualism in Writing
- Narrative Styles and Simplicity
Literary Themes
Awards and Recognition
See also

Early Life and Education

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 20, 1954. She was the third of seven children. She was the only girl and felt like the "odd number in a set of men." Her great-grandfather was wealthy but lost his money gambling. Her paternal grandfather, Enrique, fought in the Mexican Revolution. He used his savings to help her father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral, go to college.

But Alfredo was not interested in studying. He ran away to the United States to avoid his father's anger. He visited Chicago and met Elvira Cordero Anguiano. They got married and settled in a poor neighborhood in Chicago. Cisneros's mother's family came from a very humble background in Guanajuato, Mexico. Her father's family was more "admirable."

Cisneros's father worked as an upholsterer. He started moving the family back and forth between Chicago and Mexico City. This constant moving was a big part of Cisneros's childhood. They always had to find new homes and schools. This instability made her six brothers pair off, leaving her feeling isolated. Her father would say he had "seis hijos y una hija" ("six sons and one daughter"). He did not say "siete hijos" ("seven children"). This made her feel even more excluded. Her childhood loneliness helped her become passionate about writing.

Her mother, Elvira, was a strong female influence. She loved to read and was more open-minded than her father. Elvira wanted to make sure her daughter had more opportunities than she did.

When she was eleven, her family bought a home in Humboldt Park. This was a mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago. This neighborhood and its people later inspired her novel The House on Mango Street. For high school, Cisneros went to Josephinum Academy. It was a small Catholic school for girls. A teacher there helped her write poems about the Vietnam War.

Cisneros wrote her first poem around age ten. With her teacher's help, she became known for her writing in high school. She wrote poetry and was the literary magazine editor. But she said she did not truly start writing until her first college creative writing class in 1974. It took time to find her own writing voice. She explained that she first copied famous male poets. But she realized their style was "all wrong for me."

Cisneros earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Loyola University Chicago in 1976. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978.

While at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Cisneros realized her unique background was a strength. She recalled, "It wasn't as if I didn't know who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman." She realized her race, gender, and social class were important. She decided to write about things her classmates could not. She would write about her "neighbors, the people [she] saw, the poverty that the women had gone through."

Cisneros in 2017

Cisneros used Mexican and Southwestern culture and city conversations in her writing. She wanted to show the lives of people she understood. She loves hearing people's personal stories. She is dedicated to sharing the voices of people who are often ignored. For example, she shows the struggles of "thousands of silent women" in The House on Mango Street.

Five years after her MFA, she worked as an administrative assistant at Loyola University-Chicago. Before that, she taught high school dropouts at Latino Youth High School in Chicago. This was in Mexican neighborhoods like Pilsen and Little Village.

Later Life and Career

Teaching and Other Work

Besides being an author and poet, Cisneros has taught at universities. In 1978, she taught former high-school dropouts in Chicago. After The House on Mango Street was published in 1984, she became a writer-in-residence. This meant she taught creative writing at universities like the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan. She also taught at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Cisneros has also worked as a college recruiter and an arts administrator.

Family and Personal Choices

Cisneros now lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. For many years, she lived and wrote in San Antonio, Texas. In a 1990 interview, she was asked why she never married or had a family. Cisneros replied, "My writing is my child and I don't want anything to come between us." She enjoys living alone because it gives her time to think and write. She moved from Illinois to Texas so her family would give her space to focus on her writing. She felt that as Latinas, they sometimes need to "reinvent" themselves.

Writing Process

Cisneros's writing is often shaped by her own experiences. She also gets ideas from observing people in her community. She writes down "snippets of dialogue or monologue." These are conversations she hears wherever she goes. She then mixes and matches these snippets to create her stories. She often finds names for her characters from the San Antonio phone book. She picks a last name, then a first name. This way, she knows she is not using anyone's real name or story. But her characters and stories still feel real.

Once, Cisneros was so focused on her book Woman Hollering Creek that the characters felt real to her. While writing "Eyes of Zapata," she woke up one night thinking she was Ines. Ines was the young bride of the Mexican revolutionary. Her dream conversation with Zapata became the characters' dialogue in her story.

Being bicultural and bilingual is also very important to her writing. Cisneros has said she is thankful to have "twice as many words to pick from." She also has "two ways of looking at the world." Her ability to speak two languages and write about her two cultures gives her a unique way to tell stories. She tells not only her story but also the stories of those around her.

Community Work

Cisneros has helped build a strong community for artists and writers in San Antonio. She did this through her work with the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. The Macondo Foundation is named after a town in Gabriel García Márquez's book One Hundred Years of Solitude. It helps writers who want to use their talents for community building and social change.

The foundation started in 1998 as a small workshop in Cisneros's kitchen. It officially became a foundation in 2006. The Macondo Writers Workshop is now an annual event. It brings together writers who work on "geographic, cultural, economic, social and spiritual borders." It grew from 15 participants to over 120 in its first nine years. It is now based at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio.

The Macondo Foundation gives awards like the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Milagro Award. This award honors the memory of Anzaldúa, another Chicana writer. It helps Chicano writers who need time to heal. The Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award was created in memory of Sandra Cisneros's mother. Macondo also offers health insurance to member writers. They can also stay at the Casa Azul Residency Program. This program gives writers a furnished room and office in the Casa Azul. This blue house is across the street from where Cisneros lives in San Antonio. It is also the headquarters of the Macondo Foundation. Cisneros wanted the Casa Azul to be a place where writers could focus on their emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth.

Cisneros founded the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation in 1999. It is named after her father. Since 2007, it has given over $75,500 to writers connected to Texas. It honors her father's memory by supporting writers who are proud of their craft, just as he was proud of his work as an upholsterer.

Cisneros also helped start the Annual Texas Small Bookfair with Bryce Milligan. This event was a forerunner to the Inter-American Bookfair.

Chicano Literary Movement

Literary critic Claudia Sadowski-Smith has called Cisneros "perhaps the most famous Chicana writer." Cisneros is seen as a pioneer because she was the first Mexican-American woman writer to be published by a major publisher. In 1989, The House on Mango Street was reissued by Vintage Press. It was first published by a small Hispanic company. In 1991, Woman Hollering Creek was published by Random House. Before Cisneros, only male Chicano authors had successfully moved from smaller publishers to mainstream ones. Cisneros's success showed that Chicano literature could become more widely known.

As a pioneering Chicana author, Cisneros filled a gap in literature. She brought a new genre to the forefront that was previously on the edges of mainstream literature. With The House on Mango Street, she moved away from the poetic style common in Chicana literature at the time. She began to create a "distinctive Chicana literary space." She challenged common literary forms. She also wrote about topics like gender inequality and the struggles of cultural minorities.

According to literary critic Alvina E Quintana, The House on Mango Street is read by people of all backgrounds. Quintana says Cisneros's writing is easy for both Anglo- and Mexican-Americans to understand. It presents issues like Chicana identity and gender inequalities in an approachable way. Cisneros's writing has influenced both Chicana and feminist literature. Quintana sees her fiction as a way to comment on society. It aims to truly show the cultural experience of a group of people. Cisneros has helped shape Chicana feminist aesthetics by making women strong main characters in her work.

Writing Style

Bilingualism in Writing

Cisneros often uses Spanish in her English writing. She uses Spanish when she feels it expresses the meaning better or improves the flow of the text. However, she writes sentences so that people who do not speak Spanish can still understand the Spanish words from the surrounding text. For Cisneros, Spanish adds colorful expressions, a unique rhythm, and a certain attitude to her work.

Narrative Styles and Simplicity

Cisneros's fiction comes in different forms: novels, poems, and short stories. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, published in 1991, is a collection of twenty-two short stories. They use many different narrative techniques to engage the reader. Cisneros switches between first person, third person, and stream-of-consciousness. She uses short, impressionistic scenes and longer, event-driven stories. Her language ranges from very poetic to very direct and realistic.

Some stories do not have a narrator. Instead, they are made of text fragments or conversations that the reader "overhears." For example, "Little Miracles, Kept Promises" is made of fictional notes asking for blessings from saints. "The Marlboro Man" is a phone conversation between two women gossiping.

Cisneros's works can seem simple at first. But this is misleading. She encourages readers to look beyond the text. She wants them to see bigger social issues within everyday life. For example, the phone conversation in "The Marlboro Man" is not just gossip. It allows the reader to understand the characters' thoughts and cultural influences.

Literary critics have noted how Cisneros addresses complex social issues through seemingly simple characters and situations. For instance, Ramón Saldívar says that The House on Mango Street shows "from the simplicity of childhood vision the enormously complex process of the construction of the gendered subject." Felicia J. Cruz explains that each person will react differently to Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Some might say it is about growing up. Others might say it is about a Chicana's growing up. Still others might see it as a critique of unfair power structures. Cisneros's writing is rich with symbolism and imagery. It is also powerful in its social commentary and ability to create personal responses.

Literary Themes

The Importance of Place

When Cisneros writes about the hopes and struggles of Chicanas, the theme of place often appears. Place means not only the physical locations in her novels. It also means the positions her characters hold within their society. Chicanas often find themselves in places dominated by Anglo culture or by men. In these places, they face unfair treatment. One important "place" for Cisneros is the home.

Literary critics Deborah L. Madsen and Ramón Saldívar have described how the home can be a difficult place for Chicanas. They might be controlled by male family members. But their own home can also be a place of power. It can be where they act independently and express themselves creatively. In The House on Mango Street, the young main character, Esperanza, dreams of having her own house. She says, "Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after."

Esperanza wants "a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem." She feels unhappy and trapped in her family home. She sees other women in the same situation. According to Saldívar, Cisneros shows that a woman needs her own space to reach her full potential. This home should not be a place of male control. Instead, it should be a place for "poetic self-creation." A source of sadness for Cisneros's Chicana characters is that society often denies them this place. Critics have compared this theme in Cisneros's work to Virginia Woolf's idea in "A Room of One's Own." Woolf said that a woman needs "money and a room of her own" to write fiction. This means economic security and personal freedom are needed for artistic creation.

Cisneros explores the idea of place not just for gender but also for social class. As Saldívar notes, Esperanza understands the needs of the working poor and homeless. She is determined not to forget her working-class background once she gets her dream house. She plans to open her doors to those less fortunate. Esperanza says, "Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house." Saldívar says this shows that everyone needs a decent living space, no matter what challenges they face.

Understanding Chicana Identity

The challenges faced by Cisneros's characters due to their gender are linked to their culture. The rules for how women and men should act are shaped by culture. Cisneros shows the experiences of Chicanas dealing with the "deeply rooted patriarchal values" of Mexican culture. This happens through interactions with Mexican fathers and the wider community. The community pressures them to fit a narrow idea of womanhood and to be submissive to men.

A common theme in Cisneros's work is the three important figures Gloria Anzaldúa called "Our Mothers." These are the Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, and La Llorona. These symbolic figures are very important to identity and popular culture in Mexico and the southwest United States. Theorist Norma Alarcón says they have been used to control or understand women in Mexican-American culture.

Many theorists say that the gender identity of Mexican and Chicana women is complexly built around these three figures. La Virgen de Guadalupe is a Catholic symbol of the Virgin Mary in the Americas. She is seen in Mexico as a "nurturing and inspiring mother and maiden." The other two figures, La Malinche and La Llorona, represent different aspects.

La Malinche was an Indigenous woman who helped Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. She is often seen as a traitor to her people. The third figure, La Llorona, comes from an old Mexican folktale. She is a woman who drowns her children in a river out of rage. She then dies of grief and is said to wail for her children in the wind and water. These figures—the pure Virgen de Guadalupe, the betrayed La Malinche, and the grieving La Llorona—create a "fragmentary subjectivity" for Chicanas. They need to understand, redefine, or reject these ideas on their own terms.

The three "Mothers" are most clear in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. In the story "Woman Hollering Creek," the main character redefines the La Llorona myth. She decides to take control of her future and her children's. She discovers that the grito (Spanish for the sound La Llorona makes) can be a "joyous holler" instead of a grieving wail. The borderland, the symbolic space between two cultures, allows for this negotiation with fixed gender ideals.

Exploring Borderlands

Even though Cisneros does not always set her stories on the Mexico-U.S. border, the idea of "borderlands" is a key theme. This is because her characters constantly cross borders, both real and symbolic. The House on Mango Street takes place in Chicago, where the narrator lives. It also takes place in Mexico City, where she visits family. Caramelo is mostly set in these places. But part of the book describes the narrator's experiences as a teenager in San Antonio, Texas. Characters in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories also travel to Mexico to see family.

However, the "border" is not just a physical line. It also includes ideas of sex, class, gender, ethnicity, identity, and community. Cisneros often uses the border metaphorically. She explores how Chicana identity is a mix of Mexican and Anglo-American cultures. The border shows the everyday experiences of people who are not fully from one place or the other. Sometimes the border is fluid, and two cultures can exist peacefully within one person. But at other times, it is rigid, and there is strong tension between them.

Literary critic Katherine Payant has studied the border metaphor in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. It appears in references to characters' Mexican roots and their travel between countries. It also shows up in the mixing of pre-Columbian, mestizo, and Southwestern Chicano myths. It portrays Chicanas/os as "straddling two or three cultures." Payant uses Gloria Anzaldúa's idea of living "on the borderlands." This describes the experience of Cisneros's Chicana characters. Besides overcoming traditional ideas of gender and sexual identity, they must also navigate language and cultural boundaries.

Awards and Recognition

Sandra Cisneros has received many important awards. In September 2016, she was given a 2015 National Medal of Arts. In 2019, PEN America honored her with the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In 2023, she won the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation.

She received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981 and 1988. In 1985, she won the American Book Award for The House on Mango Street. She also received a Frank Dobie Artists Fellowship. She placed first and second in a national short story contest sponsored by the University of Arizona.

Cisneros has also received the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award. Other awards include the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN Center West Award for best fiction, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.

The State University of New York gave her an honorary doctorate in 1993. She also received a MacArthur fellowship in 1995. In 2003, her novel Caramelo was highly praised by major newspapers like The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. This led to her Premio Napoli Award in 2005. The novel was also nominated for the Dublin International IMPAC award and the Orange Prize in England. In 2003, Cisneros was among the first recipients of the Texas Cultural Trust's Texas Medal of Arts. In 2016, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gave her an honorary Doctor of Letters. In 2021, she received the Fuller Award from the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

Some of her papers are kept at the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College.