Contents: IntroductionPoem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Sources Further Reading |
Criticism
Bryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses Cisneros's poem in the context of other poems in her collection Loose Woman .
In her poetry, Cisneros likes to speak directly from the heart, to the heart. Her poems are not complex; the diction is straightforward and the meanings of the poems usually reveal themselves on the first reading. There is rarely a need to tease out allusions or hidden themes; the punch is delivered quickly and with force. Anyone who has ever been in love, for example, will instantly recognize the symptoms described in "Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity": the self in a state of wild abandon; the beloved contemplated as if he or she were a god; the intense feelings that create a kind of sacred space between two people, upon which the mundane aspects of life cannot intrude. The poem conveys a spontaneity and charm, almost a youthful naïveté, that suggests real experience. It gives the impression of having been written quickly, in the flush of that one overpowering and exhilarating emotion, whether felt at the time or vividly recalled later. And yet, the poem may not be quite what it first appears.
Cisneros sheds light on her method of composition, as well as making some revealing remarks about her poems, in an interview with Martha Satz published in Southwest Review. Cisneros says she wrote many of the poems published in Loose Woman for her private satisfaction only, never intending them to be published. She believes that her public life as a writer centers around her novels. As a poet, she feels free to explore the most intimate aspects of her psyche without a thought of how the results will be received by others: "The reason I write it is not to publish it but to get the thorn out of the soul of my heart." Cisneros takes inspiration from Emily Dickinson, another poet who did not write for publication. Cisneros notes, "[Dickinson] knew that the true reason one writes poetry and works at the craft is simply to write that poem."
Cisneros also comments in the same interview that in her poetry she does not decide what to write beforehand; the words just spill out, and she does not even feel in conscious control of the process. She writes what the inner levels of her psyche prompt her to write. Most readers would probably agree that many of the sixty poems in Loose Woman do indeed give this impression. These are not poems that have been much revised and reworked or agonized over. They are like quick snapshots of certain moods, attitudes, emotions, and situations. Taken together, they present a many-sided portrait of the experience of being a woman involved in the affairs of the heart.
"Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity" presents one of the more innocent aspects of that many-sided portrait. The reader would hardly guess from that poem the persona Cisneros adopts in many of the other poems. "With Loose Woman," Cisneros tells Satz, "I entered a realm where I am writing from a dangerous fountainhead." By this, she means the sexual aspects of her poems, which she thought that men might find threatening: "I strike terror among the men. / I can't be bothered what they think," she writes in "Loose Woman."
The title of the collection is meant, at least in one sense, ironically. "Loose woman" is how the persona of the poems thinks she might be described from a male, conservative, traditional standpoint; it is how a certain type of man might view her. From her point of view, "loose woman," as the poem of that title makes clear, is a label she bears with pride because for her it means being free from repressive, restricted ideas about how a woman should think and behave.
It is as well to remember that Cisneros was raised in a Mexican American community, in which patriarchal attitudes were the norm. These attitudes included the belief that a woman's place was in the home, sex was mainly for the pleasure of the male, and it was right for men to have freedom, privileges, and power that were denied to women. Cisneros once quipped that not only was she the only daughter in her family — she has six brothers — she was also "only a daughter." (She also takes care to note that her mother raised her in a nontraditional way, always allowing her time to study and fighting for her right to have a college education.) Given this traditional patriarchal context, the persona that Cisneros adopts in Loose Woman — of an independent woman who can be defiant, passionate, angry, raunchy, and ribald and is ready to indulge in sexual pleasure herself — is a threat to the accepted way of things. As the persona states in "Night Madness Poem," "I'm the crazy lady they warned you about."
In many of these poems, Cisneros clearly alludes to her Mexican heritage. "You Bring out the Mexican in Me" is typical, with its liberal spattering of Spanish words — a common device in these poems, though absent from "Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity" — and its allusions to Mexico's pre-Christian pagan history. By invoking some of the potent symbols of Mexico's indigenous religions, such as the "filth goddess" Tlazoltéotl, she conveys a kind of on-the-edge, primordial wildness, a sultry, essentially female life-force springing up from ancient streams and ready to disconcert any man who does not understand it or who tries to stand in its way. This is the authentic Cisneros, feminist-woman-of-color persona, and it is the dominant voice in the collection. Here, for example, is the persona's opinion of marriage and husbands, from the poem "Extreme Unction":
Husband.
Balm for the occasional
itch. But I'm witch now.
Wife makes me wince.
There is another voice in Loose Woman, one that does not insist so much on challenging cultural taboos. This is a more romantic, feminine voice, tinged often with longing and regret and a certain vulnerability. It occurs only occasionally, but it can be heard, for example, in "Waiting for a Lover," in which the persona nervously awaits the arrival of her new date, wondering what will happen: "You're new. / You can't hurt me yet." As she gets ready she continues:
I can't think.
Dress myself in slinky black,
my 14-karat hoops and my velvet spikes.
Smoke two cigars.
I'm doing loopity loops.
There is nothing feminist or Chicana about these statements; they could be any woman ready to embark on a new courtship (although perhaps the smoking of two cigars marks this lady as a little out of the ordinary!).
A similar voice is heard in "Why I Didn't," in which the persona pulls back from a sexual involvement with her friend:
Oh I'm scared all right
Haven't you noticed. I'm
only shy when I like a man.
When this feminine voice allows full reign to her feelings, the result is "Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity," in which all diffidence and fear is overcome in the exuberant celebration of love. This persona is pliant rather than self-assertive and romantic rather than overtly sexual although fully aware of the sacredness of the body and the gifts it can bestow. Intoxicated by this pure, idealistic love for a man, she is ready to indulge his every whim and accept without reproach his inevitable wandering. She elevates herself to the level of infinite love that sees no fault. Yet, it should also be noted that this is a poem addressed to an absent lover, and, as the saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder. The poem is not a celebration of a here-and-now love relationship but of some imagined reunion at some time in the future. Despite its future orientation, it is more of a hymn to something past, something that has gone, and can now be safely enshrined and worshipped.
This seems to be a recurring theme in the poems of Loose Woman. They are rarely celebrations of here-and-now love but of love recalled or anticipated. The same idealization of an absent lover can be found in the first section of "Los Denudos: A Triptych," in which the speaker imagines a painting by Goya in which the female nude is replaced by her former lover. The flesh-and-blood man is turned into a work of art for the doting persona to contemplate.
Similarly, the theme in "Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity," that the memory of love inspires the writing of poetry, also occurs elsewhere in Loose Woman, notably in "My Nemesis Arrives after a Long Hiatus." This poem, which in fact is more about departure than arrival, contains the lines, "In the clatter of your departures / I write poems." To which we can compare, "So that when you leave / I'll write poems," which are the final two lines of "Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity."
It seems that for the persona of Cisneros's poems love may be a many-splendored thing, but it is perhaps better contemplated in retrospect, and not the least of its many fruits is the production of art.
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on "Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity," in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.
Cynthia Tompkins
In the following essay, Tompkins discusses Cisneros's life and writings.
Sandra Cisneros, poet and short-story writer, is best known for The House on Mango Street (1983), a Chicana novel of initiation, which won the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1985. In this lyrical novella Cisneros challenges the conventions of the bildungsroman by weaving the protagonist's quest for selfhood into the fabric of the community. Such a dual focus is usual in Cisneros's poetry and prose, in which a multiplicity of voices illustrate the ways the individual engages in the discourses and social practices of Chicano culture. Additionally, by focusing on the socialization processes of the female in Chicano culture, Cisneros explores racism in the dominant culture as well as patriarchal oppression in the Latino community.
Born to working-class parents (her father an upholsterer, her mother a factory worker), Cisneros grew up as the only girl among six brothers on Chicago's South Side. Out of necessity, she learned to make herself heard, recalling in an 11 January 1993 interview, "You had to be fast and you had to be funny — you had to be a storyteller." Since her Mexican father missed his homeland and would frequently sojourn there for periods of time, the family was often disrupted and moved from one ghetto neighborhood to another many times during her childhood. In 1969 her parents managed to buy a cramped two-story bungalow in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on the city's North Side, an ugly red house similar to the one Cisneros portrays in The House on Mango Street.
Responding to questions concerning the autobiographical nature of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros in the spring 1991 Americas Review observed, "All fiction is non-fiction. Every piece of fiction is based on something that really happened. They're all stories I lived, or witnessed, or heard." Nevertheless, the central idea of her novel had a specific literary inspiration. In a seminar at the Iowa Writers Program, Cisneros participated in a discussion of Gaston Bachelard's La Poétique de l'éspace (1958; translated as The Poetics of Space, 1964) and realized that her unique experience of the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, and gender separated her from the other students.
The House on Mango Street tells the story of a child named Esperanza (Hope) and her gradual realization of her own separate being. The tale of maturation is supported by Cisneros's use of the house as a symbol of familial consciousness, and the novel also depicts the lives, struggles, and concerns of Esperanza's immediate family, neighbors, and friends. As Erlinda González-Berry and Tey Diana Rebolledo point out, "we see the world through this child's eyes and we also see the child as she comes to an understanding of herself, her world, and her culture."
In a manner somewhat comparable to that of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), Cisneros's work mixes genres, for while each section achieves, in Ellen McCracken's words, "the intensity of the short story," the forty-four interrelated stories allow for a development of character and plot typical of the novel. Julián Olivares quotes Cisneros on her intent: "I wanted to write stories that were a cross between poetry and fiction. Except Iwanted to write a collection which could be read at any random point without having any knowledge of what came before or after. Or that could be read in a series to tell one big story. I wanted stories like poems, compact and lyrical and ending with a reverberation."
The image of the house, as McCracken points out, is symbolic in three distinctive ways, first as it suggests a positive objectification of the self for Esperanza. Before her family moved into the house on Mango Street, Esperanza's teachers had made denigrating remarks about their living conditions. "'You live there?' I had to look where she pointed — the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa had nailed on the windows so we wouldn't fall out. The way she said it made me feellike nothing." Sister Superior reveals her prejudices by suggesting that as a Mexican, Esperanza must live in "a row of ugly 3-flats, the ones even the raggedy men are ashamed to go into." Thus, though far from perfect, the family's new home, according to McCracken, "represents a positive objectification of the self, the chance to redress humiliation and establish a dignified sense of her own personhood."
Cisneros also successfully dramatizes both the individual and the communal significance of owning a house. Such a basic human desire and need is especially crucial for economically oppressed minorities. The house Esperanza dreams of beyond her family home will still have a communal function. She vows that "one day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay." In a third distinctive motif Cisneros establishes a link between the image of the house and creativity, not only in the bedtime stories Esperanza's mother tells, but also in the daughter's wish for "a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem."
Despite the generally positive symbolism of the house, Cisneros does explore issues of patriarchal and sexual violence. During the course of the novel, a woman is locked in by her husband, a young girl is brutally beaten by her father, and Esperanza is raped. But even as she "mourns her loss of innocence" Esperanza understands, as critic María Herrera-Sobek points out, that by romanticizing sexual relations, grown-up women are complicit in the male oppression of their sex.
Several positive role models, McCracken observes, help guide Esperanza's development. Minerva, barely two years older than Esperanza, writes poetry when not dealing with her two children and an abusive husband. In fact, Esperanza realizes that Minerva's writing allows her to transcend her predicament. Also, Esperanza's bedridden aunt encourages her, "You must keep writing. It will keep you free." And "las comadres" (godmothers or women close to the family circle) tell Esperanza that her art must be linked to the community: "When you leave you must remember always to come back for the others. A circle, you understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can't forget who you are."Writing, then, empowers Esperanza and strengthens her commitment to the community of Chicanas.
The House on Mango Street, in Ramón Saldívar's view, "represents from the simplicity of childhood vision the enormously complex process of the construction of [a woman's ethnic identity]. Posing the question of sexual difference within the urban working-class Chicano community, Cisneros's novel emphasizes the crucial roles of racial and material as well as ideological conditions of oppression." The need to address such pervasive conditions became clear to Chicana writers of the 1980s. After The House on Mango Street many Chicanas developed, according to Yvonne Yarbo-Bejarano, "a clear-sighted recognition of the unavoidably mutual overdetermination of the categories of race and class with that of gender in any attempted positioning of the Chicana subject."
Cisneros's willingness to experiment in different genres leads to stylistic and thematic crossovers. However, Cisneros regards writing poetry and prose as distinctly different: "writing poetry you're looking at yourself desnuda.[Y]ou've got to go beyond censorship to get at that core of truth. When you think: 'Oh my goodness, I didn't know I felt that!' that's when you stop. That's a poem. It's quite a different processfrom writing fiction, because you know what you are going to say when you write fiction. To me, the definition of a story is something that someone wants to listen to."
My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987), Cisneros's most widely known collection, contains the poems published originally in a chapbook titled Bad Boys. Discussing the title of her work in the Americas Review, Cisneros observed, "These are poems in which I write about myself, not a man writing about me. It is my life story as told by me, not according to a male point of view. And that's where I see perhaps the 'Wicked Wicked' of the title." Citing her novel, Cisneros acknowledges, "A lot of the themes from Mango Street are repeated: I leave my father's house, I don't get married, I travel to other countries, I can sleep with men if I want to, I can abandon them or choose not to sleep with them, and yes, I can fall in love and even be hurt by men — all of these things but as told by me. I am not the muse."
Both Cisneros's fiction and her poetry emphasize some dominant themes. In discussing the quest for cultural identity, Cisneros asserts that "it's very strange to be straddling these two cultures and to try to define some middle ground so that you don't commit suicide or you don't become so depressed or you don't self explode. There has to be some way for you to say: 'Alright, the life I'm leading is alright. I'm not betraying my culture. I'm not becoming Anglicized.'"
In a 1993 interview Cisneros attributes her devotion to feminism, another recurrent theme, to her Mexican American mother: "My mom did things that were very non-traditional — for one, she didn't force me to learn how to cook. She didn't interrupt me to do chores when I was reading or studying. And she always told me, 'make sure you can take care of yourself.' And that was very different from other women, who felt they had to prepare their daughters to be a wife." Yet she remains aware of the price exacted by a revisionist approach to traditional mores, recalling in the Americas Review, "I felt, as a teenager, that I could not inherit my culture intact without revising some parts of it. That did not mean I wanted to reject the entire culture, although my brothers and my father thought I did. I know that part of the trauma that I wentthrough from my teen years through the twenties up until very recently, and that other Latinas are going through too, is coming to terms with what Norma [Alarcón] calls 'reinventing ourselves,' revising ourselves. We accept our culture, but not without adapting ourselves as women."
For a Hispanic the question of cultural identity often involves language. Growing up, Cisneros spoke Spanish with her father and English with her mother. Her practice of interspersing Spanish terms and phrases in her writing, especially notable in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), which was written since her move to San Antonio, stems naturally from her bicultural background. Cisneros asserted in the 4 August 1991 Chicago Tribune that "if you're bilingual, you're doubly rich. You have two ways of looking at the world."
Again dramatizing the interconnection between the individual and the community through her focus on gender in interpersonal relationships, Cisneros in the twenty-two stories of Woman Hollering Creek explores the San Antonio setting, contrasting the socialization processes of Mexicanas de éste y el otro lado (Mexican women on both sides of the border) with those of their Anglo counterparts. The book's three major sections suggest a developmental progression from childhood to adulthood, and the thematic motifs of time, love, and religion also function as organizing principles.
The experience of cyclical and parallel patterns of time especially seems to be the collection's major unifying concept, as repeated actions and rites of passage allow Cisneros to make thematic inter-connections. Time, for instance, appears as a metaphysical dilemma in "Eleven." The experience of immanence leads the child narrator to explore the notion of chronology: "when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today." Cisneros's narrator also views the passage of time in a context of behavioral expectations: "some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama's lap because you're scared, and that's the part of you that's five. And maybe one day when you're all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you're three." Finally, the child understands that the resolution of the paradox lies in conceiving time as a process of accretion: "when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one."
In "One Holy Night" the paradox of time is reflected in the characterization of Boy Baby, who "seemed boy and baby and man all at once." Similarly, his refutation of time — "the past and the future are the same thing" — is set against his proclaimed attempt to reenact ancient Mayan ways. The young female protagonist is told that she will become "Ixchel, his Queen" after undergoing a rite of passage, which turns out to be a rape. The experience is described as a clear-cut separation from the past: "something inside bit me, and I gave out a cry as if the other, the one I wouldn't be anymore, leapt out." The irony is underscored when the narrator, now a pregnant teenager who feels suspended in the present, says, "I don't think they understand how it is to be a girl. I don't think they know how it is to have to wait your whole life. I count the months for the baby to be born." A contrasting view of time is evident in "Eyes of Zapata," in which time becomes destiny. Zapata's long-standing lover, Inés Alfaro, states, "I see our lives, clear and still, far away and near. And I see our future and our past, Miliano, one single thread already lived and nothing to be done about it."
Parallel temporal paradigms are articulated in "Bien Pretty." According to the narrator, an educated Latina from San Francisco confused about her ethnic identity, "we have to let go of our present way of life and search for our past, remember our destinies." Conversely, her Mexican lover argues, "You Americans have a strange way of thinking about time. You think old ages end, butthat's not so. It's ridiculous to think one age has overcome another. American time is running alongside the calendar of the sun, even if your world doesn't know it."
Distraught at discovering that her lover must return to Mexico to tend to a wife, a mistress, and seven children, the narrator seeks solace in telenovelas (soap operas). However, she substitutes the "passionate and powerful, tender and volatile, brave" women she has known in real life for the passive models on the screen. As a result, self-confidence returns, and aesthetic pleasure leads her to focus on the present, her being in the world: "the sky is throbbing. Blue, violet, peach, not holding still for one second. The sun setting because it's today, today; with no thought of the future or past."
In keeping with the stereotype of the passionate Latina, many of the stories in Woman Hollering Creek revolve around love, Cisneros's second major organizing motif. To the author's credit, however, her approach is, for the most part, unorthodox. In "One Holy Night" love is defined as "a bad joke," as "a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three story building [while] you're waiting on the bottom to catch it," as "a top spinning so fast all that's left is the hum," and as a crazy man who "walked around all day with his harmonica in his mouth. wheezing, in andout, in and out." The male lead of "Bien Pretty" defines love by means of a paradox, "I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes." On the other hand, under the spell of telenovelas, the protagonist of "Woman Hollering Creek" lives for a masochistic version of passion, firmly believing that to "suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow." It takes female bonding to help her break away from her predicament as a battered woman.
The link between time and love is established through a pattern of cyclical repetition. "Never Marry a Mexican" focuses on unrequited love. Seeking revenge for having been seduced by her teacher and smarting from a protracted but essentially unfulfilling love affair, the female protagonist repeats the pattern by having an affair with her lover's son, who at that point happens to be her student. Seduction initiated by males, however, is more common in Cisneros's fiction. In "Bien Pretty" Flavio acknowledges the existence of a wife, a mistress, and seven children in Mexico. In "Eyes of Zapata" Inés Alfaro is aware of the numerous "pastimes" who, in addition to his wife, compete with her for the General's attention.
Moreover, patterns of cyclical repetition connect time to male violence. Inés Alfaro's mother was murdered after being gang-raped; Boy Baby appears to have murdered eleven women; and the battered wife of "Woman Hollering Creek" recalls grisly stories that point to a pattern of socially condoned practices — "this woman found on the side of the interstate. This one pushed from a moving car. This one's cadaver, this one unconscious, this one beaten blue." In a much less brutal and depressing way, female power also takes on a cyclical pattern. Inés Alfaro acknowledges, "My Tía Chucha, she was the one who taught me to use my sight, just as her mother had taught her. The women in my family, we've always had the power to see with more than with our eyes."
Religion, the collection's third major unifying theme, might more accurately be defined as a faith in the intercession of certain spiritual figures in human dynamics. Though this cultural marker is treated in "Mericans" and "Anguiano Religious Articles," it is most developed in "Little Miracles, Kept Promises," where Cisneros offers an array of ex-votos (petitions addressed to religious figures and accompanied by promises to do penance in return for the granting of requests). These offers of penance in their very nature contain the nuggets of stories. Local color emerges from the popularity of certain saints as well as through references to healers and African deities. The twenty-two pseudo exvotos in the story come from a wide range of people, including three heads of households, four young women, three grandparents, and a gay man.
The narrator, a Chicana artist who has been reading the ex-votos, rejects the traditional representation of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the passive endurance of pain endorsed by her mother and grandmother. "I wanted you bare-breasted, snakes in your hands. All that self-sacrifice, all thatsilent suffering. Hell no. Not here. Not me." Her struggle against traditional mores, class values, and sexism results in a redefinition of and a challenge to the Catholic icon: "When I could see you in all your facets, all at once the Buddha, the Tao, the true Messiah, Yahweh, Allah, the Heart of the Sky, the Heart of the Earth, the Lord of the Near and Far, the Spirit, the Light, the Universe, I could love you." Thus Cisneros proves faithful to her purpose, as she defined it in a 20 May 1991 interview: "in my stories and life I am trying to show that U.S. Latinas have to reinvent, to remythologize, ourselves. A myth believed by almost everyone, even Latina women, is that they are passive, submissive, long-suffering, either a spit-fire or a Madonna. Yet those of us who are their daughters, mothers, sisters know that some of the fiercest women on this planet are Latina women."
Woman Hollering Creek won the P.E.N. Center West Award for best fiction in 1992. Also the winner of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, Cisneros remarked on 20 December 1992 that "there are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world." Cisneros has been a writer in residence at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at the University of California at Irvine since she graduated with her master's degree from the writing program at the University of Iowa. Describing herself as "[n]obody's wife" and "nobody's mother" in 1993, the author currently "lives in a rambling Victorian painted in Mexican colors right on the San Antonio River amid pecan and mesquite trees."
Among other projects, Cisneros plans to write a second novel, "Caramelo," set in Mexico and the United States. In her December 1992 interview she said that her novel will focus on "Mexican love and the models we have of love." In a 4 August 1991 interview Cisneros asserted that she is also "particularly interested in exploring father-daughter relationships and aspects of growing up in 'the middle,' between Mexican and Mexican-American culture." She wants to examine the notions that one culture holds about the other, "what one said when the other wasn't around." But her dream, she admitted in December 1992, is to write a Chicana feminist telenovela because "It's a way to reach a lot of people." Today Cisneros is perhaps the most visible Chicana in mainstream literary circles. The vividness of her vignettes and the lyrical quality of her prose attest to her craft, about which Melita Marie Garza notes, "Cisneros is as exacting in her writing as she is brazen in her criticism. She rewrites even her shortest stories about twenty-five times."
By re-creating a Chicana child's perspective, Cisneros has already made a significant contribution to the development of the Chicano literary tradition. Moreover, by focusing on the socialization processes of the Chicana, she has criticized and challenged major stereotypes. Perhaps most important, Cisneros grounds her revisionist feminist perspective in everyday experience by highlighting the stamina of the women she has known in real life. Finally, the broad range of voices that appears in her texts — from historical figures such as Emiliano Zapata to fictional gay lovers — attests to her continued success in developing a flexible, yet personal, style.
As shown by the six reprintings of The House on Mango Street (1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988, and 1992), Cisneros's reading public is steadily increasing. Her endorsement of bilingualism in Woman Hollering Creek as well as her focus on interfacing cultures and her willingness to adopt the popular soap-opera style suggest that, though Cisneros has already carved herself a niche in American literature, the best may be yet to come.
Source: Cynthia Tompkins, "Sandra Cisneros," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 152, American Novelists Since World War II, Fourth Series, edited by James Giles and Wanda Giles, Gale Research, 1995, pp. 35 – 41.
Eduardo F. Elías
In the following essay, Elías discusses Cisneros's personal history and her body of writing.
Sandra Cisneros considers herself a poet and a short-story writer, although she has also authored articles, interviews, and book reviews concerning Chicano writers. She began writing at age ten, and she is one of the few Chicano authors trained in a formal creative-writing program. At the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1978. She has taught creative writing at all levels and has experience in educational and arts administration. Her creative work, though not copious, has already been the subject of scholarly papers in the areas of Chicano and women's studies. She has read her poetry at the Colegio de México in Mexico City; at a symposium on Chicano literature at the Amerikanistik Universität in Erlangen, Germany; and over Swedish Educational Radio. Some of her poetry is included in a collection of younger Chicano poets published in Calcutta, India. She has garnered several grants and awards in the United States and abroad, and her book The House on Mango Street (1983) was praised, winning the 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award.
Cisneros is a native of Chicago, where she grew up and attended Loyola University, graduating in 1976 with a B.A. in English. Her father was born in Mexico City to a family of means; his wanderlust and lack of interest in schooling led him to travel broadly and to venture into the United States. By chance he traveled through Chicago, met Sandra's mother, and decided to settle there for life. He and his family were influential in Sandra's maturation. Her mother came from a family whose men had worked on the railroad. Sandra grew up in a working-class family, as the only girl surrounded by six brothers. Money was always in short supply, and they moved from house to house, from one ghetto neighborhood to another. In 1966 her parents borrowed enough money for a down payment on a small, ugly, two-story bungalow in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. This move placed her in a stable environment, providing her with plenty of friends and neighbors who served as inspirations for the eccentric characters in The House on Mango Street.
The constant moving during her childhood, the frequent forays to Mexico to see her father's family, the poor surroundings, and the frequent changing of schools made young Cisneros a shy, introverted child with few friends. Her love of books came from her mother, who saw to it that the young poet had her first library card before she even knew how to read. It took her years to realize that some people actually purchased their books instead of borrowing them from the library. As a child she escaped into her readings and even viewed her life as a story in which she was the main character manipulated by a romantic narrator.
"I don't remember reading poetry," Cisneros admits. "The bulk of my reading was fiction, and Lewis Carroll was one of my favorites." As she wrote her first poems, modeling them on the rhythmic texts in her primary readers, she had no notion of formal structure, but her ear guided her in matters of rhyme and rhythm. After the sixth grade, however, Cisneros stopped writing for a while. In her junior year in high school she was exposed to works by the finest of British and American writers and by Latin-American poets who impressed her deeply. Finally, in her junior year at Loyola University, she was introduced to writers such as Donald Justice, James Wright, and Mark Strand, poets who had influenced a whole generation of Spanish writers, thus bringing Cisneros into touch with her cultural roots. She was also introduced to the Chicago poetry scene, where there was great interest in her work. She was encouraged to study in a creative-writing program and was admitted to the Iowa Writers' Workshop; she had hoped to study with Justice but discovered that he and Marvin Bell were on sabbatical leaves that academic year.
Cisneros looks back on those years and admits she did not know she was a Chicana writer at the time, and if someone had labeled her thus, she would have denied it. She did not see herself as different from the rest of the dominant culture. Her identity was Mexican, or perhaps Puerto Rican, because of the neighborhood she grew up in, but she mostly felt American — because all her reading was of mainstream literature, and she always wrote in English. Spanish was the private language of home, and she spoke it only with her father. Cisneros knew no Chicano writers in Chicago, and although she was the only Hispanic majoring in English at Loyola, she was unaware of being different — in spite of her appearance, which was considered exotic by her female classmates.
The two years at Iowa were influential on Cisneros's life and writing. She admits that the experience was terribly cruel to her as well as to many of the other first-year students, but it was also liberating. She had her share and fill of intimidating teachers and colleagues as well as some marvelous ones who helped and encouraged her. This was a time for Cisneros to mature emotionally, something she had neglected to do for some years — always having considered herself as somebody's daughter, lover, or friend. The poet struggled in these years with finding a voice for her writings. She imitated her teachers, her classmates, and what she calls the "terrible East-coast pretentiousness" that permeated the workshop, without finding satisfaction. An important friend at this time was Joy Harjo, a Native American from Oklahoma, who was well centered in her southwestern heritage and identity and who also felt lonely and displaced in the Iowa workshop. This friendship offered Cisneros the assurance that she had something to write about that would distinguish her from her classmates.
The bulk of Cisneros's early writing emerged in 1977 and 1978. She began writing a series of autobiographical sketches influenced by Vladimir Nabokov's memoirs. She purposely delighted in being iconoclastic, in adopting themes, styles, and verbal patterns directly opposed to those used by her classmates. The House on Mango Street was born this way, with a child's narrative voice that was to be Cisneros's poetic persona for several years.
The poem "Roosevelt Road," written in the summer of 1977, is most important to Cisneros because it forced her to confront the poverty and embarrassment she had lived with all her previous years and to admit the distinctiveness of this background as a positive resource that could nourish her writing. In this poem the language is completely straightforward and descriptive of the tenement housing where the poet lived as a child. Lines run into one another, so that the reader is compelled to follow the inherent rhythm, while working on the sense of the message:
We lived on the third floor always
because noise travelled down
The milkman climbed up tired everyday
with milk and eggs
and sometimes sour cream
........................
Mama said don't play in alleys
because that's where dogs get rabies and
bad girls babies
Drunks carried knives
but if you asked
they'd give you money.
.....................
How one time we found that dollar
and a dead mouse in the stone wall
where the morning glories climbed.
Once the journals Nuestro and Revista Chicano-Riqueña accepted her first poems, Cisneros gained enough confidence to submit her work to other publications. These early texts were more concerned with sound and timing, more with the how than with the what, of what she was saying. A case in point is "South Sangamon," in My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987), a poem which, when read aloud, corroborates the fact:
His drunk cussing,
her name all over the hallway
and my name mixed in.
He yelling from the other side open
and she yelling from this side no.
A long time of this
and we say nothing
just hoping he'd get tired and go.
Cisneros's master's thesis, titled "My Wicked, Wicked Ways" (Iowa, 1978), is full of such poems on a diversity of topics — daily events, self-identity, amorous experiences, and encounters with friends. Her penchant for sound is obvious, as is her representation of a world that is neither bourgeois nor mainstream. Revised and enlarged, the thesis was published as a book in 1987.
While Cisneros taught at Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago (July 1978 – December 1980), she spent time on writing but never finished projects fully as collections. Her involvement with many aspects of student life was too draining and consumed her creative energy. However, one poem she wrote was selected to be posted on the Chicago area public buses, thus giving her much-needed exposure and publicity. Cisneros was also seduced by the adulation and applause awarded to writers who read their material at public performances. After a period of "too much performing" (in her words) in coffee-houses and school auditoriums, she gave up the lecture circuit to spend more time on her writing.
Another Chicano poet, Gary Soto, was instrumental in helping publish Cisneros's chapbook Bad Boys in 1980. The seven poems depict childhood scenes and experiences in the Mexican ghetto of Chicago. One poem, "The Blue Dress," is Cisneros's effort to paint a scene full of visual imagery that depicts a pregnant woman seen through the eyes of the expectant father. The language of these poems has a musical ring, with short, run-on lines and compact statements.
By the time that The House on Mango Street was ready for publication, Cisneros had outgrown the voice of the child narrator who recounts the tales in the book, but this 1983 work gave Cisneros her broadest exposure. It is dedicated to "the women," and, in forty-four short narratives, it recounts the experiences of a maturing adolescent girl discovering life around her in a Hispanic urban ghetto. There are many touching scenes that Esperanza, the young narrator, recounts: her experiences with the death of relatives and neighbors, for example, and with girlfriends who tell her about life. In "Hips," young Esperanza explains: "The bones just one day open. One day you might decide to have kids, and then where are you going to put them?" Esperanza identifies herself to her readers: "In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters." As the stories of Esperanza in her Hispanic barrio evolve, the child breezes through more and more maturing experiences.
The reader sees many portraits of colorful neighbors — Puerto Rican youths, fat ladies who do not speak English, childhood playmates — until finally Esperanza sees herself and her surrounding experiences with greater maturity. Thus the reader sees her at her first dance in the tale "Chanclas," where attention is first focused on the bulky, awkward saddle oxfords of a school-girl, then the vision is directed upward as Esperanza blossoms into a graceful and poised dancer, who draws everyone's glances. Esperanza retells humorous experiences about her first job and her eighth-grade girlfriend who marries; then Esperanza reveals more of her intimate self in the last two tales. In "A House of My Own" and "Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes," it is revealed that the adolescent has been nurturing a desire to flee the sordid, tragicomic environment where she has grown up. The image of the house is also useful to reveal the need for the narrator to find a self-identity.
An important contribution by Cisneros to Chicano letters is that this book about growing up offers a feminine view of the process, in contrast to that exemplified by leading works by men. As critics Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and Tey Diana Rebolledo have aptly pointed out, young Esperanza is a courageous character who must combat the socialization process imposed on females; the character breaks from the tradition of the usual protagonist of the female bildungsroman by consistently rejecting the models presented to her and seeking another way to be Chicana: "I have begun my own kind of war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate." Esperanza's experiences parallel those depicted by other Chicana writers.
In conversations about her life, Cisneros admits that up through her college years she had always felt that she was not her own person. Thus Esperanza yearns for "a house all my own. Only ahouse quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem." Cisneros's speaker feels the need to tell the world the stories about the girl who did not want to belong to that ugly house on Mango Street. Esperanza admits, at the conclusion of her stories, she is already too strong to be tied down by the house; she will leave and go far, only to come back some day for those stories and people that could not get away. The conclusion is that, in essence, Cisneros takes within her the memories from the house as she also carries her mementos from Mango Street, her bag of books and possessions. These are her roots, her inspirations, and the kernels of what Cisneros sensed, years ago in Iowa, that distinguished her from other American writers.
My Wicked Wicked Ways contains several texts that have been published singly. They show a different aspect of Cisneros's work. The speakers of several poems are adult women involved in relationships with a roguish male, Rodrigo. These poems are physically descriptive and sensuous — bordering on the erotic — and behind them lies a strong hand.
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) is a rare example of a work by a Chicana being published by a mainstream press. Writer Ann Beattie has said of this collection: "My prediction is that Sandra Cisneros will stride right into the spotlight — though an aura already surrounds her. These stories about how and why we mythologize love are revelations about the constant, small sadnesses that erode our facades, as well as those unpredictably epiphanic moments that lift our hearts from despair. A truly wonderful book."
Cisneros has been fortunate to earn several grants that have permitted her to devote herself fulltime to her writing. In the spring of 1983 she was artist in residence at the Fondation Michael Karolyi in Vence, France. Earlier, in 1982, she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, which she used to travel through Europe. During that time she began work on a series of poems she included in her 1987 book. Several of them are evidently based on fleeting encounters with men she met in her European travels. They are whimsical mementos of fleeting instances either enjoyed or lost. Still present are the familiar rhythm and musicality; the major change is in the themes and voice. Most definitely, she has outgrown the adolescent form of expression of her earlier writing.
In the late 1980s Cisneros completed a Paisano Dobie Fellowship in Austin, Texas, and then spent additional time in Texas. She also won first and third prizes for her short stories in the Segundo Concurso Nacional del Cuento Chicano, sponsored by the University of Arizona. Cisneros as a writer is growing rapidly. She feels that writers like herself, Soto, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Alberto Ríos belong to a new school of technicians, new voices in Chicano poetry. Cisneros wants to maintain her distinctiveness and her dual inheritance and legacy, and not fuse into the American mainstream. She cannot tell in which direction her poetry will lead her; most recently she has expanded her writing to include essays. She hopes that years from now she will still be worthy of the title "poet" and that her peers will recognize her as such.
Source: Eduardo F. Elías, "Sandra Cisneros," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol.122, Chicano Writers, Second Series, edited by Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley, Gale Research, 1992, pp. 77 – 81.
What Do I Read Next?
- Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984) is a story about the coming-of-age of Esperanza, a Chicana growing up in an impoverished innercity neighborhood in Chicago.
- Bless Me, Ultima (1972), by Rudolfo Anaya, is a classic of Chicano literature. It tells the story of a young Mexican American boy growing up in New Mexico and coming to terms with his dual cultural identity.
- From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican-American Culture (1998; 2d ed.), by James Diego Vigil, is a readable introduction to the Mexican American experience in the United States. Vigil covers each stage of Mexican American history, from pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial times to Mexican independence and nationalism to the modern Anglo American period. He analyzes the social and cultural dynamics that shaped contemporary Chicano life.
- Growing Up Chicana/o (1995), edited by Tiffany Ana Lopez, contains twenty autobiographical essays and stories that explore the Mexican American experience from many angles. One of the essays is by Cisneros, who discusses her memories of growing up in Chicago.
- Mirrors beneath the Earth: Short Fiction by Chicano Writers (1992), edited by Ray Gonzalez, is a collection of thirty-one short stories by contemporary Chicano writers. It includes established figures such as Cisneros, Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chavez, and Ana Castillo, as well as new writers such as Daniel Romero, Patricia Blanco, Ana Baca, and others.
