CANR
WORK TITLE: Woman without Shame
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.sandracisneros.com/
CITY: San Miguel de Allende
STATE:
COUNTRY: Mexico
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 313
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 20, 1954, in Chicago, IL.
EDUCATION:Loyola University, B.A., 1976; University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A., 1978.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Latino Youth Alternative High School, Chicago IL, teacher, 1978-80; Loyola University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, college recruiter and counselor for minority students, 1981-82; Foundation Michael Karolyi, Vence, France, artist-in-residence, 1983; Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, San Antonio, TX, literature director, 1984-85; guest professor, California State University, Chico, 1987-88, University of California, Berkeley, 1988, University of California, Irvine, 1990, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1990, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1991.
MEMBER:PEN, Mujeres por la paz (member and organizer).
AWARDS:National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1982, 1988; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1985, for The House on Mango Street; Paisano Dobie Fellowship, 1986; Lannan Foundation Literary Award, 1991; H.D.L, State University of New York at Purchase, 1993; MacArthur fellow, 1995; first and second prize in Segundo Concurso Nacional del Cuento Chicano, University of Arizona; PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, 2019; Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, National Book Critics Circle, 2024.
WRITINGS
Author of introduction to The Future Is Mestizo: Life Where Culture Meets, by Virgilio Elizondo, University Press of Colorado (Boulder, CO), 2000. Contributor to periodicals, including Imagine, Contact II, Glamour, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, and Revista Chicano-Riquena.
SIDELIGHTS
Poet, novelist, and short-story writer Sandra Cisneros has garnered wide critical acclaim as well as popular success. Drawing heavily upon her childhood experiences and ethnic heritage as the daughter of a Mexican father and Chicana mother, Cisneros addresses poverty, cultural suppression, self-identity, and gender roles in her fiction and poetry. She creates characters who are distinctly Latina/o and are often isolated from mainstream American culture by emphasizing dialogue and sensory imagery over traditional narrative structures. Best known for The House on Mango Street, a volume of loosely structured vignettes that has been classified as at once a novel, a short-story collection, and a series of prose poems, Cisneros seeks to create an idiom that integrates both prosaic and poetic syntax. “Cisneros is a quintessentially American writer, unafraid of the sentimental; avoiding the clichés of magical realism, her work bridges the gap between Anglo and Hispanic,” remarked Aamer Hussein in the Times Literary Supplement.
In all her works, Cisneros incorporates Latino dialect, impressionistic metaphors, and social commentary in ways that reveal the fears and doubts unique to Latinas and women in general. She told Mary B.W. Tabor in a New York Times interview: “I am a woman and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power. They are the things that give it sabor [flavor], the things that give it picante [spice].” However, it was not easy for Cisneros to get to the point where she felt comfortable with asserting herself as a feminist writer because of her upbringing. “I think that growing up Mexican and feminist is almost a contradiction in terms,” she told Martha Satz in Southwest Review. “For a long time—and it’s true for many writers and women like myself who have grown up in a patriarchal culture, like the Mexican culture—I felt great guilt betraying that culture. Your culture tells you that if you step out of line, if you break these norms, you are becoming anglicized, you’re becoming the malinche—influenced and contaminated by these foreign influences and ideas. But I’m very pleased to be alive among the current generation of women. Many writers are redefining our Mexicanness and it’s important if we’re going to come to terms with our Mexican culture and our American one as well. … I think many of my stories come from dealing with straddling two cultures, and certainly it’s something I’m going to deal with in future stories.”
In an interview on the NEA Arts magazine Web site with Rebecca Gross, Cisneros commented on her goals as a writer: “My whole life is a mission. Every time I pick up the pen it’s in service, and I do a meditation so that I can be of service. I’m very lucky in this way; I see my work as work of the spirit. I cannot disconnect creative writing from spiritual work, just like someone being in a monastery or meditation sangha. It’s all the same to me. … [In my work] I hope that people see their story being written about, and it gives them new options and possibilities to imagine something outside of what television or what the school counselor could imagine for them.”
The House on Mango Street
Born in Chicago, Cisneros was the only daughter among seven children. Concerning her childhood, she recalled that because her brothers attempted to control her and expected her to assume a traditional female role, she often felt like she had “seven fathers.” The family frequently moved between the United States and Mexico. Cisneros periodically wrote poems and stories throughout her childhood and adolescence, but it was not until she attended the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop in the late 1970s that she realized her experiences as a Latina woman were unique and outside the realm of dominant American culture.
Following this realization, Cisneros decided to write about conflicts directly related to her upbringing, including divided cultural loyalties, feelings of alienation, and degradation associated with poverty. Incorporating these concerns into The House on Mango Street, a work that took nearly five years to complete, Cisneros created the character Esperanza, a poor, Latina adolescent who longs for a room of her own and a house of which she can be proud. Esperanza ponders the disadvantages of choosing marriage over education, the importance of writing as an emotional release, and the sense of confusion associated with growing up. In the story “Hips,” for example, Esperanza agonizes over the repercussions of her body’s physical changes: “One day you wake up and there they are. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the key in the ignition. Ready to take you where?” Written in a simple style that makes each section of the book sound like a prose poem, the pieces in The House on Mango Street won praise for their lyrical narratives, vivid dialogue, and powerful descriptions.
In a 2016 interview with Aspen Times Online contributor Andrew Travers, Cisneros remarked on the continuing response she receives from readers on this novel that was written over three decades before. Much of this communication about The House on Mango Street is from schoolchildren in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Cisneros noted in the interview that she did not write the book for an audience that young. “I wrote it for very sophisticated at-risk youth who had lived intense lives. So I’m a little shocked. But I also wrote it so that they could understand and that the more mature parts would fly over their heads if they didn’t understand it. So I get all kinds of response.” Cisneros added: “The thing that’s most moving for me is when I hear from a person who is most unlike me—a man, a man from another culture, a reader in Japan or Egypt or Germany. Someone in New York who is not a Latina but identifies with people like me in a new way. That’s the most moving.”
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-two narratives revolving around numerous Mexican-American characters living near San Antonio, Texas. Ranging from a few paragraphs to several pages, the stories in this volume contain the interior monologues of individuals who have been assimilated into American culture despite their sense of loyalty to Mexico. In “Never Marry a Mexican,” for example, a young Latina begins to feel contempt for her white lover because of her emerging feelings of inadequacy and cultural guilt. And in the title story, a Mexican woman deluded by fantasies of a life similar to that of American soap operas ventures into Texas to marry an American. When she discovers that her husband and marriage have little in common with her TV dreams, she is forced to reappraise her life.
Reviewers have praised the author’s vivid characters and distinctive prose in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Noting Cisneros’s background as a poet, Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Barbara Kingsolver remarked that “Cisneros has added length and dialogue and a hint of plot to her poems and published them in a stunning collection.” Writing in the Nation, Patricia Hart claimed that “Cisneros breathes narrative life into her adroit, poetic descriptions, making them mature, fully formed works of fiction.” Hart also commended Cisneros’s “range of characters” as “broad and lively.” Kingsolver, who stated that “nearly every sentence contains an explosive sensory image,” concluded that Cisneros “takes no prisoners and has not made a single compromise in her language.” Similarly, Bebe Moore Campbell, discussing the work in the New York Times Book Review, felt that “the author seduces with precise, spare prose and creates unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page and hang out with for a little while.”
Caramelo
Eighteen years after the publication of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros published her second novel, Caramelo. In what one Publishers Weekly contributor considered to be a “major literary event,” this novel, like her first, is heavily autobiographical; it also took nine years for her to write. Although much of it draws on her own life, Cisneros uses other people’s stories as a resource, too. She explained to Adriana Lopez in Library Journal: “I did a lot of research on people, like an ethnographer. … Much of my book is based on real things. Even if I made things up, I could never match what happens in real life.” The main character is a teenager named Celaya Reyes, or “Layla,” who is the only daughter of eight siblings, similar to Cisneros. The story is framed by a trip from Chicago to Mexico City, where the family is going to visit Layla’s grandparents in a large reunion involving three generations of Reyeses. The narrative goes back and forth between past and present as Layla thinks about her own life—including her desire to assert her true identity within her huge family—and the story of her grandmother, Soledad, who was abandoned as a young girl and who eventually becomes the bitter woman Layla thinks of as “Awful Grandmother.” The tales are tied together by a rebozo caramelo, a shawl that has been passed down through the generations from the grandmother’s mother to Layla. Whenever Layla touches her lips to the tassels, the smell and taste of it evokes strong memories in her of a family that has experienced both great joy and great tragedy.
Critics of Caramelo were impressed with Cisneros’s descriptive powers and realistic bilingual dialogue. For example, a Kirkus Reviews critic praised “Cisneros’ keen eye [which] enlivens descriptions of everything from Chicago’s famed Maxwell Street flea market to Soledad’s sun-stroked house on Destiny Street”; the reviewer also enjoyed the “casually bilingual text.” Lopez appreciated the depiction of Mexico City back in the 1920s “when it was the ‘Paris of the New World.’” Although a Publishers Weekly contributor felt that the scenes of “cross-generational trauma and rapture” might seem “repetitive” at times, the reviewer asserted that the novel is “a landmark work.” Lauding Caramelo for being “raucous, spirited, and brimming with energy,” Library Journal contributor Barbara Hoffert particularly enjoyed the way Cisneros weaves all of the elements of her story together “like the fabric in the caramelo.”
My Wicked, Wicked Ways and Loose Woman
Cisneros is primarily known for her fiction, but her poetry has also gained recognition. My Wicked, Wicked Ways is a collection of sixty poems. “Cisneros’s poems are intrinsically narrative, but not large, meandering paragraphs,” explained Gary Soto in the Bloomsbury Review. “She writes deftly with skill and idea, in the ‘show-me-don’t-tell-me’ vein, and her points leave valuable impressions.” Writing in Belles Lettres, Andrea Lockett commented: “Particularly alluring here are the daring, perceptive, and sometimes rough-hewn expressions about being a modern woman.”
In her 1994 poetry collection, Loose Woman, Cisneros offers a portrait of a fiercely proud, independent woman of Mexican heritage. “Cisneros probes the extremes of perceptions and negotiates the boundary regions that define the self,” remarked Susan Smith Nash in a World Literature Today review of the collection. Discussing her poetry with David Mehegan of the Boston Globe, Cisneros stated that her poetry “is almost a journal of daily life as woman and writer. I’m always aware of being on the frontier. Even if I’m writing about Paris or Sarajevo, I’m still writing about it from this border position that I was raised in.”
Have You Seen Marie?
A decade after publication of Caramelo, Cisneros returned to fiction with a picture book for adults, illustrated by Ester Hernandez. This book has autobiographical overtones, as it depicts a fifty-three-year-old woman named Sandra who is lost and adrift after the death of her mother, just as the author was. Sandra’s friend Roz comes to visit her in San Antonio, Texas, from Tacoma, Washington, bringing along her black-and-white cat, Marie. But no sooner has Roz arrived than Marie runs off. Sandra and Roz walk the streets of the city looking for the missing cat; they post flyers and ask strangers, “Have you seen Marie?” Soon this search takes on an urgency and a metaphorical meaning and Sandra has found a new purpose. During their search, the women encounter a wide assortment of residents of San Antonio, and through them Sandra begins to come to terms with the feeling of loss, realizing via the lost cat how much she misses her own departed mother.
A Hispanic Reader Web site contributor had praise for Have You Seen Marie?, noting that it “provides a unique glimpse into a quirky neighborhood and heartfelt look into grieving.” Similarly, online New York Journal of Books reviewer Nancy Carty Lepri commented: “This story offers insight to those who are grieving over a beloved family member, friend, or pet, to show that through loss, the love of the departed is always with us.” A Boston Bibliophile Web site writer observed: “This book would be a lovely, thoughtful gift for yourself or for anyone you know who is experiencing loss,” while an online Modern Latina contributor felt that Cisneros and Hernandez “bring to life the story about death, grief, and the desire to move forward.” The contributor added: “This book is a wonderful gift to share with someone who is experiencing the pain of losing a loved one.” A Kirkus Reviews critic also commended the therapeutic effects of Have You Seen Marie?, concluding: “This warmhearted tale offers comfort to anyone coping with the loss of a loved one.”
A House of My Own
Cisneros turns to nonfiction and memoir with A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, a patchwork of essay-like memoirs of her life from 1984 to 2014. She blends stories of her family in Chicago with insights into the difficulties she has experienced in her professional life. Throughout it all is the theme of finding one’s true home, both physically and metaphorically. The memoir was inspired in part by Cisneros’s decision to move from her home in San Antonio, Texas, to San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2013. Los Angeles Review of Books Web site contributor Sandra Ramirez felt that with this memoir, Cisneros “not only honors her womanhood, her ‘Mexicanness,’ and the lives of other women, as being instrumental in her becoming a writer, but also the poverty she experienced as a child.”
Writing in Kirkus Reviews Online, Richard Z. Santos noted that A House of My Own “serves as a memoir of [Cisneros’s] restlessness and her movement toward happiness.” Santos further commented: “This new volume reveals an even greater scope to her talent and thoughtfulness. The topics of these essays range from tributes to authors or artists she admires to moving explorations of her family’s history and her reflections on the world around her.” Reviewing A House of My Own in Library Journal, Pam Kingsbury called it a “fierce portrait of an artist and her quest,” as well as the “best memoir of the year.” Further praise came from Booklist critic Donna Seaman, who noted: “Cisneros writes frankly and tenderly of independence and connection, injustice and transcendence, resilience and creativity, the meaning of home and the writer’s calling.” A Publishers Weekly contributor commented: “Cisneros vividly evokes the many stages of her life and the places she’s been,” and a Kirkus Reviews writer dubbed this a “charming, tender memoir from an acclaimed Mexican-American author.” Women’s Review of Books writer Miroslava Chavez-Garcia also had a high assessment of the memoir, observing: “In A House of My Own, Sandra Cisneros chronicles her journey toward building a true home. Honest and unapologetic, this collection of creative works, lectures, and introductions to books allows the reader to peer into the bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, and closets where Cisneros has stored her personal treasures and the memories accumulated over a lifetime. … Cisneros reminds us that a home, literal or figurative, is a precious space that needs cultivation and protection. It is not fixed in time or space but can be transported in the heart and the mind over vast landscapes and terrains.”
[open new]
In a reprint of Cisneros’ story that appeared in the Washington Post in 2015, her 2018 Puro Amor, a bilingual chapbook about the love for animals and for art, is her first published fiction for adults since 2002. With line drawings by Cisneros, the story follows Mr. and Mrs. de Rivera (clearing referring to artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera), who open their Mexican home to as many homeless animals as they can, amassing a menagerie of dogs, cats, monkeys, lizards, a fawn, a macaw, and a tarantula. Representing unconditional love, in a family where the husband has a wandering eye, the animals rub against the Missus’s belly, sleep in the bed, and on her pillows. Just as she has patience with the animals, she has patience with Mr. de Rivera. Cisneros writes that Mister was used to being adored, to have Missus look at him in the same way the animals looked at her, with devotion and gratitude. The couple also refuses to conform to society’s expectations, feeling like orphans in the world, so they invite in animal orphans, as they also invite famous people and Communists into their home for all-night parties.
The bilingual book presents the English translation next to the Spanish pages. In Women’s Review of Books, Noelle McManus explores Cisneros’ depiction of Frida Kahlo, who died at 47, before she became famous, “Cisneros’s focus, then, is to humanize the Frida that lived and suffered…Cisneros dives into Frida’s identity without hesitation, taking bold steps in imagining the inner workings of her mind. She does this wonderfully, breathes life into a woman so often deified. In Kirkus Reviews, a critic called it a beautiful short story in a thin volume, and “This is a good, touching story about the power of bonds and unreasonable love, but to a certain extent it leaves the reader wishing for more.”
Cisneros’ 2021 Martita, I Remember You is her first novel in nearly a decade. In the story, Mexican American Corina unearths a stack of letters from the friends she met when she ran off to Paris twenty years ago to become a writer. Leaving her unapproving parents in Chicago, the 20-year-old skipped around the City of Light, bonding with Marta from Buenos Aires and Paola from Italy. Her money running out, Corina sleeps on the floor of Marta’s modest apartment, yet the women absorb as much as they can of the vibrant, but often racist, city enjoying the joie de vivre, a life of freedom and independence. Corina eventually leaves and returns to Chicago, where she had a life of marriage, divorce, two daughters, and job at the gas company. Further letters reveal Marta and Paola’s adventures in Paris after Corina left.
Cisneros based the story in part on her trip to Europe in her late 20s on her National Endowment for the Arts grant. “Some of the stories in the book are mine, and others are composites of the women I met and the stories they told me. I guess I’m all three women characters, but also none of them,” she told Richard Z. Santos in Texas Monthly. Referring to the memories of those days, Cisneros said: “Those memories stay and there’s something transformational about them. Sometimes people stay with us for reasons we don’t understand until we can write about them. I think of the story as a letter unwritten.”
Martita, I Remember You is presented as a long short story, paired with the original Spanish version. “Tightly written, unfolding in a controlled spool of memory, the story is told in a combination of correspondence and narrative vignettes,” a Kirkus Reviews critic reported. In Booklist, Donna Seaman remarked: “Every heart-revving scene is sensuously and incisively rendered, cohering into a vivid, tender, funny, bittersweet, and haunting episodic tale of peril, [and] courage.” A writer in Publishers Weekly reported: “Cisneros’s language and rhythm of her prose reverberate with Corina’s longing for her youth and unfulfilled promise.”
Cisneros published Woman without Shame in 2022, her first book of poetry in 28 years. A collection of honest and humorous songs, elegies, and poems that chronicle her journey toward rebirth, the book offers “poems pithy and lush, brash and sexy, compassionate and outraged,” according to Donna Seaman in Booklist, that reflect on Cisneros’ family, lovers, neighbors, and injustices. Seaman added that “Cisneros seeks beauty and serenity, delighting in solitude,” in a book that also offers stinging social critique and frank observations about sex for a saucy and incisive collection.
Frequently incorporating Spanish words and assessments of everyday life, Cisneros comments on moments of wonder, her journey from the United States south to a life in Mexico, her ancestors, body image, religion, politics, sex, aging, and death. The plainspoken, affecting poems offer blunt observations and heartfelt prayers that “reveal a writer fortified by a sometimes difficult past who has come to embrace the freedom that comes with self-acceptance,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
[close new]
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Chesla, Elizabeth L., Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street,” Research & Education Association (Piscataway, NJ), 1996.
Cisneros, Sandra, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2015.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 69, 1992, Volume 118, 1999.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 152: American Novelists since World War II, Fourth Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.
Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Herrera-Sobek, María, and Helena María Viramontes, editors, Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature, Arte Publico Press (Houston, TX), 1988, pp. 233-244.
Horno-Delgado, Asuncion, editor, Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Reading, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1989, pp. 62-71.
Mirriam-Goldberg, Caryn, Sandra Cisneros: Latina Writer and Activist, Enslow (Springfield, NJ), 1998.
Modern American Literature, 5th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.
Reesman, Jeanne Campbell, Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1997, pp. 278-287.
Reference Guide to American Literature, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.
Short Story Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.
Singley, Carol J., and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1993, pp. 295-312.
PERIODICALS
Belles Lettres, summer, 1993, Andrea Lockett, p. 51.
Bloomsbury Review, July-August, 1988, Gary Soto, review of My Wicked, Wicked Ways, p. 21.
Booklist, September 15, 2015, Donna Seaman, review of A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, p. 16; July 1, 2021, Donna Seaman, review of Martita, I Remember You, p. 23; August 1, 2022, Donna Seaman, review of Woman without Shame, p. 14.
Books & Culture, January-February, 2016, D.L. Mayfield, review of A House of My Own, p. 32.
Boston Globe, May 17, 1994, David Mehegan, p. 73.
Canadian Review of American Studies, fall, 1992, Maria Elena de Valdés, “In Search of Identity in Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street,” pp. 55-72.
Children’s Literature, Volume 23, 1995, Reuben Sánchez, “Remembering Always to Come Back: The Child’s Wished-For Escape and the Adult’s Self-Empowered Return in Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street,” pp. 221-241.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2002, review of Caramelo, p. 972; September 15, 2012, review of Have You Seen Marie?; August 1, 2015, review of A House of My Own; August 1, 2018, review of Puro Amor; September 1, 2021, review of Martita, I Remember You.
Library Journal, September 15, 2002, Barbara Hoffert, review of Caramelo, p. 88, and Adriana Lopez, “Caramel-Colored Prose: Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo,” p. 90; September 1, 2015, Pam Kingsbury, review of A House of My Own, p. 101.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 28, 1991, Barbara Kingsolver, review of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, p. 3.
MELUS, summer, 1996, Harryette Mullen, “‘A Silence Between Us Like a Language ’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories,” pp. 3-20.
Mester, fall, 1993, Juan Daniel Busch, “Self-Baptising the Wicked Esperanza: Chicana Feminism and Cultural Contact in The House on Mango Street,” pp. 123-134.
Midwest Quarterly, autumn, 1995, Thomas Matchie, “Literary Continuity in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street,” pp. 67-79.
Nation, May 6, 1991, Patricia Hart, review of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, p. 597.
National Catholic Reporter, January 15, 2016, Diane Scharper, review of A House of My Own, p. 16.
New York Times, January 7, 1993, Mary B.W. Tabor, interview with Sandra Cisneros, p. C10.
New York Times Book Review, May 26, 1991, Bebe Moore Campbell, review of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, p. 6.
Publishers Weekly, August 12, 2002, review of Caramelo, p. 275; September 7, 2015, review of A House of My Own, p. 60; July 26, 2021, review of Martita, I Remember You, p. 58; August 15, 2022, review of Woman without Shame, p. 49.
Southern Review, spring, 1997, “Returning to One’s House: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros,” pp. 166-185.
Southwest Review, spring, 1997, Martha Satz, “Returning to One’s House: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros,” pp. 166-185.
Texas Monthly, October, 2015, Jeff Salamon, review of A House of My Own, p. 46; November 2021, Richard Z. Santos, “Piece de Revision,” interview with Sandra Cisneros, p. 53.
Times Literary Supplement, August 13, 1993, Aamer Hussein, p. 18.
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, fall, 1995, Jean Wyatt, “On Not Being La Malinche: Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry a Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’” pp. 243-271.
Women’s Review of Books, January-February, 2016, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, review of A House of My Own, p. 25; January-February 2019, Noelle McManus, review of Puro Amor, p. 30.
World Literature Today, winter, 1995, Susan Smith Nash, review of Loose Woman, p. 145.
ONLINE
Aspen Times Online, http://www.aspentimes.com/ (April 24, 2016), Andrew Travers, author interview.
BookPage, https://bookpage.com/reviews/ (July 14, 2016), Julie Hale, review of Vintage Cisneros.
Boston Bibliophile, http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/ (January 18, 2013), Marie Cloutier, review of Have You Seen Marie?
Dallas Morning News, http://www.dallasnews.com/ (October 10, 2015), Karen M. Thomas, review of A House of My Own.
Hispanic Reader, https://hispanicreader.com/ (October 14, 2012), review of Have You Seen Marie?
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (October 8, 2016), Richard Z. Santos, author interview.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (December 8, 2015), Sandra Ramirez, “Mansion of the Spirit.”
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (October 4, 2015), Rigoberto Gonzalez, review of A House of My Own.
Modern Latina, http://modernlatina.com/ (February 25, 2013), Jasmine Colon, review of Have You Seen Marie?
NEA Arts Online, https://www.arts.gov/ (June 11, 2016), Rebecca Gross, “Sandra Cisneros: Recognizing Ourselves.”
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (May 23, 2016), Nancy Carty Lepri, review of Have You Seen Marie?
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com/ (September 2, 2021), “Sandra Cisneros Loves to Read About Women Waging Battle,” p. 8(L).
Sandra Cisneros Home Page, http://www.sandracisneros.com (May 23, 2016).
About my life and work
I was born in Chicago in 1954, the third child and only daughter in a family of seven children. I studied at Loyola University of Chicago (B.A. English, 1976) and the University of Iowa (M.F.A. Creative Writing, 1978).
I've worked as a teacher and counselor to high-school dropouts, as an artist-in-the-schools where I taught creative writing at every level except first grade and pre-school, a college recruiter, an arts administrator, and as a visiting writer at a number of universities including the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
My books include a chapbook of poetry, Bad Boys (Mango Press, 1980); two full-length poetry books, My Wicked Wicked Ways (Third Woman Press, 1987; Random House, 1992) and Loose Woman (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); a collection of stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Random House, 1991); a children's book, Hairs/Pelitos (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); the novels The House on Mango Street (Vintage, 1991) and Caramelo (Knopf, 2002), and the picture book Have You Seen Marie? (Knopf 2012). A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) is a collection of personal essays, and Puro Amor (Sarabande 2018) is a bilingual story that I also illustrated. Forthcoming works include the Spanish and English story Martita, I Remember You/Martita te recuerdo (Vintage 2021) and a poetry collection, Mujer Sin Vergüenza (2022).
The House on Mango Street, first published in 1984, won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 1985 and is required reading in middle schools, high schools, and universities across the country. It has sold over six million copies since its initial publication and is still selling strongly. 2009 marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of The House on Mango Street in the United States and I traveled to twenty cities to celebrate with readers. I am currently working with composer Derek Bermel on House on Mango Street, The Opera. Prior to the pandemic, previews of the opera were held at at Yale and Chautauqua.
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories was awarded the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction of l99l, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and was selected as a noteworthy book of the year by The New York Times and The American Library Journal, and nominated Best Book of Fiction for l99l by The Los Angeles Times.
Loose Woman won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers' Award.
Caramelo was selected as a notable book of the year by several journals including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Times. In 2005 Caramelo was awarded the Premio Napoli and was short listed for the Dublin International IMPAC Award. It was also nominated for the Orange Prize in England.
Vintage Cisneros, published in 2004, is a compilation of selections from my works.
Have You Seen Marie?, a picture book for grown-ups with illustrations by Ester Hernández, was published by Knopf in 2012. The book is now available in eBook and paperback editions.
A House of My Own: Stories From My Life was released in 2015. It is now available in paperback. The collection of essays won the 2016 PEN Center USA Literary Award for creative nonfiction.
My books have been translated into twenty-five languages, including Spanish, Galician, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, and, most recently, into Arabic, Greek, Farsi, Thai, and Serbo-Croatian. Each of my books has been translated into Spanish and is available in the U.S., and they're available as audio books read by me.
Caramelo and The House on Mango Street have been selected for many One City One Book projects in numerous communities including Los Angeles, Miami, Fort Worth, El Paso, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Santa Ana, and Kansas City with several more in the works.
In 1995, I was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and I subsequently helped organize the Latino MacArthur Fellows — Los MacArturos — a caucus of Latino awardees united in community service.
I've received many other honors, including the Texas Institute of Letters Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, l984; and an Illinois Artists Fellowship, l984; the Chicano Short Story Award from the University of Arizona, l986; the Roberta Holloway Lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley, l988; two National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowships in poetry and prose, 1982, 1988; an honorary Doctor of Letters from the State University of New York at Purchase, l993; an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Loyola University, Chicago, 2002; and honorary degrees from DePaul University in 2014 and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016; the Texas Medal of the Arts, 2003; the Fifth Star Award presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, 2015; Tia Chucha’s Lifetime Achievement Award; the Fairfax Prize in 2016. I received the Ford Foundation's Art of Change Fellowship and was recognized as part of The Frederick Douglas 200 in 2018. Most recently, I was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation.
I founded both the Macondo Foundation, an association of socially engaged writers, and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, a grant-giving institution that served Texas writers for fifteen years.
Currently, I live with two San Miguelense chihuahuas, Luz de Mi Vida and Osvaldo Amor, a xolo-chihuahua named Nahui Ollin, and a new addition, a dachshund—Leopoldine Puffina.
Sandra Cisneros
USA flag (b.1954)
Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954 in Chicago) is a Latina author and poet best known for her novel The House on Mango Street. She is also the author of Caramelo, published by Knopf in 2002, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987) and a collection of poems, Loose Woman. Her books and poetry have been translated into over a dozen languages, including Spanish, Galician, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, and, most recently, into Greek, Thai, and Serbo-Croatian. Much of her writing is influenced by her Mexican heritage.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Novels
The House on Mango Street (1991)
Caramelo (2002)
Martita, I Remember You (2021)
thumbthumbthumb
Collections
My Wicked Wicked Ways (poems) (1987)
Woman Hollering Creek (1991)
Loose Woman (poems) (1994)
Vintage Cisneros (2004)
Woman Without Shame (poems) (2022)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumb
Picture Books hide
Hairs/Pelitos (1994)
Have You Seen Marie? (2012)
thumbthumb
Chapter Books hide
Puro Amor (2018)
thumb
Non fiction hide
A House of My Own (2015)
November 2022
Sandra Cisneros
October 25, 2022 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment
By Julie Etra
I knew nothing about Sandra Cisneros when my Spanish teacher in the United States suggested I read La Casa en Mango Street (The House on Mango Street). Cisneros is a Chicago born Chicana, so the 1984 book was originally written in English when Cisneros was 30. I read it in Spanish as part of my ongoing study of Mexican culture and language; there have been at least three Spanish translations – one in 1994 by the renowned Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska. Coincidentally a great article and interview with Cisneros was recently published in the The New Yorker in September of this year http://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/sandra-cisneros-may-put-you-in-a-poem). To save you from fighting with The New Yorker’s paywall, I’ll be quoting from the article.
Cisneros is perhaps best known for her poetry, although I am a fan of both Casa and the collection of short stories Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991; translated by Liliana Valenzuela in 1996 as El arroyo de la Llorona y otros cuentos).
Although I read both of these books in Spanish, Cisneros has the unique bilingual knack of bridging the two languages, inserting Spanish translations of the English. The 2021 bilingual paperback Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo, is written in English on one side but the reader can flip the pages to read the Spanish translation. Clever.
Technically speaking, Cisneros is not a Mexican writer since she was born in the United States. She grew up in a poor neighborhood on the west side of Chicago, the only daughter of a Mexican father and Mexican American mother, surrounded by six brothers. According to Cisneros, she felt isolated as a child and was lumped in with her brothers, described as siete hijos instead of seis hijos y una hija (seven boys instead of six boys and a girl) by her father. Her father was an upholsterer, her mother a book lover.
Advertisement
Report this ad
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s her father took the family back and forth to Mexico on a frequent basis; thus she developed the self-identity schism between the two cultures. This was further exacerbated when in 1976 she entered the writer’s program at the Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences where she continued to feel like a misfit. She went on to write Casa and then began teaching in San Antonio where she lived for 15 years and founded the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, named after the fictitious town in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
Cisneros never married nor had children, her rationale being that she did not want to be distracted from her writing and that she was a bit old fashioned in her belief in the sanctity of marriage in that she didn’t want to have a future divorce. According to The New Yorker, she is relieved and apparently happy that she never selected the wrong guy: “It’s hard to live with someone, and it’s hard to live alone. But I prefer living alone. … I’ve never seen a marriage that is as happy as my living alone. My writing is my child and I don’t want anything to come between us.” She has said that the greatest love of her life was her dog Chamaco.
Tired of living in San Antonio, and in particular provincial Texas, she returned to her mother’s Guanajuato roots and now resides in San Miguel de Allende, México, immersing herself in Mexican culture, but not without challenges. She did not take much time to explore the town before she moved there following an auspicious visit.
When the interviewer from The New Yorker remarks, “So you decided to move to San Miguel de Allende,” Cisnero answers, “Yes, I came here. I didn’t know the town was colonial and had a very colonial writing program, all white and expensive and structured in a very colonial way. I didn’t realize it was San Miguel apartheid, and, when I told them that, they were offended and shocked, so I lost my enthusiasm for the book fair. I’m going to be onstage there next spring. I’m only going to do it if I can donate my honorarium to the Spanish-language portion of the fair, so, you know, that’s my way of making my peace with them. I came because this is the land of my mother’s people. I wanted to investigate those roots.”
Advertisements
Report this ad
She named her house in San Miguel Casa Coatlicue. In Nahuatl it means “Serpent Skirt”; Coatlicue is the Nahua mother goddess, symbol of the earth as both creator and destroyer, mother of the gods and the goddess of childbirth, fertility, life, and death, and one of the most important Aztec or Nahua gods. A fitting name for a house of this remarkable and independent woman.
One of my favorite short stories in Woman Hollering Creek (a real creek located behind her house in San Antonio) is “Ojos de Zapata,” (Eyes of Zapata), as told by Inés Alfaro Aguilar, the primera mujer (first woman) of the famous Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. Reports indicate that Zapata had anywhere from 9 to 16 “wives” (some of whom he may actually have married); he did not marry Inés, with whom he fathered at least three sons and one daughter.
(That of course stimulated my interest in both Zapata and Inés and led me down the rabbit hole of a chapter of Mexican history before I eventually returned to Cisneros’ next story.) “Ojos de Zapata” is fascinating not only from Inés’ perspective as the neglected “wife” of this famous revolutionary general, but for its sensual descriptions of a time, a place, and a relationship.
Back to The New Yorker interview regarding her residence in San Miguel:
Interviewer: “Is this it? Do you think you’ve finally found home?”
Cisneros: “I think I have one more house in me.”
Interviewer: “Where would it be?”
Cisneros: “Oaxaca, maybe.”
Sandra Cisneros on the Me Too Movement, Narrative Voice, and The House on Mango Street
In Conversation with Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
By Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
November 6, 2020
Changing languages, nations, media—these are the directions of literature today. Is it possible to write in English with Spanish meanings, or vice versa? What is it like to write in English in México—or Spanish in France? How can a place influence the rhythms and tones of words, phrases, and books? I enjoy teaching Sandra Cisneros in Puerto Rico, where changing languages is not unusual or exotic, but a part of daily life. Amid the violence and absurdity and incongruity of monolingualism, in her work my students often hear their own voices, discover a model to tell their own stories. In July 2018, I caught up with her in San Miguel de Allende, México.
Article continues after advertisement
The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard
Remove Ads
*
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera: When you enrolled at the University of Iowa for the MFA program, was there a transition period or did you go right out of undergrad?
Sandra Cisneros: I wish that there had been. I was really too young to go from undergraduate to graduate school. I was 21, because my birthday is in December. And I was also too young as far as the ways of the world. When I look back and think about it, I feel like I was 12. It was really a big kick in the nalgas for me to go there.
I had experiences as an undergrad that I want to write about that aren’t a secret. I do need to write about these things that were very damaging to me. When I was an undergrad, I had an affair with my professor, which, you know, professors think that’s what you can do. But it really was unfair to the student because the professors are in a position of power. And I talk about it with young women; it’s not a secret. But it was very, very damaging to me, especially since this relationship was—how do I put it—he was very tenacious in keeping this relationship going when I was trying to cut it off by going to Iowa. But he was very persistent. I wasn’t able to detach myself until after I finished at Iowa. I had this secret life when I was a junior through Iowa that tormented me and that I wrote about in my poetry. And it’s why my writing is always dealing with sexuality and wickedness—and it was conflictive for me who had grown up as this virginal girl from the barrio who had been so protected with six brothers and a conservative father.
Article continues after advertisement
Remove Ads
And then I had an affair with a writer-professor, or a poet-professor. And at that time, with all the poets, it was just accepted that, you know, boys will be boys. It was not seen as sexual harassment: there was none of the “me too” movement. All of this abuse of power was happening but there was no way to call it out. There was no way to have a voice and protect yourself, which is why I am so supportive of the “me too” movement now. But at that time, I was too young. I may have been at the age of consent, but it wasn’t a relationship of people with equal power.
It damaged me for decades.
I want to write about it in my next collection of essays. My last book was more about houses thematically, so there was no place to talk about it. But I am not ashamed or proud. But it is something that influenced and damaged me. And it certainly became a theme in my writing. I couldn’t write about it or have people listen or guide me during the time that I was at Iowa. When I tried to write these confessional first-person poems—of course I was writing in voices that weren’t mine—trying to imitate Richard Hugo and James Wright. But I wasn’t getting anywhere with these big man voices. And I was going through things that were really tearing me up inside. Eventually I wound up going the opposite route, taking a younger voice and a different shame. I was ashamed of the life I was living but I couldn’t write about it. To get past my own auto-censura I went to a younger voice, a younger self, and a younger shame, and that’s how House on Mango Street was born.
JHM: I am glad the MFA took you out of that horrible situation at Loyola.
SC: No, it didn’t! I went away—four hours—but this man, this poet, kept pursuing me. And kept visiting me, until really the end. When I cut it off, I was in a car with him and he got physically violent. He drove the car up to the curb and almost ran into a telephone pole. I realized that this man could kill me. I had to just pretend to go along with it. And I cut it off once I was safe.
Article continues after advertisement
Remove Ads
I had this secret life when I was a junior through Iowa that tormented me and that I wrote about in my poetry. It’s why my writing is always dealing with sexuality and wickedness.
There was a lot of drinking in his life. I just needed to get out of it.
I wrote a letter to his wife when I was at Iowa. This was the most honest piece of writing I did. But he was very obsessive and tenacious. I was just a kid.
It was my first real serious relationship. It left me damaged for a long, long time. Even now, in my 60s, I have to work to be forgiving and to forgive myself, and to ask forgiveness because I think they are all interrelated.
I think that there were a lot of disastrous relationships and beautiful relationships that shape who I am at 65. I have to acknowledge them all and I wanted to write about them. I’ve written about them in some ways in my fiction and poetry but to write about them in nonfiction I have to be in a place where I am not angry. And I am in that place now.
JHM: Did that change in cultural surroundings, from Chicago to Iowa, shape how you write and experience emotions?
Article continues after advertisement
Remove Ads
SC: Being in Iowa took me out of what was familiar. At 21 I hadn’t been anywhere, except to Mexico. I thought all of the United States was like Chicago. Going to Iowa was a real kick in the pants. I felt such discomfort there. And that’s not to say that I hadn’t felt that discomfort in Chicago, but I couldn’t name it. Being in Iowa made me see my neighborhood, my gender, my ethnicity, the way I spoke, the way I dressed, the way I grew up, as foreign. And so I had to examine it. What it is that makes me very different from my classmates? And from that discomfort and from that sense of vergüenza that I felt at being from a casa humilde, House on Mango Street was born.
I could feel it, see it. Being in Iowa truly exacerbated that discomfort.
I’ve written about it in an essay “Notes From a Native Daughter” published in Chicago Magazine. It’s about the discomfort of class and color and sometimes gender. I felt that discomfort in my own city, too. Iowa put it into focus. And it was shortly after being there, after being there a semester, that I was able to name and write about that place of difference. And to write about that vergüenza became a kind of challenge, a weapon for me against my classmates.
I wanted to write something that they couldn’t tell me I was wrong.
It gave me a voice, after being silent for a semester. This is what I know. You can’t tell me I’m wrong.
Article continues after advertisement
Remove Ads
Since then, when I teach writing, I ask people to think about things that make them different from anyone in the room. And even what makes them different from anyone in their family or their community or their gender or their sexuality. What do they know that no one else knows? Can you write from that place? That’s what gives you voice.
When we were talking about houses, I realized I didn’t have the house that everyone else had. I was ashamed to invite anyone over to my house. It was really a moment of absolute and overwhelming—me emocioné, me impactó tanto—that I felt like running out of the room and quitting the program. But I think the other side of shame is rage. And I am really proud that I come from a line of women that have that coraje because, after I got over being upset, I was able to ask myself, what do I know that no one else knows?
Even now, in my 60s, I have to work to be forgiving and to forgive myself, and to ask forgiveness because I think they are all interrelated.
And with my students, I ask them: what are ten things you know that no one else in this room knows? What do you know that no one else knows? And what do you wish you could forget? And then I say, write from that place.
JHM: Do you find that there are certain places that nourish your creativity more than others?
SC: Yes I do. And there are certain places that snuff it out. Like Chicago for me was one of those places. If you read my essay, “Notes of a Native Daughter” you’ll see why. I just didn’t feel at home in Chicago. When I come to Mexico, even though I live in a little sort of glass bubble in San Miguel, I feel happy here. I feel happy walking down the street. I feel happy going to the bank or going to mail something or buying a loaf of bread, running into people I know. There’s a joy just in being. I feel happy when I wake up and I smell the most pleasant memories of my childhood. Waking up in Mexico is a very distinct smell. It smells like orange rinds and fresh-baked bolillos and sewage and the soap they throw on the cement to scrub the sidewalks, it’s all kind of mixed in together. And it’s very fresco, and the sky is this wonderful blue. It’s fresco y puro. It’s a joy to wake up here. There’s also the duality of darkness, fear—you can’t have one without the other. But on the other hand, I was called to be here. I really feel ánimas—spirits—or whatever’s out there called me to be here. I don’t why I’m here. I don’t know if I’ll always feel it.
I don’t feel completely safe in Mexico as a woman. But I feel I belong.
I’m very much reminded that I’m a woman in this country. I’m also reminded that I’m a woman of a certain age. Now I am madrecita. And in Mexico there’s nothing that’s more holy than madre. I am addressed as madrecita. It’s nice to arrive at a certain age and have more respect than a man your age.
Here I feel that I’ve ascended to the level of diosas. Like the Virgen de Guadalupe. There’s a respect.
JHM: What is it like for you to travel in Europe and in Latin America—do you have many invitations to lecture?
SC: The French, well. I just feel like the French don’t get me. I am kind of like an orphan when it comes to Latino Letters because my books aren’t sold in the country I live in—or elsewhere in Latin America. I’ve only recently been invited to congresos in other Latin American countries. I’m kind of a misfit, an unnatural daughter because you can’t get my books here. While I don’t speak Spanish perfectly, I present in Spanish with some English thrown in. I tell the audience, “you’re going to help me if I get stuck”. There are sometimes when I don’t have the vocabulary for, say, “dumpster” and things like that. The audiences are always very supportive and helps me.
JHM: That happens to me in class sometimes.
SC: Soy más como una curiosidad. I don’t know how people see me. My books aren’t available. I don’t know if people know who I am. It could be that they do in departments of Border Studies and that kind of thing. I am kind of a stuck in a hole.
I have a new little chapbook from Sarabande Press and my friends here who own a business want to present the book at their shop in Mexico City—Colonial Roma—and I said, “Who will come? Does anyone know who I am?” I know that in my little bubble of San Miguel there are a lot of expats, but I don’t know that Mexicans know who I am.
I was invited to Managua and this year to Peru, and I wonder why they are inviting me.
JHM: The topics you write about, I imagine that they are painful to put on paper: misplacement, hybridity, displacement, the powerlessness of being Latina in the US. Many have not heard voices like yours. You can tell the mine is rich—and it’s clear you’ve been there, and brought it out. Your work is like a glimpse at the future.
SC: Thank you, Jeffrey. I just came back from Taipei and there are a lot of people in these hybrid cultures. I met with a writer from Taipei whose parents speak Taiwanese and Japanese and she speaks the above with an accent and has inhibitions about not speaking languages perfectly. Her first language is English. We did an interview in the back seat of a car service on our way to a dance performance. There are hybrid cultures happening globally, which to me is the future, and it gives me hope for the xenophobia we are seeing.
What do they know that no one else knows? Can you write from that place? That’s what gives you voice.
I’ve thought about people from hybrid cultures as being amphibious—and that our job is to unite those communities that are apart, that have these polarities. Like those who live on land and those who live under water.
And there’s another culture: there are amphibians with wings those are los alebrijes like my friend who went to school in the US but goes to spend her summers in Taiwan and maybe vacations in Europe. And I think that’s the future.
JHM: Reminds me of students at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, who have a very distinct cultural maturity. The students are endowed with capacities that—
SC: Exactly! Students like that have a special gift.
JHM: I love the University of Puerto Rico—hybrid, bilingual learning spaces are so fertile. If Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford and so on, institutions with unlimited resources, were to do what we do here, or if they looked more like the UPR culturally and linguistically, it would be of great benefit to the communities they serve. And the nations they serve, really.
SC: It is a way of seeing the world that is lost on people who aren’t exposed to it directly. Those who are xenophobic, often don’t have access to those worlds.
JHM: Those perspectives, your perspectives, are accessible to students at UPR in very interesting ways, which is part of why I enjoy teaching your work.
SC: Thanks so much. I think there’s a lot of good writing coming up, too. I just finished reading Erika L Sánchez—her poetry Lessons from Expulsion and I’m not your perfect Mexican Daughter. I find her writing so fine. Joe Jiménez is another young writer I like a lot. There are many good writers coming up. Like José Antonio Rodríguez, people who are writing literally from the border. Or they are the border. Erika is from Chicago, so she is the border, growing up there. She’s a younger generation writing about the Chicago experience. I am always emocionada when I read journals. Angie Cruz has a journal called Aster(ix) publishing excellent writing. I love there are so many new writers I don’t know. It’s thrilling and exciting. They are doing a new fusion of cultures, Eduardo Corales, for example. I love his poetry. Natalie Díaz, there is great, great writing coming up. I am excited by all of it.
JHM: How do you feel about literature, as a practice.
SC: Every book is a prescription for what ails you. A book has to change me and make me want to write. It has to inspire me. It has to heal me. That’s why I read and that’s why I write. Literature is best when it makes us stronger human beings.
JHM: I have a quote of yours: “that voice is one of a person speaking Spanish in English. By that I mean that I write with the syntax and sensibility of Spanish, even when there isn’t a syllable of Spanish present. It’s engrained in the way I look at the world, and the way I construct sentences and stories.” What you describe appears in Vivian Cook’s Multicompetence theory.
SC: I hadn’t heard of this. At one point I thought of getting a PhD in linguistics, I am very excited by language. I didn’t do the PhD because it would have taken the time when I wrote my novel, House on Mango Street. But I am excited by language and I have this theory that there’s an archaeology to our language; we could look at our language and unearth other cultures and languages the same as if we were going through the seven layers of Troy. We could look at our language and our parents’ language and beneath that are traces of another community. This would happen for everybody, whether we’re monolingual or bilingual or trilingual. I believe that everybody’s language is based on the stones of the previous generation’s language. Kind of like the churches of Mexico City are built out of the stones of pyramids.
Every book is a prescription for what ails you. A book has to change me and make me want to write. It has to inspire me. It has to heal me.
So even if you’re a child whose ancestors came on the Mayflower, your language will offer certain influences of your town, your part or region of the US. Our families have ways of speaking and that way of speaking is also a way of seeing. If we examined phrases that are particular to our families, I believe they will give reflections of the communities we grew up in, and community of our ancestors.
I think it’s true of every single human being.
JHM: I think archaeology is a very appropriate word for what you describe.
SC: Thank you. When I was writing House on Mango Street, I handed in my manuscript and went off to live in the south of France. I zig-zagged on a eurorail pass and I had to write a letter to my friend’s mother, who was my host in Athens. She speaks Greek and her second language is Spanish. We had no common language except Spanish. I had to write to her in Spanish. I composed those letters in a little stone cabin in the south of France. I finished and said, “oh my, this letter sounds like House on Mango Street!” There isn’t much Spanish in House on Mango Street.
That’s when it occurred to me that I had been writing with the syntax of my father’s Spanish without being aware of it. It was there. It was underneath my English, it’s what makes my English unique. There’s an animism that’s probably underneath the Spanish that comes from pre-conquest languages.
If you look at the codices and their translations, you’ll see that the diminutive is there. That’s very particular to Mexican Spanish and Mexican ways of seeing the world.
JHM: I am fascinated by México. It’s a continent—a world.
SC: A universe! But I think that all of those culturas, even though the languages may have disappeared, is still there in our way of being and our way of speaking and the words we choose and the way we look at nature, and the way we speak to one-another. It’s still here.
In our house we would never say, shut the light off. We would say “close the light,” and then when I say it I am always self-conscious as I never know what’s correct. And I think that—close the light—comes from my mother, who grew up with country people who spoke Spanish.
My friends in Iowa would all laugh at me because it sounded wrong to them but it never sounded wrong to me because I grew up listening to them.
There are a lot of things in English that are carry overs from Spanish that are so particular to my family that they sound correct to me.
That’s when it occurred to me that I had been writing with the syntax of my father’s Spanish without being aware of it. It was there.
JHM: Are there any readings you return to for inspiration?
SC: I like reading Time of the Dove, I love it in English but I especially love it in Spanish. I am not very good at reading in Spanish so I always have the English and Spanish next to each other. Juan Rulfo I can read in Spanish without the English because the Spanish he uses is so colloquial.
I read Borges, Seven Nights. That’s one of my favorite bedtime books. He writes in Spanish in a way that I want to but do not have the vocabulary. I read him in English and Spanish.
JHM: When I read Borges, I get piel de gallina. There’s nothing like it. Something about it can’t be translated. The rhythm and timber of his language is so powerful.
SC: Yes! And especially those essays—Seven Nights. He was blind when he wrote them and had to memorize them. He was like Homer, blind and reciting things. He must have had tricks so he could remember. I love his transitions, how he goes from one topic to another—how his mind leaps across a chessboard.
Me da mucho ánimo, when I read him, to write nonfiction. So I like to read him. I always wanted to write my own Siete noches. I even did a lecture one time when I took seven pieces of my writing that have to do with night—stories, poetry—to do an homenaje to Borges. But I know I don’t write like Borges. Me inspira.
Another is Ámbar Past’s Dedicatorias. She writes in Spanish and English, her first language is English. Sometimes she has her text in some language that you wouldn’t get, like Japanese. I love what she’s done with Leñeteros Press. When I read her poem, Dedicatorias, I wish I could write like that. I feel like writing poetry when I read her.
JHM: When you’re writing, do you keep anything specific nearby?
SC: I write in two different places in this house. I’ve lived here two years. I decided every room would be my office. When I lived in Texas I had an office. It really didn’t make me happy. Every room has to make me feel like writing. I write in my bed, on the dining room table, in my outer living room. I write on a tiny rustic table with a pop opener on one leg. (I guess you’d say soda opener, pop is what we say in Chicago.)
I always have little altars nearby.
JHM: ¿Guadalupe?
SC: This one has Guadalupe. My great-great grandmother was a woman who could neither read nor write from the campo here in Guanajuato, a photo of her; a photo of my mother and father that’s in A House of My Own with their arms intertwined. And a photo of la Sra. Camacho de López, my textile teacher. I guess I’d have flowers around them. Brightly colored sashes on the repisa.
I always have altares, even if it’s a little altar, with a Buddha and a little ofrenda near me. I try to have them in places that I work. And I also try to light incense when I am working, to remind me my guardians and ancestors are with me in the work I do. I do a meditation to honor them and to make them proud with the work I do.
JHM: Your introduction to House of My Own, about technology, was fantastic. On the road, our digital lives are uninterrupted.
SC: I don’t like opening my laptop when I’m traveling. I like having a notebook and a pen and reading emails on my phone. And my answers are brief because I don’t type with my thumbs. I like to document things on paper. I am not in communication much on the road.
I write in two different places in this house. I’ve lived here two years. I decided every room would be my office.
A friend forced me to get an Instagram account. As a frustrated visual artist, I post photographs and a phrase. That suits me when I am traveling.
JHM: How is your relationship with language now, in Mexico?
SC: My chapbook Puro Amor is a short story with the Spanish text next to the English. It is terribly appropriate to where I am now. To have the books bilingual in one edition since I’m living in Mexico. It’s the first time my drawings appear with my writing. People don’t even know I draw. That’s why I’m excited about this book with Sarabande Press.
I got a Ford Fellowship recently, “The Art of Change” fellowship, and with this I’m interviewing the undocumented or those who work with the undocumented. I’m traveling with microphones and a recorder. I’m also interviewing other artists. I don’t know what I’ll do with those, maybe a podcast. Now I’m just in the collecting stage, without knowing what I’m creating. Maybe it’s an opera or play or drama or a chorus of voices.
Sandra Cisneros is a poet, a short story writer, a novelist, and an essayist who explores the lives of working-class people. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, the National Medal of Arts, and 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her novel The House on Mango Street (1984) has sold more than six million copies, has been translated into more than 25 languages, and is required reading in elementary schools, high schools, and universities across the nation. A new book, Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo, a story told in English and in Spanish, was published in 2021. In the fall of 2022, a new collection of poetry, Woman Without Shame, Cisneros’s first collection in 28 years, was published by Knopf and by Vintage Español in a Spanish-language translation, Mujer sin vergüenza, by Liliana Valenzuela. Cisneros is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico. As a single woman, she chose to have books instead of children. She earns her living by her pen.
The Sacred Work of Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros writes to honor her ancestors, because when that’s her motivation, ego gets out of the way. Angélica Paljor profiles the celebrated author of The House on Mango Street.
Angelica Paljor
3 August 2022
Photo by Leonardo Cendamo / Getty images
Share on Facebook
Share on X
Email this Page
Sandra Cisneros has a tattoo on her left arm of “Buddhalupe”—Guanyin and the Virgin of Guadalupe fused together. The celebrated novelist identifies herself as a “Buddhalupista,” someone for whom the compassion of a bodhisattva and the Virgin of Guadalupe is the same. Or, as she puts it, her form of Buddhism “draws from the energy of the Virgin of Guadalupe and incorporates the indigenous goddesses as doorways to la luz [the light].”
Cisneros has received many accolades for her literary contributions, including the 2019 Pen/Nabakov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the 2016 National Medal of Arts, which was presented to her by then-President Barack Obama. The House on Mango Street is her best-known book, having sold more than six million copies in more than twenty languages. It sketches the tenuous time of coming of age for a Latina girl growing up in impoverished Chicago. It expresses so much of the beauty and trauma of the Latino experience that it was required reading in many American public schools for decades.
I try to use the sunrise and the sunset, depending on which one I see, as my mindfulness bell and practice.
How does Buddhism enter the life of a Latina writer like Cisneros? And how does her practice take into account the cultural context and history of the U.S. and Mexico, two bordering countries where life and literature have emerged and merged?
Cisneros was introduced to Buddhism in the same way many of us were: through a book. A friend gave her Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh. That led her to attend her first retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh in Rhinebeck, New York, and later, another one at Deer Park Monastery in San Diego County, California. “I felt I had found my spiritual path,” Cisneros says.
She took lay vows and was given a dharma name in Vietnamese, which as she remembers it meant “Home of the Ancestors.” This brought tears to her eyes and the thought that this was “la Divina Providencia!”
Cisneros also found Pema Chödrön. She listened to Pema’s teachings while she was driving, and long after she’d parked in her driveway, she would stay put in her car so she could keep listening. She loved the humility and sense of humor that Pema Chödrön and Thich Nhat Hanh displayed. She made a mindfulness practice of forgiveness a constant act.
“That’s the thing I’ve learned the most from Thich Nhat Hanh. I try to use the sunrise and the sunset, depending on which one I see, as my mindfulness bell and practice,” she says. “Every time I see the sunset, I think of all the people I am working on forgiving, and I include myself.”
In her younger years, Cisneros had periods of depression and suicidal thoughts, which in her writing she calls “funkadelics.” Researching depression experienced by Latinas, people of color, and artists, and reading the works of Native American poet laureate Joy Harjo, Pema Chödron, and Thich Nhat Hanh—all of whom she considers her spiritual gurus—helped Cisneros to transform her thoughts and emotions.
“One of the greatest things that Thich Nhat Hanh taught me is that all of these things that I am feeling are clouds,” says Cisneros. “And if you wait long enough, they just roll away. That’s so nice to know.”
width=
Photo by Keith Dannemiller
Sandra Cisneros was born and grew up on the immigrant side of Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s. The only girl among six brothers, she found solace in the library. Her father was an upholsterer who had served in World War II. Her mother was a keen finder of antiques in second-hand stores, who had wanted to be more than just a mother.
It took Cisneros nine years to write Caramelo, a novel focusing on her father and how he’d loved her unconditionally. Caramelo was supposed to be just his story, Cisneros says, yet as the writing unfolded, she felt compelled to look deeper into the lineage of his ancestors and the stories others told her in the process.
The novel is named after an unfinished rebozo (shawl) that was made by the narrator’s great-grandmother, Guillermina, just before she died. Cisneros wrote, “Even with half its fringes hanging unbraided like mermaid’s hair, it was an exquisite rebozo of five tiaras, the cloth a beautiful blend of toffee, licorice, and vanilla stripes flecked with black and white, which is why they called this design a caramelo. The shawl was slippery-soft, of an excellent quality and weight, with astonishing fringe work resembling a cascade of fireworks on a field of sunflowers, but completely unsellable because of the unfinished rapacejo [edging].”
In Caramelo, Cisneros pulls the words tight to create symmetry, space, and melody, and in the process, she braids eighty-six story strands into smooth, intricate plaits, bulging with color. Cisneros tugs together English and Spanish, and constructs and reconstructs, from very little fabric, the stories of so many people who came before her.
She writes, “Guillermina’s mother had taught her the empuntadora’s art of counting and dividing the silk strands, of braiding and knotting them into fastidious rosettes, arcs, stars, diamonds, names, dates, and even dedications and even before her, her mother taught her as her own mother had learned it, so it was as if all the mothers and daughters were at work, all one thread interlocking and double-looping, each woman learning from the women before, but adding a flourish that became her signature, then passing it on.”
The reader intuitively understands that in writing Caramelo, Cisneros is completing the shawl for Guillermina. In a sense, the novel preserves Guillermina’s art form, which is otherwise getting lost.
Cisneros is sensitive to the archeology of language. “All of our languages are built on the stones of a previous language or previous culture or previous community,” she says. “The way we construct sentences or look at the world, or say certain things that are very peculiar or particular to our family—it all comes from a legacy of other people and other communities.”
In addition to being a novelist, Cisneros is a gifted poet, and now a collection of her poems, written over the span of thirty years, is being published by Knopf and Vintage Español. Called Woman Without Shame, or Mujer sin vergüenza, it’s the voice of a mature, playful, and daring Cisneros, keen on taking off the robe of shame and being herself—as much as she can be.
width=
“I have been working my whole life not to have shame,” she says when asked about the meaning of the title. “But I’ve been given shame for being poor. I’ve been given shame for not having the right clothes. I’ve been given shame because I don’t look like the beauty on the magazine cover. For us who are people of a certain class and color and gender—tanta vergüenza, tanta vergüenza [so much shame, so much shame]. I feel that all my writing has been an attempt to erase shame.”
Cisneros is at her home in the Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende, and as the afternoon light flows through glass doors rimmed in a shade of nopal-green, she remembers the Hill of Tepeyac.
When Cisneros was a child, she played on that cerro in the northern part of central Mexico City with her brothers and cousins during family vacations. Then she returned as an adult and saw Tepeyac with the eyes of a pilgrim. Its legacy as sacred ground revealed itself to her.
For the indigenous Nahuatl-speaking people in pre-Columbian times, Tepeyac was the sacred site of the fertility goddess Tonantzin, “Our Mother.” Later Spanish colonizers converted the Aztecs by force and appropriated the temple of Tonantzin. Yet the belief system that would arise from worshiping La Virgen de Guadalupe is considered a faith intrinsically tied the Mexican identity, where aspects of the indigenous faith have survived and in some aspects thrive today.
In 1531, on Tepeyac, the Virgin Mary allegedly appeared before an indigenous man named Juan Diego and instructed him—in the Nahuatl language—to ask the local archbishop to build a chapel there in her honor. But the archbishop wasn’t sure he believed Juan Diego, so the Virgin appeared again, and this time she miraculously supplied Juan Diego with roses and an image of herself on his cotton tilmahtli. This convinced the archbishop of the legitimacy of the petition, and the chapel was constructed.
Today on Tepeyac, near the site of the original chapel, stands the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where Juan Diego’s tilmahtli is displayed. The Aztecs’ devotion to the feminine aspect of the divine didn’t disappear; rather, aspects survive and thrive in its current form. With the passage of time, Tonantzin became the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The Virgin of Guadalupe, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
For Cisneros, the Virgin has been an important part of her life since the early nineties. At that time, she was establishing herself as a Chicana writer. The House on Mango Street had been published in 1984, but was not yet recognized as a significant piece of American literature. Now, suffering from writer’s block, she was struggling to write her collection of stories Women Hollering Creek. In search of aid and inspiration, Cisneros decided to visit the shrine of the folk saint and curandero (healer) Don Pedrito Jaramillo in the south Texas valley region. There she saw, alongside braids, baby pictures, and crutches, prayers written by ordinary people.
They were, Cisneros says, “little notes all folded up like fortune-cookie notes. I started reading them and realized, ‘What an ego you have thinking you can write for everybody when everybody is already writing their own stories in these little prayers.’
I was so moved by the power of humility and need coming from the community that I returned to the church to do more investigation on these little notes and I made a promesa. I said, ‘If so many people are making promesas to Don Pedrito, I could make a promesa to Virgen de Guadalupe. You know, she’s my person in my neighborhood.’”
Months later, Cisneros entered one of the two basilicas at the foot of Tepeyac to make good on her promise and visit the Virgin of Guadalupe on December 12, the Mexican national day when thousands of pilgrims visit her. As Cisneros describes it, she herself was not faith-driven, but the faith of the people there moved her.
Around the same time, Cisneros was also attending retreats with Thich Nhat Hanh. Which one came first, her studies in Buddhism or her Guadalupanismo? She does not remember. But in various ways, her writing, her faith in the Virgin of Guadalupe, and her study of Buddhism interfaced with one another, the way clusters of strands are woven into a pattern on a loom. How did that transformation happen? “No sé,” Cisneros says, “I just felt a weight lifted off my heart.” Her writing started to flow after she requested the Virgin help with her writer’s block, and in return she visited the Virgin.
One cool, drizzling night in April, Sandra Cisneros was giving a talk at Bard College in Upstate New York for a National Endowment of the Arts Big Read event. She was speaking sometimes first in Spanish and sometimes first in English, but almost all of what she said was equally translated, so that whoever understood her in both languages felt as if they were listening to two sides reflected in a mirror.
Photo by George Stellingwerf / picfair.com
Cisneros was weaving the story of her own trajectory—from the young woman who wrote The House on Mango Street to the poet who would soon publish Woman Without Shame. They are two different women but the same one, exploring the cultural associations of words and fusing them in places like an artful welder. In spoken or written word, Cisneros plaits together identity, ancestry, and culture, which in Latin America is permeated with indigenous, African, and Christian symbolism.
Her audience was focused on The House on Mango Street, so once more the sixty-seven-year-old storyteller looked back at its twenty-two-year-old writer. “I suspect that the reason why the book has had such a long life is because I didn’t write it for myself,” she said. “I didn’t write it to win an award or to get famous. I wrote it to stay alive when I was dying, on behalf of the people I loved. That’s the difference: when we make something for those we love and we don’t do it with a personal agenda, siempre sale bonito—it’s always going to turn out well. That’s what House on Mango Street taught me.”
Cisnero’s honesty about the depression and self-destruction she lived through as a graduate poetry student helped the audience understand the egoless leap she managed to make when creating the Mango Street vignettes. But what about afterward, once success showed up at the door, and suddenly there was a readership with expectations of her?
The Ethiopian writer Dinaw Megestu, also among the first published writers to represent his community to an American audience, was sitting next to her. He asked, “How do you feel that you have to navigate those expectations?”
Cisneros explained how the fear of having to represent her community and to think of the reader almost cut her tongue out. But, she continued, “If I write to honor my ancestors, then my fear gets out of the way because when you do something to honor someone your ego gets out of the way, and you are just working to cumplir, to fulfill that obligation. That’s the work that we do.”
For Cisneros writing is not an easy act. It is a spiritual practice. She considers writing to be her sitting meditation. Writing, she said at Bard, “is sacred work, as sacred as a nun or a monk who meditates for days or hours—that’s how I see it.” And, she added, “If you ask your ancestors to help you get your ego and your fear out of the way, they come. It works, try it!”
Tonantzin Guadalupe must be smiling.
Woman without Shame. By Sandra Cisneros. Sept. 2022.176p. Knopf, $27 (9780593534823); e-book, $14.99 (9780593534830). 811.54.
Cisneros (Martita, I Remember You, 2021) writes with irresistible intimacy, especially in her poetry. We feel confided in, teased, moved, and jolted as she explores matters earthy and spiritual. Cisneros is funny and lacerating, caring and mischievous. In this gathering of three decades of poems pithy and lush, brash and sexy, compassionate and outraged, she considers the places she's lived, family, lovers, neighbors, moments of wonder, injustices epic and personal, and the ways age can so rudely resculpt the body even while liberating the mind. Cisneros contrasts her journey-of-choice south from the U.S. to Mexico "with a truck hauling my library," to the plight of her grandparents in Mexico. "WTio couldn't read, fled / North during the revolution," carrying few belongings. Everything glistens in street scenes, while nature is full of lessons offered by the "guru moon" and "inspirational ants." Cisneros seeks beauty and serenity, delighting in solitude and being happy "in bed with my love, a book." But she also offers stinging social critiques and frank and hilarious riffs on sex. This is a delectably saucy and incisive, righteous and resonant collection.--Donna Seaman
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Seaman, Donna. "Woman without Shame." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 22, 1 Aug. 2022, p. 14. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A714679340/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=91139c7d. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
Sandra Cisneros. Knopf, $27 (176p) ISBN 978-0-593-53482-3
The introspective latest from Cisneros (Loose 'Woman) sweeps through her life with blunt observations and heartfelt prayers. The frequent use of Spanish words and fresh images of quotidian moments of life in Mexico ("when dawn arrives/ with her furious scent of bolillns ,/ orange peels, and.../ Fabuloso" and "my heart... a peeled mango bearing an emerald housefly") act as both description and invitation. In short, lyrical poems, Cisneros juggles religion ("God Breaks the Heart Again and Again until It Stays Open"), humor ("I Should Like to Fall in Love with a Burro Named Saturnino"), and politics ("A Boy with a Machine Gun Waves to Me"). In keeping with the book's title, these poems bare her past in the more personal work about sex ("You Better Not Put Me in a Poem" begins with a list of images of previous lovers' penises: "a curved scimitar," "a far tamale plug," and "a baby pacifier"), about almost dying ("Year of My Near Death"), and about aging ("This loss of the/ right ear's hearing,/ No cross.// I only halt listen/Anyhow.") These plainspoken, affecting poems reveal a writer fortified by a sometimes difficult past who has come to embrace the freedom that comes with self-acceptance. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Woman Without Shame." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 34, 15 Aug. 2022, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A715674440/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=af2b69d6. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
Cisneros, Sandra MARTITA, I REMEMBER YOU Vintage (Fiction None) $12.95 9, 7 ISBN: 978-0-593-31366-4
A Chicago woman discovers old letters from a long-lost friend she'd met as a young adult in Paris, leading her to recall friendships forged in the yearning days of her youth.
When Corina unearths a pack of letters from her friend Martita as she renovates her house, she recalls her time as a 20-year-old with Martita and Paola among the out-of-reach glamour of Paris, where they bonded over their shared poverty and dreams to do better for themselves. Corina is waiting for a letter of acceptance from a French art foundation as her money disappears, hoping it arrives before she's forced to go home to Chicago. Paola, from Italy, and Marta, from Buenos Aires, both let Corina stay with them in their own less-than-desirable living situations, and they walk around the glittering streets, looking but unable to access most of what they see, still holding onto their determination to partake of what they can with joie de vivre. We glean snippets of Corina's life back home: Her father disapproving of her choices, her family making tamales in an assembly line for Christmas. When Corina finds herself back in Chicago, working at the gas company and married with children, pieces of Martita's and Paola's further adventures are detailed in their letters. Tightly written, unfolding in a controlled spool of memory, the story is told in a combination of correspondence and narrative vignettes; its length is closer to that of a long short story but it works as a stand-alone volume, especially as it's paired with its Spanish version.
A tale both beautiful and brief.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Cisneros, Sandra: MARTITA, I REMEMBER YOU." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A673649711/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=752ac1ce. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
''These are not your typical war stories,'' says the writer Sandra Cisneros, whose new book is ''Martita, I Remember You.''
What books are on your night stand?
I have a New Mexican writing desk on one side of my bed and an antique Mexican trunk on the other. Because of this, there are too many books stacked in precarious towers waiting to collapse whenever I reach for anything, the newer books burying the older. When I have to search for a book, it's like excavating Tenochtitlán. Thanks to this interview, I've finally done some housecleaning. Here are some of the titles I found:
''You Don't Have to Say You Love Me,'' memoir, Sherman Alexie
''The Women Who Hate Me: Poetry 1980-1990,'' Dorothy Allison
''Afterlife,'' novel, Julia Alvarez
''Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro,'' nonfiction, Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating
''Until We Are Level Again,'' poetry, José Angel Araguz
''How to Love a Jamaican,'' story collection, Alexia Arthurs
''Jackknife: New and Selected Poems,'' Jan Beatty
''Letters From Cuba,'' middle-grade novel, Ruth Behar
''Siete noches'' and its translation, ''Seven Nights,'' essays, Jorge Luis Borges (Always within reach on my night stand)
''Weedee Peepo,'' essays, Jose Antonio Burciaga
''Otherwise, My Life Is Ordinary,'' poetry, Bobby Byrd
''Perras,'' poetry, Zel Cabrera
''Piñata Theory,'' poetry, Alan Chazaro
''The Compassion Book,'' essays, Pema Chödrön
''Long Distance,'' poetry, Steven Cordova
''Tracing the Horse,'' poetry, Diana Marie Delgado
''Create Dangerously,'' essays, Edwidge Danticat (Always on my night stand)
''The Inheritance of Loss,'' novel, Kiran Desai
''Homeland Security Ate My Speech,'' nonfiction, Ariel Dorfman
''The Date Fruit Elegies,'' poetry, John Olivares Espinoza
''Ten Plays by Euripides,'' translated by Paul Roche
''Head Off & Split,'' poetry, Nikky Finney
''The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story,'' edited by John Freeman
''When Living Was a Labor Camp,'' poetry, Diana Garcia
''The Book of Ruin,'' poetry, Rigoberto González
''Tangle,'' poetry, Pauletta Hansel
''Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings,'' poetry, Joy Harjo (Another one I keep on my night stand all the time)
''The Spring of My Life,'' poetry, Kobayashi Issa, translated by Sam Hamill
''Rattlesnake Allegory,'' poetry, Joe Jimenez
''Selected Works,'' poetry, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
''I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapuscinski''
''Recovering the Sacred,'' nonfiction, Winona LaDuke
''Grace Notes,'' poetry, Lisa Lopez Smith
''Cervantes Street,'' novel, Jaime Manrique
''Caring for a House,'' poetry, Victor Martinez
''Temporada de huracánes,'' and its English translation, ''Hurricane Season,'' novel, Fernanda Melchor
''Born in the Cavity of Sunsets,'' poetry, Michael Luis Medrano
''Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957,'' history, Nancy Raquel Mirabal
''Native Country of the Heart,'' nonfiction, Cherríe Moraga
A manuscript of ''The Consequences,'' Manuel Munoz's forthcoming collection of stories
''The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa,'' translated by Sawako Nakayasu
''Bone,'' a novel, Fae Myenne Ng (Rereading this again after decades because I love it)
''Piedra de Sol,'' poem, Octavio Paz
''With the River on Our Face,'' poetry, Emmy Pérez
''Grieving: Dispatches From a Wounded Country,'' nonfiction, Cristina Rivera-Garza, translated by Sarah Booker
''Libro Centroamericano de los Muertos,'' poetry, Balam Rodrigo
''This American Autopsy,'' poetry, José Antonio Rodríguez
''From Our Land to Our Land,'' essays, Luis J. Rodriguez
''Brooklyn Antediluvian,'' poetry, Patrick Rosal
''Hermosa,'' poetry, Yesika Salgado
''Black Wings,'' Sehba Sarwar
''Blood Sugar Canto,'' poetry, ire'ne lara silva
''Teresa of Avila: Ecstasy and Common Sense,'' by Tessa Bielecki
''VirginX,'' poetry, Natalia Treviño
''The Architecture of Language,'' poetry, Quincy Troupe
''Codex of Love: Bendita Ternura,'' poetry, Liliana Valenzuela (I'm rereading this)
''Their Dogs Came With Them,'' novel, Helena María Viramontes (Rereading this too)
What's the last great book you read?
The one I'm reading now; ''Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,'' by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a history of how the United States evolved to where we are as a nation besieged by gun violence. This is not the kind of book I'd usually read, but I loved her earlier book, ''An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States''; reading it was like going back to school and gaining a new perspective of the Americas, one that retrieved the lost history of my ancestors. I'm on a mission to make up for the huge gaps in my miseducation as a woman of color.
Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
''The Nine Guardians,'' by Rosario Castellanos, a beautiful novel about a village on the Mexico-Guatemala border during the turbulent power shifts of the 1930s. Castellanos is one of the most brilliant writers of the last century, but when the Latin American boom in literature resounded in the United States, it was only the male voices that were heard. At this point in my life, I want to read the classics from the Americas, from Mexico, from women, from the working class, from the Indigenous communities, from everyone who hasn't been allowed to the podium before.
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
I prefer reading lying down propped by a sea of pillows, like a famous grand horizontale, in bed or on the terrace, on a chaise or in a hammock, or simply on the couch; preferably on a day when no one rings the doorbell, which is almost impossible, because in Mexico, everyone rings the bell. The flower seller, the doughnut man, the water man, the sweet potato man, the knife sharpener, the woman asking to sweep your driveway, the man who was laid off his job and is looking for work as a gardener, the nice couple from the countryside with fresh tortillas and prickly pear paddles, the man who sells wool snakes to keep out the doorway drafts. I am lucky to be able to work from home and not have to ring doorbells, so I have no right to complain.
What's your favorite book no one else has heard of?
My favorites are Gwendolyn Brooks's ''Maud Martha'' and Mercé Rodoreda's ''The Time of the Doves,'' both books that deal with war, though the former only at the finale. Come to think of it, many of my favorite books are about women surviving or waging war -- Elena Poniatowska's ''Here's to You, Jesusa!,'' a melding of fiction and nonfiction about a Mexican woman warrior; ''Cartucho'' and ''My Mother's Hands,'' both memoiristic accounts by Nellie Campobello that witness war from a child's point of view; ''Recollections of Things to Come,'' a novel by Elena Garro, which documents Mexico's Cristero War of the 1920s; ''Tempest Over Mexico,'' a memoir by Rosa King, a foreigner who witnessed the key players of the Mexican Revolution; and ''A Woman in Berlin,'' a brutal memoir of the sacking of Berlin by a writer too afraid to publish under any other name but Anonymous. Except for ''Maud Martha'' and ''Tempest Over Mexico,'' they were all written in a foreign language, with some translations faring better than others. These are not your typical war stories.
What book should everybody read before the age of 21?
Books are medicine. What heals me may not be the right prescription for anyone else. This makes me reluctant to make recommendations. But, if I were obliged to guide younger readers, I would feel compelled to give them a wide choice of books in different genres so they could find something, at least one thing that might be transformational, including graphic novels, mythologies, oral tales and cosmologies from across the globe. It's important that young people find the right books that speak to them at the right time, otherwise you might be encouraging them to dislike reading.
What book should nobody read until the age of 40?
Again, I don't believe in ''should read,'' but I think many would enjoy and savor the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen much better as adults. I recommend the miraculous translations by Tiina Nunnally.
Which writers -- novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets -- working today do you admire most?
Luis Rodriguez, Edwidge Danticat, Natalie Diaz, Rigoberto González, Virginia Grise, Joy Harjo, Helena Maria Viramontes, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Denise Chávez, Manuel Muñoz, Dorothy Allison, Levi Romero, John Phillip Santos, Charles M. Blow, Jorge Ramos, Carmen Aristegui, Elena Poniatowska, Luis Alfaro and every Mexican journalist who puts their life in danger by writing the truth. And, I hear a chavalo named Lin-Manuel in New York is pretty good.
You're a dual citizen of America and Mexico, and your new novella is being published in a bilingual English-Spanish edition. What Mexican books deserve greater attention in the United States?
I read Spanish too slowly to have any expertise here. But I do love and admire the works of Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and, most recently, Fernanda Melchor and Cristina Rivera Garza. I speed read them in English first, then reread them in Spanish. Sometimes I'm forced to read them in their original language because the translations aren't available yet or aren't satisfactory.
What's the last book you read that made you laugh?
Jaime Cortez's ''Gordo,'' Fernando A. Flores's ''Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas'' and Christine Granados' ''Fight Like a Man.''
The last book you read that made you cry?
Jasmon Drain's ''Stateway's Garden.'' It's a book about the people who live in the projects of Chicago, my hometown. The author writes about them with such love, respect and generosity it broke my heart.
The last book you read that made you furious?
Nabokov's lecture on Jane Austen documented in ''Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature,'' edited by Fredson Bowers. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov wrote: ''I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class.'' There's pride and prejudice for you!
Has a book ever brought you closer to another person, or come between you?
''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn'' was my mother's favorite movie, but I never bothered to watch it or read the book because I had watched the beginning of the film with her and thought it too sentimental. On the day of my mother's funeral, after we all regrouped at her house, I felt too exhausted and sick to do anything but take in a movie. I found the cassette in my mother's video library and popped it into the VCR. Then I realized the film is the story of a girl who wants to be a writer. My mother had always wanted to make something artistic of her life, and this testimony to that hunger just made me weep. I read the book by Betty Smith soon after, and I've loved it ever since.
What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
Rereading Robert Graves's ''The White Goddess'' after decades made me realize I didn't pay attention to the same things I had when I first read this book as a young woman. This time around I'm fascinated with the lineage of oral literatures. The book got me thinking about Homer and his connection to the Irish bards, and then to the oral literatures of the Americas and spoken poetry today, how each builds on what came before. Even if a language disappears, I believe a worldview, a syntax, a cadence survives from which the conquering language builds upon, like the stones the Spanish conquistadores gathered from the Indigenous temples to build their Catholic churches. Something like that is happening in our poetic inheritance. Something old and ancient and sacred survives in the spoken word, which is fascinating for those of us who are word-workers.
Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
For me the great shame and dolor of our times is the story of immigrant children. There are a lot of great books out there on the subject, but I especially admire those written by the writers who were immigrant kids themselves. These include Rene Colato Lainez's ''My Shoes and I,'' a children's picture book; Reyna Grande's memoir ''The Distance Between Us''; and Javier Zamora's poetry, ''Unaccompanied,'' as well as his forthcoming memoir, ''Solito, Solita,'' which I'm currently reading. I also love the graphic memoir ''Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Undocumented Vignettes From a Pre-American Life,'' by Alberto Ledesma. But lest we think child migration is new, there's Ruth Behar's young adult novel ''Letters From Cuba,'' about a girl who emigrates solo from Poland to Cuba during World War II.
What moves you most in a work of literature?
I'm not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few.
Which genres do you especially enjoy reading?
Poetry, biographies of artists or activists, fiction, essays, spirituality, art history, including books on textile, design and fashion, and especially books on houses.
And which do you avoid?
Mysteries, cookbooks, sci-fi, fantasy, romance novels and biographies of U.S. presidents.
How do you organize your books?
The ones I love passionately live intimately with me in my bedroom shelved in no special order. And the ones I want to read next or again are stacked in towers next to my bed, on chairs or on the floor. The magical books (fairy tales, children's literature, Eduardo Galeano's vignettes which defy genre, Elena Poniatowska's fiction and nonfiction) reside in the hall just outside my bedroom door. The rest are downstairs on bookshelves or stacked on tables and benches everywhere in my home, wallflowers hoping to be invited to dance.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
Cyndi Lauper's memoir, which I absolutely adore, and a whole shelf devoted to Maria Callas biographies. Oh, and Alan Cumming's memoir ''Not My Father's Son.''
What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?
A cheap paperback copy of ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' when I was in the fifth grade. It was the first book I ever owned. I found it in the Sears Roebuck bargain basement for 50 cents. I begged my father to buy it, and, lucky for me, it was payday. I had no idea people could actually buy books; I'd never seen a bookstore. I thought books were so valuable they were only dispensed to schools and libraries.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
Unsociable, strange, rude. Or so my family said, because I hated abandoning a book when relatives came to visit. I had to be scolded and shamed into civility. Yet my mother would exempt me from helping her in the kitchen if I had a book in my hand, even if I was reading a novel instead of doing homework! Since I'm the only girl in a large family, I felt guilty about this at the time, but not enough to put down my book.
Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Beatrix Potter and Virginia Lee Burton get better each time I read them. I keep their books and biographies near for inspiration and admire them even more now that I'm older.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
I read books about Native spirituality, about shamans and healers and mystics, to try to better understand the border between the living and the dead and my own gifts regarding same. Living in Mexico helps me with this journey because the dead don't abandon us but live alongside us daily. What I was taught to dismiss as superstition when I lived in the States is now a spiritual awakening. I'm grateful to be living in Mexico, which is one of the first-world nations, in my opinion, when it comes to awareness of the divine.
You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Emily Dickinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jane Austen. (In case Miss Emily is a no-show, and that's very likely, it's a tossup between Mae West or Rumi as an alternate.)
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
I would never want to offend any writer by publicly admitting which books I've put down; it's not the writer's fault we didn't click. Maybe the book arrived too early or too late in my life. If I sense a book isn't likely to make me a better writer or a better human being, I release it. I have to. At 66 I haven't got a lot of time left before I transmogrify into a maguey.
What do you plan to read next?
Poetry. I am going to revisit the Elizabethan poets and the beautiful chants of the Mazatec healer Maria Sabina, both for inspiration.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Rebecca Clarke FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Sandra Cisneros." The New York Times Book Review, 5 Sept. 2021, p. 8(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A674313653/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=98ff2678. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
Before I could ask my first question for our interview, Sandra Cisneros and I had already talked about social media (her advice: writers don't have time to "fritter on Twitter"), certain politicians whose mothers need to "give them a nalgada with a chancla" (a spanking with a sandal), and where I could find a Xoloitzcuintli (a hairless breed of dog). [paragraph] The 66-year-old former San Antonio resident, who now lives in the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende, is a patron saint of Hispanic literature; her Macondo Writers Workshop has helped launch dozens of careers. The House on Mango Street, Cisneros's 1984 debut novel, has sold more than seven million copies and remains a classroom staple. Her newest book, the dual-language novella Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo was published in September, with the Spanish translation by Austin-based Liliana Valenzuela.
TEXAS MONTHLY: With all that's happening right now, where can we find hope?
SANDRA CISNEROS: I have hope; I'm an optimist. I'm always waiting and asking, "Where's our Gandhi? Our Dr. King? Our Cesar Chavez?" I'm always looking for those leaders, and maybe they're us. We all have to make that change we want to see. Someone said that--was it Gandhi? Or was it just a bumper sticker I saw in Austin?
But I think it's up to us to be very mindful. I know I've been guilty of speaking when angry. We don't have to be the Buddha, but what language are we using? What examples are we putting out there, especially when we write?
TM: What helps ground you?
sc: I always go to Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk. I read him, and pow! That's the chanelada I get if I'm angry or say something I regret. And other poets, too. I have Joy Harjo at my bedside. Also Edwidge Danticafis Create Dangerously. These are my spiritual leaders.
TM: What's your revision process like, and has it become easier over the years?
SC: It's irritating at first, death-defying and slow as hell, and I'm always convinced it will kill me. Each book becomes more difficult as I get older because I demand more of myself. If I can, I let a manuscript sleep for a few months or weeks or days. I write lots of other things when I'm stuck: poetry, essays. Or I read, or draw. I think it opens up the mind to get off the track and look at something else. I love looking at paintings, or watching a documentary, or watching another art form, like dance.
TM: The protagonist of Martita, Corina, rediscovers letters from friends she met in Paris decades earlier, then spends much of the book processing her past. Was that part of the genesis of the story?
SC: This story was originally part of Woman Hollering Creek, so I wrote it first in the eighties or at the beginning of the nineties. It was one of a few that didn't make it into the collection because it wasn't finished. Sol put it away and thought I'd come back to it later. My life just kind of got swept up after that, but my friend Dennis Mathis from the University of Iowa [where Cisneros earned her MFA in creative writing] kept asking me when I was going to finish that story. I was always working on poetry, a novel, and so on, but I finally had some time, and I pulled it out.
TM: So, you had time because of the COVID-19 pandemic?
SC: Yes. During the last presidency I would accept any offer to travel and speak because I felt a responsibility to encourage and teach young people. That was my ministry. Then the pandemic was away almost to have a retreat and finish things. I had files and files of notes from my editors and from Dennis. All of them like my head, dusty. So, I had to clear everything out and finish it. And I have the age, perspective, and, I hope, wisdom that I didn't have when I was younger.
TM: How much of the book is drawn from your time in Europe in your twenties?
SC: When I was traveling on my NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] grant, I was 28 or 29.1 had a Eurail pass, and that's how I traveled to lots of different places. Some of the stories in the book are mine, and others are composites of the women I met and the stories they told me. I guess I'm all three women characters, but also none of them. I started from an autobiographical place because so many weird things happened to me when I was traveling. But when I came home no one wanted to hear them!
TM: Corina was broke in Paris; she couldn't afford to tour the Eiffel Tower. Why does she hold on to those memories?
SC: It's the memories we wish we could forget. I always tell young writers: Don't write about what you wish you could remember. Write about what you can't forget. Those memories stay and there's something transformational about them. Sometimes people stay with us for reasons we don't understand until we can write about them. I think of the story as a letter unwritten. You think of someone and say, "Oh, I would say this or that to them. Where are they now?" Maybe being 661 see things in a different way than I could have when I was younger. I don't think I could have written this book when I was 40.
TM: I'm seeing a lot of parallels between Corina's act of remembering and the act of writing.
SC: I think we write as a question, but we don't know the question until we get to the answer.
TM: What's next?
SC: I met my deadline on my book of poetry Woman Without Shame. I'm working on the lyrics for the opera adaptation of The House on Mango Street, and I want Martita to be performed as a play, so I've got a lot of work to do.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
RICHARD Z. SANTOS IS THE AUTHOR OF THE NOVEL TRUST ME AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF CREATIVE WRITING NONPROFIT AUSTIN BAT CAVE.
photograph by Nick Simonte
Caption: Sandra Cisneros at her home in San Miguel de Allende.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Texas Monthly, Inc.
http://www.texasmonthly.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Santos, Richard Z. "Piece de Revision: Author Sandra Cisneros on staying hopeful, the agony of revising, and publishing her new novella thirty years after she started it." Texas Monthly, vol. 49, no. 11, Nov. 2021, pp. 53+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A680641880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=14bec4a8. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
Martita, I Remember You. By Sandra Cisneros. Tr. by Liliana Valenzuela. Sept. 2021. 112p. Vintage, paper, $12.95 (9780593313664).
Concentration is an art form for Cisneros. Every word is a skipped stone creating ripples in its wake, every image vibrates with implication. In this welcome and vital return to fiction, Cisneros, beloved by readers and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, portrays three adventurous young women seeking their fortunes in Paris. Memories of this interlude in her life surface as Corina scrapes "a hundred and six years of varnish like layers of honey-drenched phyllo" from a dining room hutch in a Chicago three-flat. She is prompted to retrieve and open a box of letters from those long-ago allies who befriended her on her quest to become a writer, and soon Martita of Buenos Aires and Paola of northern Italy come to life as they navigate family pressure, poverty, and unwanted sexual advances in pursuit of independence and fulfillment. Mexican American Corina's reflections on her harrowing experiences, including living with two busking puppeteers and the racism of Parisians, alternate with missives from Martita and Paola charting the meandering paths of their lives after Corina left Paris. Every heart-revving scene is sensuously and incisively rendered, cohering into a vivid, tender, funny, bittersweet, and haunting episodic tale of peril, courage, concession, selfhood, and friendship. Cisneros' intricately multidimensional and beautifully enveloping novella is presented in both English and Spanish.--Donna Seaman
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A new book from Cisneros is guaranteed to generate impassioned interest, and this vibrant novella will be much discussed.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Seaman, Donna. "Martita, I Remember You." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 21, 1 July 2021, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A669809295/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=401c806f. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo
Sandra Cisneros, trans, from the Spanish by Liliana Valenzuela. Vintage, $12.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-593-31366-4
In this bilingual edition of Cisneros's exquisite story (after P/iro Amor), a woman relives her time in Paris two decades earlier via a cache of discovered letters. At 20, Corina aspires to become a writer and escape her poor Mexican Chicago family, prompting het to travel to Paris. She meets Marta, from Chile, and Paola, from Italy, and mingles with artists, dancers, and performers. She stretches her money to stay longer, realizing, "I can't go home yet. Because home is bus stops and drugstore windows, elastic bandages and hairpins, plastic ballpoints, felt bunion pads, tweezers, rat poison, cold sore ointment, mothballs, drain cleaners, deodorant." Back in Chicago, she holds onto a photo of herself with Marta and Paola, but swiftly loses touch with them. Decades later, she discovers a letter from Marta sent shortly after she'd left, suggesting they meet in Spain, "in case you're still traveling." Corina speaks to Marta in her thoughts and gives the rundown of her life: divorced, remarried, twodaughtets. Cisneros's language and rhythm of her prose reverberate with Cotina's longing for her youth and unfulfilled promise. The author's fans will treasure this. Agent: Susan Bergholz. Susan Bergholz Literary. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 30, 26 July 2021, pp. 58+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A670530905/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e1c46ea8. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
Cisneros, Sandra PURO AMOR Sarabande (Adult Fiction) $10.00 10, 9 ISBN: 978-1-94644821-7
A short story about love, animals, art, and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
Cisneros' (A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, 2015, etc.) first published fiction for adults since the novel Caramelo in 2002 tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. de Rivera and their house full of love, animals, and art. Published as Volume 15 of Sarabande Books' Quarternote chapbook series and featuring simple but evocative line drawings by the author, the story is presented in the original English and a facing Spanish translation by Valenzuela. Even though they're never named, the main characters are clearly Kahlo and Rivera. "Mister" is a famous artist known for his drinking, womanizing, and his "frescoes taller than their blue house." "Missus" paints at times but is mostly concerned with taking care of her husband and managing the menagerie of dogs, monkeys, cats, birds, lizards, a single fawn, and all manner of other creatures. The animals come to represent all the love and emotion present in Mr. and Mrs. de Rivera's life and their refusal to conform to societal expectations. Why do they adopt every stray animal they can? Why do they invite famous people and Communists to parties that last all night? Because they want to. The writing is sharp and vivid, and the animals can be felt on the page. "The animals consumed more than food. They devoured Mrs. de Rivera's attention from the moment she opened her eyes. Even before she opened her eyes. The dogs pawed and rubbed themselves on her belly and spine. They slept on her starched pillow embroidered in silk thread--'Amor Eterno.' They brought dirt into her bed, nosed their way under the blankets, curled themselves in the nook behind the knees, the swell of her stomach, the soles of her feet." This story first appeared in the 2015 Washington Post Fiction Issue and has been a staple of Cisneros' live readings for years. Cisneros manages to be one of America's most respected authors despite her relative paucity of new work in the past 16 years. This is a good, touching story about the power of bonds and unreasonable love, but to a certain extent it leaves the reader wishing for more.
A solid short story in a beautiful, thin volume from an author we wish we heard more from.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Cisneros, Sandra: PURO AMOR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A548138158/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2097e0f0. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.
Puro Amor
By Sandra Cisneros
Louisville, KY; Sarabande Books, 2018, 32 pp., $10.00, paperback
Everyone has something to say about Frida Kahlo. Some see her as an icon ages before her time; others insist she is overrated. Her image has been coopted by movements and businesses alike. She represents feminism, communism, experimentalism, Mexican nationality, anything the public wants her to represent. These days her face lives on Forever 21 t-shirts and her words on Instagram and Facebook. Her humanity, in many cases, seems to have been washed away, every indication that she was a living, breathing, flawed human being overshadowed by the wants of the authors wielding her name. Yet, from the start, I trusted Sandra Cisneros to treat Frida well.
Puro Amor, a chapbook that just so happens to be Cisneros's first published fiction for adults since 2002, is about Frida, though she is never addressed by any name other than Mrs. de Rivera. The story is told twice, in English on left pages and Spanish on the right--an arrangement that tripped me up more than once when I began reading. My initial attempt to read the pages from left to right was foiled when Cisneros's own sketches of dogs began appearing intermittently throughout, throwing the alignment off-kilter. I tried to read all of the English, then all of the Spanish. I tried flipping back and forth between pages. No one way worked perfectly. Eventually, I settled into a flow, reading one passage in one language and then again in another, pausing to take in each tongue for some time before diving in again. Puro Amor's words are soft and flowing, but the manner in which I found myself reading it was fragmented. Somehow, that made the whole of it feel like a dream.
The text itself, in either language, only spans about ten pages. It involves not an event but an entire marriage, simultaneously weaving through years and the breadth of a single spring morning. Cisneros's Frida is neither a celebrity nor a symbol. She is only the wife of a renowned muralist, and while she enjoys painting as a hobby, it does not bring her any success. She creates art not for recognition but to bring joy to those around her, namely her husband and the countless pets she rescues from around her home. Every piece, whether it be a pillow embroidered with the phrase "Amor Eterno" or a dessert wrapped in banana leaves, is a gift. She lives to give, to pour out love until someone pours it back to her. Her husband--again, never referred to as anything but Mr. Rivera--is too busy with himself to worry about her. "Ah, how troublesome it is to be famous!" he laments, draping himself across her lap like an infant. He's more of her son than her husband, constantly yearning for her attention. Cisneros writes,
He was used to being adored, to have her look at him in the same way
the animals looked at her, with devotion and gratitude, as if they were
all sunflowers radiating light. She had to do this. Her husband was
famous.
Is this love? Cisneros's Frida seems to think so, as does her husband. Such an arrangement is one countless women find themselves in. They live as their lovers' mothers, gently shepherding them through life at the expense of their own autonomy. Indeed, this Frida wraps herself in motherhood, dotes on both her husband and her animals, treats every last one of them like her own children. Though she herself sometimes reverts back to that childlike state, she and her husband being "orphans in the universe," it is she who holds the household together, who watches out for every living creature within it. Her domestic centrality and authority allows her to feel some semblance of control over the volatile life her husband has given both of them. It allows her to be strong in spite of the illness wearing her down, graying her hair and rotting her teeth and binding her beneath the sheets of her bed. It allows her to become someone, anyone, something more than the Wife of the Artist.
Cisneros's decision to address Frida in terms of her husband's accomplishments rather than her own may seem curious for a story about an iconic figure such as Kahlo, but it is certainly nothing new. Women are measured by the work of their husbands, remain relegated to the last names they take. History washes these women away, leaving them nothing but footnotes in their husbands' lives. One such woman, Sophia Tolstaya, wife of Leo Tolstoy, kept detailed diaries of her experiences as a prodigy's accessory. "Everyone asks," she once wrote, '"But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?' To this question I can only reply: 'I don't know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.'"
Frida Kahlo, of course, made it out of the shadows, carved a name for herself that would one day shine even brighter than her husband's. Very little of this, however, happened during her lifetime. While alive, she had a single solo exhibition, and the majority of the paintings she sold were commissions. The Frida we love--vibrant and clever, a talented experimentalist--was only known after her death, at age 47. Cisneros's focus, then, is to humanize the Frida that lived and suffered, the Frida that knew nothing of fame, the Frida that existed in the same transitory realm as Sophia Tolstaya, an artist aching without knowing quite why she ached. This Frida--this iteration, this incarnation of her--is far cry from the unstoppable force we see in modern pop culture. She is flawed. She serves others. She is real.
The prospect of even reviewing a story about Frida Kahlo frightened me. Could I do justice to her, I wondered? In the godlike light I viewed her in, any misstep felt like blasphemy. Yet Cisneros dives into Frida's identity without hesitation, taking bold steps in imagining the inner workings of her mind. She does this wonderfully, breathes life into a woman so often deified.
The Frida of Puro Amor finds peace in her own weakness. Towards the end of the story, she calls out to her animals, "?Quien quiere amor?"--Who wants love?--and, when they stand before her, she demands to know, "?Quien los quiere?"--Who loves you? She cares little for the love others have for her, only wanting them to understand what she has for them. Sophia Tolstaya once wrote that she had "a love which nobody wants and which nearly drives me insane." Both she and Frida hurt with a pain that might be uniquely female; one that, I believe, pangs deep within all of us. Sandra Cisneros knows this well.
Reviewed by Noelle McManus
Noelle McManus is a sophomore Linguistics student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she studies Spanish and German. Her last piece for the Women's Review of Books was "The Linguistics of Texting" in the September/October 2018 issue.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
McManus, Noelle. "To Serve a Genius." The Women's Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2019, pp. 30+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A578441038/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eb1dc56d. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.