A History of American Literature

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as fragments of testimony slowly reveal the neglected truth; so, in a way, does

The Valley and the series to which it belongs. This is historiography from the oral

roots up, not from the standpoint of authorial omniscience, those in power. It reveals

a history that might otherwise have been silenced, suppressed by those who have the

authority or simple force required to get their stories heard: a history that, Hinojosa

suggests, can and must be continually retold, renewed.

One of the distinctive features of chicano fiction of a more recent generation is

that it acknowledges the movement of many Mexican-Americans into new, urban

environments. Another, even more distinctive feature is that it is very often written

by women and, as with the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, adopts a critical view of

the cult of machismo and many of the tensions obtaining between the sexes in the

Mexican-American community. A notable illustration of both these features is the

fiction of Sandra Cisneros (1954–): The House on Mango Street (1980), then later

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Born in Chicago, Cisneros spent

her early years moving backwards and forwards between the United States and

Mexico with her family. Moving to the border state of Texas, she then began to write

what she later described as “the stories that haven’t been written ... to fill a literary

void.” The eventual result was the collection The House on Mango Street, which

established her reputation. In this volume, Cisneros developed the form used by

other chicano/a writers, such as Rivera: a series of related stories and sketches, with

a central character and narrator to provide them with a sense of continuity. The

central character here is Esparanza Cordero, a young girl who moves into the house

that gives the book its title. The trope of movement, migration, so rooted in chicano

fiction is still there. “We didn’t always live on Mango Street,” Esparanza explains.

“Before we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler.

Before Keeler it was Pauline, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember

is moving a lot.” However, this series of stories concentrates on Esparanza, her family,

and the rundown neighborhood in Chicago where they live. “Here there is too much

sadness and not enough sky,” Esparanza observes. Giving her narrator an intimate

idiom that moves between the colloquial and the lyrical, Cisneros explores the

“sadness” of those lives and their gazing at the “sky,” their yearning for something

better. Telling her story (“I like to tell stories,” she confides), Esparanza confides in

few people apart from the reader (whom she calls “my friend”). And her confidences

begin to liberate her. “You must keep writing,” someone tells her; “it will keep you

free.” By the end of the collection, she is beginning to realize that freedom.

The House on Mango Street, in fact, addresses several forms of enclosure and

liberation – opposites figured throughout the story in terms of the polarities of

house and sky, room and window (so many women in these stories spend their time

gazing from their windows), streets and trees. This is a series of stories about growing

up, coming of age: Esparanza breaks slowly out into the adult world of high heels

and womanly hips, jobs and kisses, sex and death. It is also about the ghetto, the

urban enclosure inhabited by Mexican-Americans where, as Esparanza puts it, “we

make the best of it,” living in an exile that is cultural and also maybe linguistic –

dreaming, perhaps, of “the ones left behind ... far away.” It is also, and more

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