1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

For advanced students, a complex discussion of how Chabon, Jonathan Lethem,
and Rick Moody go beyond metaphor and metonymy to engage in a kind of
hypostasis, using comics to “challenge some of the most basic tenets of the lin-
guistic turn of twentieth-century critical theory.”

—Kathryn West

h

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

(Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1983)

In an essay titled “Only Daughter,” Chicana author Sandra Cisneros describes
looking back at a self-description she had written for an anthology early in her
career; it reads, “I am the only daughter in a family of six sons. That explains
everything.” She says that for the reader’s sake, she should have written, “I am the
only daughter in a Mexican family of six sons” or “I am the only daughter of a
working-class family of nine.” In the first printings of The House on Mango Street
Cisneros’s author biography states, “The daughter of a Mexican father and a
Mexican-American mother, and sister to six brothers, she is nobody’s mother and
nobody’s wife.” The emphases and variations in these self-descriptions highlight
Cisneros’s major concerns as a writer: societal, cultural, and familial expectations
of women, the role of class and poverty on identity and self-perception, and per-
haps most poignantly, the intersections between gender and culture for a Chicana.
As the first and perhaps still most influential writer to articulate this story, she
stands at the forefront of such contemporary Latina writers as Helena María
Viramontes, Ana Castillo, Denise Chávez, Lorna Dee Cervantes (all Chicana),
Julia Alvarez (Dominican American), Judith Ortiz Cofer, Esmeralda Santiago
(Puerto Rican), and Cristina García (Cuban).
Cisneros was born in Chicago on 20 December 1954. She spent her childhood
traveling back and forth between impoverished Chicago neighborhoods and the
large and comfortable home of her paternal grandparents in Mexico. Despite eco-
nomic difficulties, her parents managed Catholic-school tuition for their children,
even, as she points out in the essay mentioned above, for her as “only a daughter.”
Cisneros attended Loyola University in Chicago, where she majored in English,
receiving a B.A. in 1976. With encouragement from an English teacher, she applied
to and was accepted to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she earned
an M.F.A. in 1978. She did, not, however, find the Iowa program a comfortable
experience. She says, “The House on Mango Street started when I was in graduate
school, when I realized I didn’t have a house. I was in this class, we were talking
about memory and the imagination.... I remember sitting in the classroom, my face
getting hot and I realized, ‘My god, I’m different! I’m different from everybody in
this classroom.’... It wasn’t as if I didn’t know who I was. I knew I was a Mexican
woman. But, I didn’t think that had anything to do with why I felt so much imbal-
ance in my life, whereas it had everything to do with it. My race, my gender, and