Research Guide to American Literature

my class! And it didn’t make sense until that moment, sitting in that seminar. That’s
when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about”
(Pilar R. Rodríguez Aranda interview).
After finishing her graduate degree, Cisneros worked as a college recruiter, a
teacher to high-school dropouts, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator,
as well as filling visiting-writer positions at a number of universities. Her earliest
publications were poetry, but it was the 1984 appearance of The House on Mango
Street that brought her to national prominence. She followed it with a volume
of poetry, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, in 1987, and an acclaimed collection of short
stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, in 1991. While Mango Street
channels beautifully the voice of a young girl, the short stories in Woman Holler-
ing Creek are told by narrators ranging from young girls to more mature women
negotiating cultural stereotypes, abusive marriages, love, and family. Although
Spanglish, the representation of the mixture of English and Spanish vocabulary
in the speech of many people who live on both sides of the border, appears in a
few instances in Mango Street, Cisneros uses it more frequently and deliberately
in Woman Hollering Creek, where it serves to highlight themes of border crossings
and hybridity. In 1994 Cisneros published a book for children, Hairs/Pelitos, and
another collection of poetry, Loose Woman. As the titles of her volumes of poetry
suggest, her poetic voice expresses passion, sexuality, and rebellion. In 1995 Cis-
neros received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award.
In her 2002 novel Caramelo, or Puro Cuento Cisneros redefines the mean-
ing of “border culture,” depicting the life and family of Lala Reyes, a descen-
dant of a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl, makers. Lala’s family makes an
annual trip from their home in Chicago to visit family “on the other side,” in
Mexico City, which for many Midwestern Mexican Americans becomes a kind
of “suburb” of the Midwest, despite its distance. Much longer than Cisneros’s
other works (more than four hundred pages), it nevertheless shares the use of
many short chapters and vignettes, songs, Spanglish, poetic prose, rich sensory
details, and focus on the intimate and often fraught negotiations of family
life that characterize much of her other work. It is dedicated to her father, an
upholsterer like Lala’s father, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer during
the writing of the novel.
In addition to her writing, Sandra Cisneros influences the world of art and
literature through other avenues. She is the founder and president of the Macondo
Foundation (begun in 1998 around her kitchen table and incorporated in 2006, it
is named for the village in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad [1967;
translated as One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970]), which “works with dedicated
and compassionate writers who view their work and talents as part of a larger
task of community-building and non-violent social change [and attempts] to
serve our under-served communities through our writing” (its website is <www.
sandracisneros.com/macondo.php>). In 2000 she also founded the Alfredo Cis-
neros Del Moral Foundation in honor of her father; it provides awards to writers
with connections to Texas who are judged to take the same pride in craftsmanship
that her father did in his craft as an upholsterer. Cisneros has made her home in
San Antonio, Texas, for many years.

Sandra Cisneros 17