Sandra Cisneros

This paper explores the relationship of space and identity in the novel The House on Mango Street, written by a prominent Chicana writer San-dra Cisneros. Based on spatial theories and ethnic studies, the paper demonstrates how specific spatial characteristics interact and translate into the main character's identity traits. The spatial narrowness of homes and the isolation of Mango Street reflect a sense of social confinement, isolation, and subjuga-tion of Latino people in the U.S., predominantly Latino girls and women. As a minority people, they occupy the space on the social periphery where Latino and Anglo cultures meet. The spatial contact of Latino and Anglo-American culture generates de-territorialized, diasporic, and hybrid identities which are further compromised by gender issues in the Chicana case. In this setting, the main character Esperanza strives towards identity reconstruction which strongly relies on spatial and mental repositioning.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is heavily influenced by Marxist literary theory. From the very beginning she begins with addressing issues of familial financial poverty, the bourgeois' instilment of the proletariat concept of and desire for " the American dream, " the poverty of the neighborhood, education as a means of hope, the inhumane treatment of immigrants, and misconceptions between different ethnicities of the proletariats. Several uses of Marxist theory are present throughout the text. For example, the issues of poverty appear within the first chapter " The House on Mango Street. " Esperanza gives an account of her family having to move frequently and how the last time in particular was a rushed move because of a plumbing issue and their landlord wouldn't fix it because the house was too old. She tells of having to carry water in milk jugs to the washroom just to bathe. This issue is related to Marxist theory however, the relationship between the upper class and proletariat is not easily defined. It is a much more complex issue that is rooted in a system that favors the upper class and bourgeoisie over the proletariat class in the case of living conditions.

The article offers a systematic critique of identity politics and intersectionality that today dominate Western mainstream literary theory and Anglo-Saxon literary production by bringing to the fore a much overlooked critical intervention on the part of materialist (literary) system theorists and Western Marxist feminists. It then dissects the ways in which the trappings of identity politics and its upgraded version of intersectionality are manifested in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, with the class in the triad of class, race and gender eventually weakened and removed from view.

For High School and College/University Students and Their Teachers.

These online and print research projects are _optional_, but they will supplement and deepen students' engagement with Cisneros' stories.  They have been classroom tested, with Swarthmore College students.

Intended to be used in conjunction with my "Lesson Plans for Teaching Four Stories from Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories," also posted on this Academia.edu site. 

A slightly shorter version of that other essay is scheduled for publication in 2020, in the Modern Language Association's Options for Teaching series:
_Teaching the Narrative of Mexicana and Chicana Writers_.  Ed. by Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez, DePaul University.

In this essay, I  examine three contemporary chicana reinscriptions of the Llorona myth, written by Monica Palacios, Sandra Cisneros, and Angela de Hoyos, in order to identify the ways in which revisionary mythography forms an essential component in the rejection of Indohispanic
Source: Confluencia, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Fall 2000), pp. 49-58

This paper explores elements of popular culture in Sandra Cisneros' novel The House on Mango Street. The theoretical approach in the first section of the paper introduces the most relevant aspects of early U.S. popular culture, while the second section discusses U.S. popular culture with respect to ethnic minorities, predominantly Chicanas portrayed in Cisneros's novel. The paper highlights certain ambiguities of popular culture in relation to minorities in the U.S., as well as the fact that, though having embraced egalitarian ideals and having general progressive views, popular culture nevertheless has failed to integrate specific cultural and gender perspectives of Latinas, as demonstrated by the lack of representation and stereotyping of female characters in the novel.

Sandra Cisneros’ _Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories_ (1991) is assigned frequently in high school and undergraduate courses in English and American literature, Latinx literature, and other classes.  This essay presents teaching strategies for Cisneros’ short fiction by focusing on two stories that explore childhood—“Eleven” and “Barbie-Q”—and two that treat difficult passages into adulthood, “Woman Hollering Creek” and “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.” 

See also the accompanying Cisneros document, which includes (optional) online and print research projects for high school and/or undergraduate students on topics related to these Cisneros stories.

Now under contract.  Scheduled print publication from MLA: 2020.

Note: this online essay is a slightly longer version of the upcoming print version, which is shorter due to word count limits for each essay in the print anthology.

The paper analyzes the main narrative strategies used in Woman
Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros. It explores the influence of the author’s
cultural identity on the formal characteristics of her work. In the choice of genre,
she opted for the short story cycle because it enables the covering of various aspects
of the main theme – lives of Mexican women on both sides of the US–Mexican
border. She also chose a hybrid form – a fusion of prose and poetry – in order to
emphasize the need for erasing the borders between traditional dualities: prose/
poetry, Mexican/American, male/female. Writing mainly in the first person, the
author gives voice to marginalized women who have never had the opportunity to
tell their stories. Thus, by subverting the established literary conventions of genre,
form and voice, Cisneros creates hybrids which reflect her gender and culture.

Sandra Cisneros is one of the most prominent writers of American and
Hispanic literary world. Her successful novel titled The House on Mango Street recounts
the life, the milieu and the compelling experiences encountered by women from the
eyes of Esperanza, the protagonist of the novel. However, there are a large number of
resemblances between houses and the women figures. Esperanza thinking that she does
not belong to there at the beginning of the novel is determined to make the women on
Mango Street educated and optimistic about their future.

Both Sandra Cisneros and Helena María Viramontes in their novels, The House on Mango Street and Under the Feet of Jesus, respectively, deal with the experience of growing up as a young Mexican-American woman in the United States. Both their protagonists (Esperanza in The House on Mango Street and Estrella in Under the Feet of Jesus) not only experience discrimination as Latinas at the hands of mainstream Anglo-American culture, but are also discriminated as women within Mexican culture, whose traditional gender roles leave little room for female self-identification. Both Cisneros and Viramontes show the problem of discrimination based on gender to be closely related to those of racism and classism as both Esperanza and Estrella witness the abuse and exploitation of women as part of the vicious cycle of poverty in a lower class environment. To the young protagonists (both of whom are entering puberty and about to discover their own sexuality) female sexuality, in this context, often appears threatening and dangerous, as it entraps women in dependence and poverty. Thus, both Esperanza and Estrella struggle to come to terms with their femininity and sexuality. Both eventually have to break away from the traditions they were raised in, in order to arrive at a more fluid and flexible gender identity. In that sense, both The House on Mango Street and Under the Feet of Jesus can be read as coming-of-age stories on the formation of Chicana identity.

Capitolo dedicato alla scrittrice chicana Sandra Cisneros e alle opere "La casa en Mango Street" e "Loose Woman". La trattazione letteraria è accompagnata da un focus sulla condizione socio-culturale della donna chicana e sulla discussa arte della 'digital diva' Alma Lopez.

Sandra Cisneros is one of the most prominent writers of American and Hispanic literary world. Her successful novel titled The House on Mango Street recounts the life, the milieu and the compelling experiences encountered by women from the eyes of Esperanza, the protagonist of the novel. However, there are a large number of resemblances between houses and the women figures. Esperanza thinking that she does not belong to there at the beginning of the novel is determined to make the women on Mango Street educated and optimistic about their future.

The critical locus of this essay explores a binding element in all expatriate and immigrant literatures -the national displacement of the protagonist- in order to elucidate the manner in which ethic, linguistic, and social otherness affect the bilateral exchanges between immigrant and national (as well as immigrant-immigrant). Much of Chicano writing deals with the linguistic, societal, and cultural challenges of residing outside Latin America, and in The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros, several significant thematic components relate to complications that derive from the characters’ distance from national origins1. My critical approach will consider contemporary psychological studies of immigrants as a measure of the action of the three principal groups of characters in the text: Latin American adults, Latin American adolescents, and Anglo Americans. A focus on the relationship that the Latin Americans have with their social context endeavors to elucidate how expatriation and distance from homeland - or status as a national - affects the character action in one of Cisneros’s most illuminative works.

The House on Mango Street has been translated into more than 20 languages worldwide, including Croatian in 2005. The novel has secured a firm foothold in many a literature and cultural studies syllabus outside the USA and has served as one of central entry points for the discussion and understanding of the position of women in America's ethnicized communities. In its treatment of women's disadvantaged position, Cisneros's novel relies heavily on the tenets of liberal feminism, which reduces the understanding of gendered oppression to personal relationships between individual men and women and to the attitudes of men towards women. Unlike liberal feminist literary theory, systemic feminist literary theory takes a broader social context into consideration by directing our critical gaze to the structural forces and institutional practices that shape gendered positions and define the role of women inside and outside family settings. The paper shows that because of its subscription to the tenets of liberal feminism, the novel ends up treating gender constraints and women's domestication as though these were phenomena limited only to ethnicized communities. As a result, women's marginalization comes to be construed as a marker of ethnic otherness rather than a structural problem defining and permeating American society as a whole. Through translations, these constructs

The paper analyses some narrative techniques used by the Chicana
writer Sandra Cisneros in her short-story cycle Woman Hollering Creek.
First, her specific use of language is addressed. By using the techniques
of mixing and switching of codes she subverts the dominant language and
puts the reader in the position of immigrants who do not understand the
English language. The paper further analyses the deployment of religion
as a recurring theme. The older autochtonous Mexican religion and newer
Catholicism create a hybrid which empowers the characters in this book.
Finally, we focus on the author’s use of parody and irony to tackle serious
issues such as the status of women, tradition, religion, identity, crime and
responsibility.

In this essay, I explore the way Sandra Cisneros portrays La Llorona and La Malinche in "Women Hollering Creek" and "Never Marry a Mexican." I will also present the ways in which the characters attempt to break or accept the gender roles established by these two mythical women. Many critics assert that La Llorona and La Malinche are negative figures for many Latin American women and girls. La Llorona is the woman who drowned herself and her kids to get back at her husband for his infidelity: the ultimate bad mother. La Malinche is considered the "harlot, traitor" of Cortes. However, I argue that it is only through La Llorona that Cleofilas can find redemption in "Women Hollering Creek." Conversely, In "Never Marry a Mexican," Clemency tries to forsake her Mexican roots and the sexuality of La Malinche but Clemencia's rebellion ties her more closely to her. I argue that theses two stories show that only through the accepting and molding of their Mexican heritage are these female protagonists able to be at peace in the physical and psychological borderlands between America and Mexico, and with themselves.

The present study revises communitarian boundaries in the fiction of Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros. Using the ideas of key figures in post-phenomenological communitarian theory and connecting them with Anzaldúa and Braidotti’s concepts of borderland and nomadism, this essay explores Cisneros’ contrast between operative communities that crave for the immanence of a shared communion and substantiate themselves in essentialist tropes, and inoperative communities that are characterized by transcendence or exposure to alterity. In The House on Mango Street (1984) the figure of the child is the perfect starting point to ‘unwork’ (in Nancy’s terminology) concepts such as spatial belonging, nationalistic beliefs, linguistic constrictions, and gender roles through a selection of tangible imagery which, from a female child’s pseudo-innocent perspective, aims to generate an inoperative community beyond essentialist tropes, where individualistic and communal drives are ambiguously intertwined. Using Cisneros’ debut novel as a case study, this article studies the female narrator as embodying both a community of one and Cisneros’ search for an intellectual Chicano community.

“Barbie-Q” (1991) by Chicana Sandra Cisneros and “The Couch” (2010) by Emirati Fatima H. Al Mazrouei lend themselves to a comparative study for several reasons. Both short stories present female narrators who desire the object identified in the title of each story. In each story, this item carries significant symbolic value. Both poetic prose texts offer an implicit critique on (post)modern consumerism, and both also weave this critique into a context of female body image and the beauty myth manifested in Naomi Wolf’s book by the same title (1991). Departing from a philosophical understanding of “desire,” and encouraging a constructive dialogue between so-called “Western” and non-Western feminist discourse, this essay accounts for implications the diverse representations of female desire have for their contrasting cultural contexts. It highlight ways in which increasingly urgent transcultural or cosmopolitan feminist discourse could function more fruitfully.

Este ensayo analiza el combate, a través de la narrativa ficcional, contra la reproducción social de conductas patriarcales en la comunidad chicana, tomando en cuenta las concepciones binarias de la realidad que, producto de la hegemonía de los roles de género, consolidan y propagan la normalización de las opresiones de las mujeres. Para ello, se utiliza como fuente primaria la novela The House on Mango Street (1984) de la escritora Sandra Cisneros. El proceso analítico se realiza con especial interés en Esperanza Cordero, elemento disruptivo principal y protagonista de la novela. El carácter contrahegemónico de la protagonista se ve reflejado en su negativa a asimilarse al ambiente sexista que habita mediante la  transgresión de los roles hegemónicos, el empoderamiento individual y el desarrollo de sororidad.

El presente capítulo aborda la reescritura feminista que Sandra Cisneros hace de los tres grandes estereotipos chicanos de género: La Malinche, La Virgen de Guadalupe y La Llorona en su segundo experimento narrativo Woman Hollering Creek (1991). El punto de partida son las teorías de críticas como María Herrera-Sobek, Elizabeth J. Ordóñez o Katherine Ríos.

Drawing on the idea of literature as healing (Wilentz), this article examines the anti-dualistic restoring defense of the body, sexuality, and love in Angelou (African American), Cisneros (Chicana), and Peri Rossi (Uruguayan Spanish). My trans-American comparative reading seeks to transcend frontiers and join the poets' efforts to demolish racist, (hetero) sexist, and other prejudices. The authors insist on the body and emotions as providing reliable sources of knowledge; they propose that women can cure themselves by loving their bodies, poetry can close up the wounds of sexist violence, and respect for lesboeroticism can heal intolerant communities. While celebrating the female, the poetic personae embrace non-binary positions that defy sexual and gender stereotypes; moreover, their poems' cross-cultural and multi-tonal dimension functions as a bridge among people. In sum, the poetry of Angelou, Cisneros, and Peri Rossi has the power to cross borders and heal the world.

The Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s initiated a strong political consciousness amongst Mexican-Americans, turned the previously derogatory terms ‘Chicano’ and ‘Chicana’ into assertions of ethnic pride, and sparked the creation of a vast body of literature by writers of Mexican descent.
We will begin our survey of Chicano and Chicana literature with Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s famous epic poem “I am Joaquin” in which the speaker voices the social inequalities in the United States at the time of the Movement. Joaquin’s struggle to fashion an identity in the push-and-pull of American, Mexican, and indigenous cultures and traditions will become a recurring issue in this class when we probe stories and poems set in the Southwest border region or the Latino neighborhoods of American metropolises. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poetry, Sandra Cisneros’s coming-of-age novel The House on Mango Street and Luis Rodriguez’s narratives of a gang-plagued East L.A., narrators and characters cross borders, negotiate generational conflicts, and attempt to straddle the perceived divide between community and individuality. In our readings of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima and Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek” we will encounter the weeping women, patron saints and indigenous healers of Mexican folklore, as well as La Malinche, the highly contested and iconic woman who – legend has it – was involved in the Spanish conquest. We will analyze their literary representations and study their re-writes and re-appropriations in view of gender roles in Mexican-American culture.

Drawing on the idea of literature as healing (Wilentz), this article examines the anti-dualistic restoring defense of the body, sexuality, and love in Angelou (African American), Cisneros (Chicana), and Peri Rossi (Uruguayan Spanish). My trans-American comparative reading seeks to transcend frontiers and join the poets’ efforts to demolish racist, (hetero) sexist, and other prejudices. The authors insist on the body and emotions as providing reliable sources of knowledge; they propose that women can cure themselves by loving their bodies, poetry can close up the wounds of sexist violence, and respect for lesboeroticism can heal intolerant communities. While celebrating the female, the poetic personae embrace non-binary positions that defy sexual and gender stereotypes; moreover, their poems’ cross-cultural and multi-tonal dimension functions as a bridge among people. In sum, the poetry of Angelou, Cisneros, and Peri Rossi has the power to cross borders and heal the world.

Este artículo explica la construcción autoficcional de La casa en Mango Street, obra de la chicana Sandra Cisneros. Parte de la base teórica que considera la autoficción como un género no subordinado a otros, siguiendo la posición de Vera Toro, y elabora un estudio de las claves poéticas de la obra, así como de las condiciones sociohistóricas en que ha sido escrita. Analiza también cómo es el espacio el elemento narrativo fundamental que permite establecer una relación entre la creación literaria, la creación de identidad del pueblo chicano y la de la mujer-narradora de la obra. En este estudio no perdemos tampoco de vista el fuerte carácter crítico del texto: por un lado, observaremos la identidad en su colectividad chicana, atendiendo a ese espacio dinámico e híbrido o espacio intersticial, tal y como lo conceptualiza Homi Bhabha. Por otro lado, veremos esa identidad enunciada desde un sujeto-alteridad femenino, o más bien desde unas alteridades femeninas, poniendo en diálogo ese lugar intermedio con el de la paradójica wild zone que supone la narración de Esperanza Cordero.

Este trabajo se propone analizar la novela The House on Mango Street (1984) de la autora chicana Sandra Cisneros (1954) atendiendo al modo en que el mito platónico de la caverna es reinterpretado en clave feminista para significar alegóricamente el proceso de empoderamiento por el cual la mujer chicana consigue salir del gueto, liberarse de la opresión patriarcal que este supone, y adquirir un lugar propio en el que desarrollar su identidad femenina libremente. Este viaje se realiza, no obstante, sin que ello suponga un abandono de sus raíces hispanas, pues el compromiso con la comunidad conmina a Esperanza Cordero a retornar al barrio para garantizar las oportunidades de aquellos iguales que, como ella, buscan prosperar en una sociedad estadounidense que los concibe como parte de la alteridad. En las fronteras entre la literatura hispanoamericana y la estadounidense, Sandra Cisneros desarrolla una novela cargada de tintes autobiográficos en los que su herencia mexicana tiene un gran peso, por lo que constituye una narrativa de frontera. Fruto de la realidad migrante entre México y E.E.U.U., esta
narración híbrida y transnacional contribuye a conformar una mitología propia de la cultura chicana a fin de narrar las propias experiencias colectivas del migrante latinoamericano en Estados Unidos.

"Portraits of the Artist" is a Fall 2018 Swarthmore College English Literature seminar of mine for first-year undergraduate students introducing them to literary and cultural studies—and analytical writing skills—at the college level.  For potential majors in all fields, including humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences.

Para quien crea una nueva realidad a través de la palabra, es decir, para quien escribe, “to write is a glorious but bold activity” (Barthes, Mythologies 50). Si bien el acto de creación en cualquiera de las ramas del arte es, sin duda, tan antiguo como el ser humano, en particular la literatura es un invento moderno, con reglas y gustos que se acomodan a las épocas y a las tecnologías disponibles. Un libro, entonces, surge como una individualidad, como una creación original e irrepetible, pero a su vez refleja estilos que lo emparentan con una historia, con una tradición de la que emana y en la que se inserta, un contexto que construye al texto y que el texto, simultáneamente, ayuda a construir. En esta presentación trabajaré sobre el libro de Sandra Cisneros titulado A House of My Own: Stories from My Life. A partir de una selección de textos de A House of My Own me propongo rastrear la intertextualidad en tres ámbitos: la(s) lengua(s), la literatura y la música. Desde el título mismo de la obra, la relación con otros textos, en el sentido amplio del término, constituye la trama que organiza, a la vez que sostiene, esta y otras obras de Cisneros. Será a partir de la noción de intertextualidad de Roland Barthes que realice la exploración del texto de Sandra Cisneros.

This article deals with the portrayal of female emancipation in Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are you Going, Where Have You Been” and Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street, where two teenage girls face the dangers of leaving home in order to develop themselves, which results in a different view of the concept of “home” at the end – home as having a mind of one’s own.

La Llorona, La Gritona, Weeping Woman, Crying Woman or Woman in White—different names that refer to the same mythical figure of a woman cursed to haunt a place (usually by a body of water) weeping for her dead children or seeking to punish wayward men for her own suffering. Configurations of the characterization of the La Llorona figure date back to early indigenous mythology in Mexico prior to the Spanish colonization but different versions of this myth populates not only contemporary Mexican culture but also various southern states of the U.S. Some adaptations of the myth depict her as the monstrous mother who kills her children by drowning them while others focus on her victimization at the hands of a patriarchal society because of her racial and/or social inferiority. This paper will focus on these two oppositions: monstrous mother and/or victim. Specific strains of the myth from biblical, mythological and folkloric roots will be examined to exemplify the one constant that links all versions: La Llorona as the wronged woman who is taken advantage of and then discarded by her male Other. Special attention will be paid to the contemporary versions of the tale (both in oral tradition, internet postings and an episode in the television series “The Supernatural”) in which there seems to be a focus on not only on issues social and racial inequality but also on modern day questions of identity. Wherein lays the true monster? Is it the figure of La Llorona or is it the socio-cultural imaginary that makes a woman feel valuable based on her physical beauty and elegance and not on her ability as a mother, a wife or simply, her individuality?

This essay defines the problem of bildungsroman hermeneutics for literary criticism and social policy in the post-civil rights era. Examining critical responses to Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, it argues that the traditional bildungsroman exerts a powerful hold on interpretations of minority mobility. Bildungsroman hermeneutics understands social relations as organized around individual development. This model undermines the collective politics many critics sense in Cisneros's text and obscures her revisions of the genre. Furthermore, bildungsroman hermeneutics intersects with neoconservative arguments that developed to roll back civil rights reforms and stymie government interventions. To address the inequalities enduring after civil rights we must circumvent an individual-centered template that has shaped plots of narrative and social change. Part of a broader effort to decenter the bildungsroman (including the work of Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Naylor), Cisneros's text can help us do so, if we can learn to read it otherwise.

An undergraduate survey and discussion course taught at Swarthmore College, Spring 2017.  31 students enrolled.

Texts and authors included:
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer
Nora Ephron, Heartburn
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Amistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives
Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek
Chimamanda Adichie, Americanah
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Since the 1980s, the literary and theoretical output of American women writers of Latin-American heritage has offered an alternative reading of feminist literary tradition. Sandra Cisneros is probably one of the foremost figures within the American context of “Border Literature” and “Borders Studies” proper. This article firstly outlines the parameters, theorems and prominent figures of Border Studies, and then examines Cisneros’ short story “Woman Hollering Creek” which deconstructs the dualistic mode of thinking in terms of first world vs. third world dichotomy, and defies various thematic and structural borders. The story is also a parody of the Mexican popular genres of telenovella (soap opera) and fotonovella (photo novel), and offers a new form of identity formation through the female protagonist’s quest for finding her own voice and subjectivity outside the prescribed gender roles attuned to the patriarchal discourse proposed in the aforementioned popular genres. Hence, this article offers a close reading of the story’s narrative strategies on a linguistic and semantic level as they inform its thematic concerns.