Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1984), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work includes experimentation with emerging subject positions, which she attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and she is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.
Cisneros's early life provided many experiences that she later drew on, as a writer: she grew up as the only daughter, in a family of six brothers, which often made her feel isolated, and the constant movement of her family, between Mexico and the United States, instilled in her the sense of "always straddling two countries but not belonging to either culture." Cisneros's work deals with the formation of Chicana identity, exploring the challenges of being caught between Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, facing the misogynist attitudes present in both these cultures and experiencing poverty. For her insightful social critique and powerful prose style, Cisneros has achieved recognition, far beyond Chicano and Latino communities, to the extent that The House on Mango Street has been translated, worldwide, and it is taught, in U.S. classrooms, as a coming-of-age novel.
Cisneros has held a variety of professional positions, working as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator, and she has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes. In 1998, she established the Macondo Writers Workshop, which provides socially conscious workshops, for writers. In 2000, she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas. Currently, Cisneros resides in Mexico.
Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 20, 1954, to a family of Mexican heritage, as the third of seven children. The only surviving daughter, she considered herself the "odd number, in a set of men.” Cisneros's great-grandfather had played the piano for the Mexican president and was from a wealthy background, but he gambled away his family's fortune. Her paternal grandfather, Enrique, was a veteran of the Mexican Revolution, and he used what money he had saved to give her father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral, the opportunity to go to college. However, after failing classes, due to what Cisneros called his "lack of interest" in studying, Alfredo ran away to the United States, in an effort to escape his father's anger. While roaming the southern United States, with his brother, Alfredo visited Chicago, where he met Elvira Cordero Anguiano. After getting married, the pair settled, in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. Cisneros's biographer, Robin Ganz, writes that she acknowledges her mother's family came from a very humble background, tracing its roots back to the Mexican state of Guanajuato, while her father's was much more "admirable".
Taking work as an upholsterer to support his family, Cisneros's father began "a compulsive circular migration, between Chicago and Mexico City, that became the dominating pattern of Cisneros's childhood." Their family was constantly moving, between the two cities, which necessitated their finding new places to live, as well as schools for the children. Eventually, the instability caused Cisneros's six brothers to pair off, in twos, leaving her to define herself, as the isolated one. Her feelings of exclusion from the family were exacerbated, by her father, who referred to his seis hijos y una hija ("six sons and one daughter"), rather than his siete hijos ("seven children"). Ganz notes that Cisneros's childhood loneliness was instrumental, in shaping her later passion for writing. Cisneros's one strong female influence was her mother, Elvira, who was a voracious reader and more enlightened and socially conscious than her father. According to Ganz, although Elvira was too dependent on her husband and too restricted, in her opportunities to fulfill her own potential, she ensured her daughter would not suffer from the same disadvantages as she did.
Her family made a down payment, on their own home, in Humboldt Park, a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood, on Chicago's West Side, when she was eleven years old. This neighborhood and its characters would, later, become the inspiration for Cisneros's novel, The House on Mango Street. For high school, Cisneros attended Josephinum Academy, a small Catholic all-girls school. Here, she found an ally, in a high-school teacher who helped her to write poems about the Vietnam War. Although Cisneros had written her first poem , around the age of ten, with her teacher's encouragement, she became known for her writing, throughout her high-school years. In high school, she wrote poetry and was the literary magazine editor, but according to Cisneros, herself, she did not really start writing, until her first creative writing class, in college, in 1974. After that, it took a while to find her own voice. She explains: "I rejected what was at hand and emulated the voices of the poets that I admired in books: big male voices like James Wright and Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke, all wrong for me."
Cisneros was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree, from Loyola University Chicago, in 1976, and she received a Master of Fine Arts degree, from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, in 1978. At Loyola, she had an affair with a professor that she calls a “secret life [from] when I was a junior through Iowa that tormented me and that I wrote about, in my poetry”. She describes the abusive relationship as "very damaging to me" and is "why my writing is always dealing with sexuality and wickedness".
While attending the Workshop, Cisneros discovered how the particular social position she occupied gave her writing a unique potential, recalling: "It wasn't as if I didn't know who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But I didn't think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance, in my life, whereas it had everything to do with it! My race, my gender, and 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." She conformed to American literary canons and adopted a writing style that was purposely opposite that of her classmates, realizing that instead of being something to be ashamed of, her own cultural environment was a source of inspiration. From then on, she would write of her "neighbors, the people [she] saw, the poverty that the women had gone through."
So to me it began there, and that's when I intentionally started writing about all the things in my culture that were different from them—the poems that are these city voices—the first part of Wicked Wicked ways—and the stories in House on Mango Street. I think it's ironic that at the moment when I was practically leaving an institution of learning, I began realizing in which ways institutions had failed me.
Drawing on Mexican and Southwestern popular culture and conversations in the city streets, Cisneros wrote, to convey the lives of people she identified with. Literary critic Jacqueline Doyle has described Cisneros's passion for hearing the personal stories that people tell and her commitment to expressing the voices of marginalized people through her work, such as the "thousands of silent women,” whose struggles are portrayed in The House on Mango Street.
Five years after receiving her MFA, she returned to Loyola University-Chicago, where she had previously earned a BA in English, to work as an administrative assistant. Prior to this job, she worked in Pilsen and Little Village, predominately Mexican neighborhoods, in Chicago, and teaching high school dropouts, at Latino Youth High School.