Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) is an American writer.

Cisneros was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 20, 1954, to a family of Mexican heritage, 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 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 name came from a very humble background, tracing its roots back to Guanajuato, Mexico 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' childhood."

Their family was constantly moving between the two countries, 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' 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 Khara 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' 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 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 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 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."

Cisneros says of this moment:

"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."

She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991).

Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell.

In 1998 she established the Macondo Writers Workshop, which provides socially conscious workshops for writers, and in 2000 she founded the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, which awards talented writers connected to Texas.

Cisneros currently resides in Mexico.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.

Cisneros' early life provided many experiences 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 migration 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' 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 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 has maintained a strong commitment to community and literary causes.