Guest Author - Sharon Cullars

Growing up in a Chicago working-class neighborhood in the sixties, Sandra Cisneros wondered why her family’s home "wasn't all green lawns and white wood like the ones in ‘Leave It To Beaver' and ‘Father Knows Best'" (Ghosts 72). Trying to escape the poverty of her youth and the loneliness of being the only girl in a family of seven siblings, she sought refuge in reading and dreaming of a nice home where life was as idyllic as that portrayed on television. But her family’s constant moving between Chicago and Mexico only provided instability, at the same time exposing her to two cultures, Mexican and American, rural poor and urban poor.

Her feeling of disconnectedness from the American dream remained with her into her adult years, where even in college, she found that the assigned literature did not speak to her as a woman, and especially not as a Latina. In her early writings, she had to eventually learn to divorce her style from those of the “big male voices” in literature, writers like Hugo and Reothke who were her initial influences but whose works did not reflect her life or culture.

Earning a B.A. in English from Loyola and five years later a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Cisneros’ own style emerged with her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1984), a lyrical novel of a young Mexican-American girl growing up in Chicago, a tale patterned much after her own life. In her novel she finally wrote about the things she knew well: “feminism, love, oppression, and religion". She incorporated Spanish into the basically English narrative, merging the languages of her two cultures, sometimes without translation. In explaining the non-translation she said: “I will try to weave it in such a way in the rest of the story so they don’t lost [lose] it." The book earned the Before Columbus Book Award in 1985, a testament to the literary value of voices from cultures other than the mainstream.

In 1991, Cisneros wrote Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Random House), a collection of short fiction featuring women on both sides of the Mexican border. In the title story, Cleofila finds herself trapped in a marriage marred by alcoholism, poverty and abuse and exacerbated by the couple’s recent immigration to American from Mexico. Cleofila is eventually helped by a health care worker who aids in her escape back to Mexico, where ironically she finds examples of feminine freedom that she never found in America. Woman Hollering Creek achieved literary prominence by having six of its stories included in Norton's Anthology of American Literature, making Cisneros one of the few Latina writers ever to be featured.

Feminism is a continuous theme in Cisneros’ works, which includes collections of poetry. She glorifies in the sexually wicked heroine as depicted in her collection, Bad Boys and Loose Women (1994). In her poems, sexual freedom and economic independence are states to be achieved and enjoyed, and not to be tinged with the Catholic guilt that she explores in My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), a collection of sixty poems that each resemble a short story. These breaking of the yokes that bound Cisneros in her upbringing as an obedient Catholic girl resonates in her work, displaying a defiance that she had not been able to show as a child.

In her stories, Cisneros finally found the voice that she had been searching for, a strong voice that needed to be heard and shared, and the literary world is much richer for being able to hear it. Read an excerpt from Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.