SANDRA CISNEROS: GENERAL COMMENTARY

DEBORAH L. MADSEN (ESSAY DATE 2000)

SOURCE: Madsen, Deborah L. "Sandra Cisneros." In Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, pp. 105-34. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Madsen explores Cisneros's dual marginality as a Latin female, examines her self-determination and control over the physical, sexual and social aspects of her life, and highlights the autobiographical elements in Cisneros's poetry and fiction.

In a 1990 interview Sandra Cisneros joked that after ten years of writing professionally she had finally earned enough money to buy a secondhand car.¹ Her struggle for recognition as a Chicana writer earned her critical and popular acclaim with the publication of The House on Mango Street (1984), the success of which was followed by Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her poetry collection My Wicked, Wicked Ways was published by the Berkeley-based Chicana Third Woman Press in 1987, and the outrageous themes of these poems continued in the poems collected in Loose Woman, which appeared in 1994. Cisneros's work is characterized by the celebratory breaking of sexual taboos and trespassing across the restrictions that limit the lives and experiences of Chicanas. These themes of trespass, transgression, and joyful abandon feature prominently in her poetry. The narrative techniques of her fiction demonstrate daring technical innovations, especially in her bold experimentation with literary voice and her development of a hybrid form that weaves poetry into prose to create a dense and evocative linguistic texture of symbolism and imagery that is both technically and aesthetically accomplished.

Sandra Cisneros was born in the Puerto Rican district of Chicago on 20 December 1954. Her parents' mixed ethnic background (Spanish-speaking Mexican father and English-speaking Mexican American mother) is reflected in the cultural hybridity that is one of Cisneros's recurring themes. She is the third child and only daughter in a family of seven children, a condition that Cisneros has described as leaving her marginalized as a consequence of her gender.² During Cisneros's childhood her father's restless homesickness caused the family to move frequently between Chicago and her paternal grandparents' house in Mexico City, and always she lived in urban neighborhoods. Although her early years were spent in cramped urban apartments, Cisneros recalls her childhood as solitary. Cisneros ascribes to the loneliness of those formative years her impulse to create stories by re-creating in her imagination the dull routine of her life.

She graduated with a B.A. degree from Loyola University in 1976 and completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1978. It was at Iowa that Cisneros discovered, first, a sense of her own ethnic "otherness" and, second, the unique literary voice that characterizes both her poetry and her fiction. She describes her early writing as inferior imitations of the work of mainstream writers; in the discovery of her difference came a rejection of this attempt to join the American literary orthodoxy. The voice she discovered, the voice she had unconsciously suppressed, is the voice of the barrio.

An ongoing commitment to those who grow up in the barrio has led Cisneros to become involved as a teacher in educational projects designed to assist the urban underprivileged, such as the Latino Youth Alternative High School in Chicago. She has worked variously as a teacher, a counselor, a college recruiter, a poet-in-the-schools, and an arts administrator in order to support her writing. Cisneros has taught creative writing at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; the PEN Center West Award for the best fiction of 1991; the Quality paperback Book Club New Voices Award; a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; and the Frank Dobie Artists Fellowship, Austin, Texas. Sandra Cisneros moved to the Southwest in 1984; she now lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is currently working on a novel, Caramelo.

Cisneros describes writing as something she has done all her life from the time when, as a young girl, she began writing in spiral notebooks poems that only her mother read. Her first published book, Bad Boys, appeared as the Chicano Chapbook No. 8 (1980). Her novel The House on Mango Street was published by a small regional press in 1984 and the following year was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award. The novel draws heavily upon childhood memories and an unadorned childlike style of expression to depict life in the Chicano community. Issues of racial and sexual oppression, poverty, and violence are explored in a sequence of interconnected vignettes that together form a modified autobiographical structure. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories continues the exploration of ethnic identity within the patriarchal context of Chicano culture. The stories in this volume offer snapshots of Mexican American life: sights and smells recalled in childish memories, stories told by witches who see all of Chicano history from past to future, the hopes and aspirations of grandparents and grandchildren, friends and neighbors, Mexican movies, and "Merican" tourists. Her first volume of poetry, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, is described by Cherríe Moraga as "a kind of international graffiti, where the poet—bold and insistent—puts her mark on those travelled places on the map and in the heart."³Loose Woman similarly invokes the cultural and the emotional in an intoxicating sequence of outrageously confessional moments. Cisneros has also published essays on writing and her role as a writer, most notably the selections titled "From a Writer's Notebook. Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession" and "Notes to a Young(er) Writer," both of which appeared in the Americas Review (1987). Her books have been translated into ten languages.

In Cisneros's work the effort to negotiate a cross-cultural identity is complicated by the need to challenge the deeply rooted patriarchal values of both Mexican and American cultures. Cisneros writes, "There's always this balancing act, we've got to define what we think is fine for ourselves instead of what our culture says."⁴ Chicana feminism has arisen largely from this need to contest the feminine stereotypes that define machismo, while at the same time identifying and working against the shared class and racial oppression that all Chicanos/as—men, women and children—experience. To adopt models of femininity that are thought of as Anglo is, as Cisneros describes, to be

told you're a traitor to your culture. And it's a horrible life to live. We're always straddling two countries, and we're always living in that kind of schizophrenia that I call, being a Mexican woman living in an American society, but not belonging to either culture. In some sense we're not Mexican and in some sense we're not American.⁵

Patriarchal definitions of feminine subjectivity, some Anglo but mostly Mexican, affect all of Cisneros's characters by creating the medium in which they live. The protagonist of The House on Mango Street, the girl Esperanza, compares herself with her great-grandmother with whom she shares her name and the coincidence of being born in the Chinese year of the horse,

which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female—but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong.⁶

This fiery ancestor, "a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry" (Mango Street, 11), is forcibly taken by Esperanza's great-grandfather, and her spirit broken, she lived out her days staring from her window. The narrator remarks, "I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window" (11). This woman is the first of many Esperanza encounters who are broken in body and spirit by the patriarchal society that defines the terms by which they live.

The primary effect of these prescriptive definitions is the experience of the self as marginal, as failing to belong in the culture in which one lives. Cisneros challenges marginality but in subtle ways and using the weapons at her disposal as an artist: imagery, symbolism, forms of narrative connectivity that are at odds with rational, discursive logic. Like so many Chicana writers, Sandra Cisneros rejects the logic of the patriarchy in favor of more provisional, personal, emotional, and intuitive forms of narrative. She creates stories, not explanations or analyses or arguments. The stories that comprise The House on Mango Street are linked according to a loose and associative logic. In this way the fragmented structure of the text embodies a quest for freedom, a genuine liberation that resolves rather than escapes the conflicts faced by the Chicana subject. María Elena de Valdés describes how Cisneros's narrative technique relates to the theme of feminist resistance:

The open-ended reflections are the narrator's search for an answer to the enigma: how can she be free of Mango Street and the house that is not hers and yet belong as she must to that house and that street. The open-ended entries come together only slowly as the tapestry takes shape, for each of the closed figures are also threads of the larger background figure which is the narrator herself.⁷

The threads with which the story is then woven are the complex image patterns Cisneros gradually develops and the imagistic connections she builds among the vignettes. The first story, which describes the houses in which Esperanza has lived, ends with her father's promise that their cramped and shabby house is temporary. The next story, "Hairs," begins with a description of her father's hair and goes on to contrast it with her mother's. The contrast between mother and father is continued and generalized in the third story, "Boys and Girls," which ends with Esperanza's hope that she will one day have the best friend for whom she yearns. The fourth story concerns the meaning of Esperanza's name, "Hope." In this way Cisneros creates vignettes that are self-contained, autonomous, yet link together in an emotionally logical fashion and build to create a picture of life in the barrio, seen through the experiences of the young Esperanza and her developing consciousness of herself as an artist.

The stories collected in Woman Hollering Creek are organized according to a similar associative logic. The volume is divided into three named sections: "My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn," "One Holy Night," and "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman." Each section shares a loosely defined theme: the experience of Chicano/a children in "My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn," "Eleven," "Salvador Early or Late," "Mexican Movies," "Barbie-Q," "Mericans," and "Tepeyac" ; the betrayal of Chicana girl children in the stories "One Holy Night" and "My Tocaya" ; and the limited choice of adult relationships available to women in patriarchal Chicano/a society in "Woman Hollering Creek," "The Marlboro Man," "La Fabulosa: A Texas Operetta," "Remember the Alamo," "Never Marry a Mexican," "Bread," "Eyes of Zapata," "Anguiano Religious Articles Rosaries Statues …," "Little Miracles, Kept Promises," "Los Boxers," "There Was a Man, There Was a Woman," "Tin Tan Tan," and " Bien Pretty." Though many of these stories depict the lives of individuals who are comprehensively defeated by the sheer burden of work, worry, and care they are required to bear, in some of them Cisneros creates characters who are able to subvert oppressive definitions of gender identity in favor of marginal, hybrid selves.

The story "Never Marry a Mexican," for example, begins with the disappointment of the narrator's grandparents that their son should have married a United States-born Mexican—a woman who is neither white like an Anglo nor raised properly in the ways of Mexican femininity:

what could be more ridiculous than a Mexican girl who couldn't even speak Spanish, who didn't know enough to set a separate plate for each course at dinner, nor how to fold cloth napkins, nor how to set the silverware.⁸

The lesson learned by the narrator is "Never Marry a Mexican," which she generalizes into a determination never to marry. Instead she cultivates a hybrid identity, belonging to several socioeconomic classes and yet to none. She describes herself as "amphibious"—capable of surviving in radically different environments. And although she is United States-born, still the native idiom does not come naturally to her. She exclaims, ironically in the very idiom she denies, "I can't ever get the sayings right even though I was born in this country. We didn't say shit like that in our house" (73). This awareness of cross-cultural marginality extends even to the endearments used by her lover; he calls her Malinche, "my courtesan," the native woman taken by Cortés and mother of the hybrid Chicano race. But this woman, Cisneros's narrator, takes her own peculiar revenge upon her adulterous lover: in his wife's absence she plants around the house a trail of sticky sweets, in places only his wife will look—her makeup bag, her nail polish bottles, her diaphragm case. Then she seduces this faithless lover's son, and the significance of the story becomes clear as a confession to this son and an explanation of the relationship in which he has become involved. This vengeance is more than personal; it is revenge upon an Anglo man who believes he can "Never Marry a Mexican." This is vengeance sought on behalf of La Malinche for all her Chicana daughters who are good enough to seduce but never good enough to marry. This is vengeance on behalf of all the women who are led to believe that marriage is the only mechanism by which their lives may be validated and if they are not married then they themselves are somehow not valid.

The legacy of La Malinche is the fragmentary subjectivity commonly experienced by Chicanas: women who seek approval on both Anglo and Mexican terms, so that the unitary sense of self is inevitably sacrificed. The Chicana writer perhaps experiences this conflict most intensely:

the Chicana has had to be a cultural schizophrenic in trying to please both the Chicano and Anglo publishers, not to mention pleasing the readers, who may neutralize her potential to create within her own framework of ideas.⁹

In these words Marcela Christine Lucero-Trujillo describes the experience of cross-cultural identity and alienation that is perhaps the single most common theme in ethnic women's writing. To lose one's sense of self in the effort to satisfy mutually antagonistic sets of cultural values is the danger negotiated by Cisneros's characters. The image of living under occupation, of living in an occupied territory or even of becoming occupied territory, describes the experience of both a woman under Chicano patriarchy and a Chicana under Anglo dominance. This accounts for Cisneros's use of the image of the window in several of the stories in The House on Mango Street. Women are depicted sitting by their windows, forbidden or afraid to enter the world represented by the street, literally and physically trapped in their imposed domesticity. Esperanza's friend Sally is beaten by her jealous husband if she so much as speaks to anyone in his absence; Rafaela's husband locks her in their apartment, so she communicates with the world solely through the window; Mamacita refuses to leave her building because she cannot speak English. Such women experience the world in a series of vignettes which permit no unifying structure. They live lives without narrative, without context, but representing a logic of oppression and cruelty too ugly to confront. In her fiction Cisneros tells of living with a double burden imposed by white women and by men of all colors. The complexities of gender, race, and class, which will not remain distinct but instead compound their oppressive effects, form the labyrinth that Cisneros seeks to map.

Fiction is used to expose the many lies that are told to children, especially girl children, in order to regulate their desires, ambitions, and aspirations. The narrator of the story "One Holy Night" tells her girl cousins who are curious to know "how it is to have a man": "It's a bad joke. When you find out you'll be sorry" (Woman Hollering Creek, 35). But these girl children seem to have no choice other than to "find out," eventually. The juxtaposition of the vignettes in The House on Mango Street dramatizes the attempts of the adolescent Esperanza to reconcile her childish naïveté with the realities of adult Chicana life. In the story "Papa Who Wakes Up Tired in the Dark" Esperanza makes an important distinction between her own father and other men as she struggles to reconcile her love for her father with the treatment she receives from other men and the patriarchal attitudes that inform their behavior toward her. In the preceding story, "First Job," Esperanza describes her first experience of sexual harassment, by a man old enough to be her father:

he said it was his birthday and would I please give him a birthday kiss. I thought I would because he was so old and just as I was about to put my lips on his cheek, he grabs my face with both hands and kisses me hard on the mouth and doesn't let go.

(55)

In one of the pivotal stories of The House on Mango Street, "Red Clowns," Esperanza describes her sexual initiation. She is assaulted by a group of Anglo boys while waiting at the fairground for her friend Sally. Esperanza's feelings of helplessness, confusion, and pain are overwhelmed by the sensation of betrayal: betrayal by Sally who was not there when Esperanza needed her but also betrayal by all the women who ever failed to contradict the romantic mythology of love and sex. Esperanza says, "You're a liar. They all lied. Only his dirty fingernails against my skin, only his sour smell again" (100). Esperanza directs her anger and shame not at the perpetrators of this violent act; she does not have the words, the language with which to direct blame at men, and privileged white men at that, and so she internalizes that sense of blame and accuses women instead. As María Herrera-Sobek explains:

The diatribe is directed not only at Sally the silent interlocutor but at the community of women who keep the truth from the younger generation of women in a conspiracy of silence: silence in not denouncing the 'real' facts of life about sex and its negative aspects in violent sexual encounters, and complicity in embroidering a fairy-tale-like mist around sex and romanticizing and idealizing unrealistic sexual relations.¹⁰

In the earlier story "Beautiful and Cruel" Esperanza tells of her desire to become like the movie actresses who are beautiful and cruel. The kind of actress Esperanza most wants to be "is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away" (Mango Street, 89). This image of an empowered woman is quite distinct from the imagery of femininity encountered in popular culture. The character Marin, for example, represents the young victim of patriarchal popular culture. Esperanza recalls that Marin sings popular songs of romantic love, and she tells the younger girls

how Davey the Baby's sister got pregnant and what cream is best for taking off moustache hair and if you count the white flecks on your finger-nails you can know how many boys are thinking of you and lots of other things I can't remember now.

(Mango Street, 27)

Marin's ambition is to work in a department store, where she can look beautiful and wear fashionable clothes and meet someone to marry. Romantic love and personal beauty are the ideologies that inform her sense of herself, her worth, and the direction of her life. Esperanza realizes that Marin is waiting for someone, a man, to come along and take control of her life. She refuses to accept responsibility for her life herself; she places that responsibility with the unknown man for whom she is waiting. As Esperanza imagines, Marin is "waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life" (27). Unlike the movie actress in the story "Beautiful and Cruel," whatever feminine power Marin possesses she gives away.

But in "Red Clowns," Esperanza tells of her discovery that a "Spanish girl" does not possess any power and that whatever is desired of her will be taken from her by force. Ignorance of her own helplessness is what Esperanza most resents: the deliberate falsehoods that lead her to believe she has a power that always has been denied her. The adults into whom children like Esperanza mature are deceived by their culture about who they are and what they can achieve in their lives. Esperanza's mother uses her own life to warn her daughter of the danger of the ideology of personal beauty. She tells how she left school because she had no nice clothes to wear and only when it was too late did she see the mistake she had made. The lives led by her parents represent for Esperanza the discrepancy between the promises made by her culture and the reality of the life that is actually delivered. Her parents believe that hard work will be rewarded in material ways. They live in the expectation that life will become easier and their next house will be bigger and better. Eventually Esperanza stops believing them and the mythology they believe. She refuses to accompany the family on Sunday afternoon drives to admire the houses and gardens of rich Anglo-Americans—the people for whom her parents and neighbors toil. America promises its citizens more than it is willing to deliver; but Chicano culture promises its little girls less than they are capable of achieving—a life of drudgery, servitude, and self-denial.

Cisneros's treatment of sexuality is divided between a celebration of the power of a demythologized feminine sexuality and a powerful awareness of misogyny and the control of women through the control of their sexuality. The control of bodily appearance, how the female body is represented in words and in flesh, is a powerful strategy for the control of women's minds. In the language of patriarchy, femininity is defined closely with the female body. It is because she is a woman that Alicia must rise before dawn to do her dead mother's work before she goes to school. Alicia is told that "a woman's place is sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star" (Mango Street, 31) to begin another day of cooking, cleaning, and serving her family. Female identity is inscribed upon the feminine body, as the girls speculate about the true function of women's hips:

They're good for holding a baby when you're cooking, Rachel says.…You need them to dance, says Lucy.…You gott a know how to walk with hips, practice you know—like if half of you wanted to go one way and the other half the other.

(Mango Street, 49)

It is in terms of feminine usefulness to men—as entertainment (dancing), bearing and raising children, cooking, appearing sexually attractive—that the female body derives its usefulness, not as the representation of individual or feminine subjectivity. So the feminine is defined in objective terms, as women appear to men, rather than the subjective terms of feminine experience.

Many women are trapped within these cultural constructs. They find their femininity represented in a language that serves the interests of men and the masculine view of the world. Consequently, these women are unable to describe, even to themselves, the reasons for their suffering. The title story of Woman Hollering Creek tells of the young woman Cleófilas, who is brought to Texas from Mexico by the husband she hopes will transform her life into the kind of romance she knows from magazines, novels, and telenovelas.

Cleófilas thought her life would have to be like that, like a telenovela, only now the episodes got sadder and sadder. And there were no commercials in between for comic relief. And no happy ending in sight.

(52-53)

She discovers instead a life of neglect, abuse, beatings, loneliness. This is until a nurse introduces her to an entirely different kind of woman—someone who will help her leave her violent husband and return to Mexico, someone who suggests that the "hollering" for which the creek is named does not have to signify only sadness or anger but perhaps also defiance, a bold assertion of femininity and the will to self-determination. This woman, Felice, introduces Cleófilas to a whole new perspective on femininity and a range of previously unthinkable possibilities for living her life. Felice fractures the patriarchal narratives of womanhood that have constrained Cleófilas's thinking about herself and her potential.

Cisneros devotes much of her work to this effort of fracturing the powerful narratives of femininity that serve the interests of the patriarchy. Not limited to deconstructing patriarchal gender definitions, Cisneros also devotes her energies to telling about her sexuality but from her own feminine point of view, which is emphatically not a male point of view. This is the significance of Cisneros's "wicked, wicked ways," the title of her 1987 volume of poems. She is "wicked" in that she has reappropriated, taken control of, her own sexuality and the articulation of it—a power forbidden to women under patriarchy. Her wickedness is that of defying a patriarchally constructed boundary separating that which is legitimate for a woman from that which is not. The "loose woman," described in the poem of the same name, assumes mythological proportions as a consequence of her subversive powers: "They say I'm a beast … a bitch. / Or witch … the woman of myth and bullshit.…By all accounts I am / a danger to society. / I'm Pancha Villa" (Loose Woman, 112-13, 2.1, 4-5, 24)—come to save the women! This loose woman breaks laws, disregards religion, terrorizes men; "In other words, I'm anarchy" (Loose Woman, 114, 1.47).

The poems collected in Loose Woman enact a defiant reclamation of feminine sexuality—for example, "I Let Him Take Me," "I Am So in Love I Grow a New Hymen," "Black Lace Bra Kind of Woman," "Down There," "A Man in My Bed Like Cracker Crumbs," and "Loose Woman." Titles such as these are indicative of the boisterous humor, the earthiness, the extrovert energy of these poems. All are short, all set a scene and implicitly tell a tale, and all speak in powerful images that celebrate a demythologized femininity. A "black lace bra kind of woman" is a "loose woman," a woman who defies the polite rules governing feminine behavior, a woman who has "rambled / her '59 Pontiac between the blurred / lines dividing sense from senselessness" (Loose Woman, 78, 2.7-9). She is dangerous, the kind every girl's mother warned against: "Ruin your clothes, she will. / Get you home way after hours" (2.10-11). This kind of woman is reckless in her enjoyment of her life, her self, her body, and the poem celebrates this vibrant state of being: "And now the good times are coming. Girl, / I tell you, the good times are here" (2.17-18).

In the poem "Down There" Cisneros creates a vocabulary with which to write poetry about the reality of women's bodies. She does this not only to make of feminine sexuality a legitimate subject for poetry but also to challenge the decorum governing the ways in which the female body has been represented in poetry. The poem begins by administering a shock to poetic decorum: "Your poem thinks it's bad. / Because it farts in the bath. / Cracks its knuckles in class. / Grabs its balls in public" (Loose Woman, 79, 2.1-4). The poem is characterized initially by a sequence of "bad" macho habits: farting, peeing in the pool, picking one's nose, spitting, and swaggering like a macho John Wayne or Rambo. Then the tone shifts slightly and the poem is likened to objects rather than behaviors: a used condom, testicle skin, a lone pubic hair, a cigarette stub "sent hissing / to the piss pot" (2.59-60), half-finished beer bottles—in short, "the miscellany of maleness" (1.64). In these stanzas the poem is deliberately offensive, the images deliberately shocking, an outrageous violation of poetic decorum. But then comes Cisneros's ironic twist: as she turns to the central (the real) subject of her poem, the language assumes a more serious, decorous, "poetic" tone, yet the subject itself is an outrageous violation of patriarchal poetic decorum—"men-struation": "Yes,/Iwantto talk at length about Men-/ struation. Or my period" (2.88-90). The ironic hyphenation of "men-struation" draws attention to the gendered fashion in which women's and men's bodies enter poetic discourse. Cisneros goes on to describe this feminine blood as the link between sexuality and creativity: "I'd like to dab my fingers / in my inkwell / and write a poem across the wall. / 'A Poem of Womanhood'" (2.120-23). But this poem is not just made of a woman's experience and produced by a woman; it is also for women and of them; it is representative of the commonality of all women: "Words writ in blood. But no, / not blood at all, I told you. / If blood is thicker than water, then / menstruation is thicker than brother-/ hood" (2.125-29). It is in the true and authentic representation of feminine experience, including the reality of feminine sexuality, that women will find the solidarity that comes from shared gender experiences. Only by casting off the poetic stereotypes of patriarchal discourse will women overcome the divisive effects of those stereotypes and discover the potential for joy in their own bodies that is denied them.

Cisneros describes the discovery of this potential for joy, this subversive enjoyment of one's own sexuality, as a source of power for women: "Sexyness [sic], I think, it's a great feeling of self-empowerment."¹¹ She has been criticized both by other women and by men for some of the forms taken by this celebration of her sexuality, such as the highly suggestive photograph of Cisneros as "vamp" that adorns the cover of My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Cisneros describes that photography:

The cover is of a woman appropriating her own sexuality. In some ways, that's also why it's wicked; the scene is trespassing that boundary by saying 'I defy you. I'm going to tell my own story.'¹²

Cisneros goes on to describe her dismay when women failed to perceive the transgressive meaning of her gesture. She reports the following encounter, when

some feminist asked: 'How could you, a feminist, pose like lewd cheesecake to sell your book?' And that offended me. At first I was hurt, then I thought about it and said: 'Wait a second, where's your sense of humor? And why can't a feminist be sexy?'¹³

The breaking of sexist stereotypes cuts both ways in Cisneros's work, against both the male and female limits that can be placed upon feminine sexuality. The transgression of patriarchal taboos is an important aspect of Cisneros's work as a Chicana writer. Sandra Cisneros is under no illusions about the power of feminine sexuality as a weapon used against women. She recognizes that in the context of the barrio, or any poor neighborhood, feminine sexuality is equated with vulnerability: "I was writing about it [the barrio] in the most real sense I knew, as a person walking those neighborhoods with a vagina," she says in reference to her subject in The House on Mango Street. ¹⁴

Cisneros is not coy when it comes to articulating clearly the reasons why women become trapped in situations of extreme oppression. Fear of violence, sexual violence especially, is one of the prime strategies by which women are kept under control. Poverty, illiteracy, inability to speak English—these reinforce and exaggerate the coercive effect of patriarchal violence by limiting the mobility and opportunities of women. In poetry Cisneros carves out a space for these subjects and the words with which to articulate them. In "Still Life with Potatoes, Pearls, Raw Meat, Rhinestones, Lard, and Horses Hooves," for example, she contrasts the myth of genteel poverty with the reality of life in Mexican San Antonio: "poverty's not quaint when it's your house you can't escape from. / Decay's not beautiful to the decayed" (Loose Woman, 109, 2.37-38).

Although Cisneros does not flinch from depicting the squalor and deprivation of the life lived by many Chicanos, she does not dwell upon these hardships. Mexican history and mythology offer a rich vocabulary of poetic allusions with which to represent the complexity of a dual cultural heritage. In particular Cisneros addresses the issue of Mexican role models: "We're raised in a Mexican culture that has two role models: La Malinche y la Virgen de Guadalupe. And you know that's hard route to go, one or the other, there's no in-betweens."¹⁵ The virgin and the whore—these categories of "good" versus "bad" women are complicated by the perception, shared by many Chicana feminists, that they risk betrayal of the people if they pursue an alternative construction of femininity that is perceived to be Anglo. In her 1986 essay "Cactus Flowers: In Search of Tejana Feminist Poetry" Cisneros questions the playful tone of some Chicana feminist poetry that dares to criticize Chicano men only to a certain point, a point from which the poet can "slip back into the safety zone and say 'just kidding.'"¹⁶ She asks of the poet under discussion, Angela de Hoyos, in her collection Woman, Woman:

Why is de Hoyos afraid to fall out of the graces of the males whom she is obviously angry with? Is she afraid of being labelled a Malinchista by them, corrupted by gringa influences which threaten to splinter her people?¹⁷

Threats to Chicana self-definition come, then, from Angla America as well as from the machismo of Chicano culture.

As a Chicana feminist Cisneros needs to revise aspects of her hybrid culture as a woman: that is, both by using her power as a woman and by challenging those aspects of her double cultural inheritance that prescribe what she as a woman can be. In order to do this Cisneros claims a symbolic vocabulary of Aztec allusions in her poems and in stories such as "Never Marry a Mexican," which is discussed above. For instance, the poem "You Bring Out the Mexican in Me" works through a frenetic list of all those things that comprise "Mexicanness." Throughout the poem this notion of Mexicanness has encompassed multitudes, including the most radical opposites (Loose Woman, 4-6). From "the filth goddess Tlazolteotl … the swallower of sins … the lust goddess without guilt" to the Virgin, this poem and the subjectivity it describes aspire toward a kind of unity that can never be unitary, that is always predicated on conflict, the "Aztec love of war," the "pre-Columbian death and destruction," the "rain forest disaster, nuclear threat … Mexico City '85 earthquake," extremes of passion. In poems such as this Cisneros claims her right to the inheritance passed down to her by Aztec women, the conquered women who survived despite the Virgin's people. Catholicism is a powerful legacy, but the pagan legacy is just as potent. In poems such as "You Bring Out the Mexican in Me" Cisneros uses this pagan force to resist the gender stereotypes of Catholicism and the guilt with which they are enforced.

Traces of these stereotypes are to be found in every household, in every Chicano/a community. Cisneros's commitment to the cultura y raza is represented by the extension of the family to encompass the entire community. In her stories family members are often evaluated for their effectiveness as role models in the ongoing effort to resist oppressive patterns of behavior. This is especially true of female relatives: mother, aunts, comadres, girl cousins, abuelitas. The lives that make up the family are subjected to a subtle ideological analysis to reveal the conditions of their entrapment. An ironic commentary on this analytical watchfulness is represented in the story "Barbie-Q." The title itself is a pun—signifying both the universal attraction of Barbie dolls for all little girls and also the fact that the dolls our narrator can afford to own are those salvaged from a warehouse fire:

So what if our Barbies smell like smoke.…And if the prettiest doll, Barbie's MOD'ern cousin Francie with real eyelashes, eyelash brush included, has a left foot that's melted a little—so?

(Woman Hollering Creek, 16)

The narrator has absorbed the merchandising rhetoric together with the values represented by the doll. Consequently the vignette is presented in a tone of naive defiance of those socioeconomic pressures that will ensure these little girls never can meet the standard of feminine beauty signified by the doll. The doll is both role model (in terms of body image, at least) and evidence of the exclusion of Chicanas from governing Anglo definitions of femininity.

In The House on Mango Street Esperanza learns first what she does not want to be and then learns what she has the potential to become. She is named for a great-grandmother who was dominated by her husband and spent her life sitting at her window looking out, thinking of all the things she might have been. There are the characters Marin, the neighbor who has been brought from Puerto Rico to baby-sit her young cousins and look for a husband; Minerva, who writes poetry but is trapped physically in an abusive marriage; Esperanza's mother, who speaks two languages and sings opera but is too scared to go downtown because she cannot speak English; and Sally, who marries to escape her violent father. But then there are the comadres, the three sisters, who tell Esperanza that she must escape in order to come back for those who cannot find a way out themselves; it is for them she must always remember:

A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.

(Mango Street, 105)

And Alicia repeats this lesson: if life on Mango Street is ever to improve, then it will be because people like Esperanza have made it better. In response to Esperanza's insistence that she does not belong and does not want to belong, Alicia insists that not only is Esperanza shaped by the culture of Mango Street, but she will return to change it because, she asks, "Who's going to do it? The mayor? And the thought of the mayor coming to Mango Street makes me laugh out loud" (Mango Street, 107). It is as a writer that Esperanza must struggle to make that difference, because politicians will not. No one else will do it.

It is as an artist that Esperanza discovers how she can make a difference to life on Mango Street. But the altruistic aspect of her writing is slow to dawn upon her. This is because the Chicana artist needs to be selfish in order to have the time to write. Cisneros has written of her mother who let her read and study in her room rather than do her chores; later it was her family who provided financial assistance when she needed it.¹⁸ The Chicana writer needs to resist the traditional lifestyles available to Mexican American women: marriage and children would leave no time and no energy for creativity. Cisneros tells how even a regular job can threaten the concentration of energy necessary for writing. "I would like a wife, instead of a husband, because then he could take care of the kids," she jokes.¹⁹ For the woman writer, marriage means a burden of housework with which creative work cannot compete. The solitary time needed for thinking and writing is incompatible with marriage—but this is the traditional lifestyle for the Chicana who is expected to move from the father's house to that of the husband. The private mental space in which the creative process occurs is crucially related to physical space and interpersonal space.

It is no accident, then, that the house provides a controlling metaphor in The House on Mango Street and that Esperanza's growing awareness of herself as an artist is tied to her need to discover a space of her own; a place to think her own thoughts and to write them down in an appropriate silence. The characters Aunt Lupe and Minerva in The House on Mango Street seek in poetry both a refuge from their oppressive lives and an authentic kind of freedom that resolves rather than simply eludes the conflicts that characterize their experience of subjectivity. But these women have no space to call their own. Esperanza experiences the house in which she lives as a metaphor for her entire sense of self. In the first vignette she describes the shame evoked by a nun's words: "You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there" (Mango Street, 5). From this humiliation comes a determination to live in a "real" house. And with this real house will come a firm and stable sense of being, in place of the nothingness evoked by the nun. Esperanza sees an image of herself reflected in the nun's face and in her words; as a poet Esperanza is able to use words to construct both a means of escape and a means to return to the house on Mango Street.

Poetry, writing, becomes in Cisneros's work much more than words on a page. Poetry is the real business of living because the writing process engages the poet in the difficult business of contesting all those cultural pressures that are placed upon the ethnic woman. To live in freedom and to be free to write are complementary aspects of the same effort at self-liberation. As a consequence, Cisneros writes many poems about poetry, poems that deliberately confuse poetry with other passionate engagements. "I Let Him Take Me," for instance, misleads the reader by using the language of romantic love in such a way that the poetic muse is personified as a lover. But we are aware only of the lover—until the final line. Then the love which is sneered at by others, the love at which the poet labors and which she nurtures, and the lover who "never disappointed, / hurt, abandoned" is dramatically identified as "Husband, love, my life—/ poem" (Loose Woman, 11, 2.15-16, 17-18).

The discovery and protection of a space in which to be alone is one of the threads that unifies the vignettes of The House on Mango Street. The narrative sequence develops as a Kunstlerroman—a portrait of the artist as a young Chicana. In their instructive essay "Growing Up Chicano: Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros" Erlinda González-Berry and Tey Diana Rebolledo contrast the characteristics of the male coming-of-age narrative with Cisneros's narrative style in The House on Mango Street. ²⁰ Esperanza first learns to see herself as an artist and then realizes how to be an artist by discovering a mission that is defined by what she can do for all the women, not just herself. Her escape from the barrio must be instructive, for then it can be true freedom based on acceptance rather than self-denial. Esperanza wants not simply to escape or transcend her surroundings, for however brief a time; she embraces literature as a potent opportunity to take control over her own life's story. Agency, in the determination of her self and her life, is what writing offers. Speaking as a Chicana, Cisneros explains:

None of us wants to abandon our culture. We're very Mexican, we're all very Chicanas. Part of being Mexican is that love and affinity we have for our cultura. We're very family centered, and that family extends to the whole Raza. We don't want to be exiled from our people.²¹

Though many of her characteristic themes and subjects are shared in both her poetry and fiction, the two forms appear quite distinct to Cisneros—opposed almost:

Poetry is the art of telling the truth, and fiction is the art of lying. The scariest thing to me is writing poetry, because you're looking at yourself desnuda. You're always looking at the part of you that you don't show anybody.²²

But at the center of that self-scrutiny is the core of truth that Cisneros identifies as the poem itself. In radical contrast fiction is as extroverted as poetry is introverted: "the definition of a story is something that someone wants to listen to. If someone doesn't want to listen to you, then it's not a story."²³ Cisneros's poems do tell stories, but in a compact, economical, and highly imagistic fashion. Her poetry is a kind of storytelling; it can be narrative in this way. But more striking is the highly poetic and evocative quality of Cisneros's fiction.

Several commentators have remarked upon the richly poetic, allusive quality of Cisneros's prose, and she, remarking upon the formal indeterminacy of The House on Mango Street, describes how she wanted to create stories that read like compact and lyrical poems, formed into a collection that could be read at any point in the sequence or as a single narrative.²⁴ The literary structures Cisneros uses are as multifaceted as her cultural identity. In seeking to forge a language that will express but not misrepresent her experiences Cisneros, like many Chicana writers, encounters a number of difficulties. First, there is the question of language and the competing claims of English and Spanish to prominence in her work. Second, many of the canonical literary styles within the American tradition were created to express the realities of masculine experience. Even those forms suited to feminine expression manifest an Anglo vision of the world. Cisneros, along with many of her Chicana sisters, confronts the twin difficulties of writing as a woman and as a Chicana every time she begins to write. The patriarchal bias of Chicano culture and the Anglo bias of American women's culture represent the twin obstacles of sexism and racism that Chicanas must negotiate in order to write authentically. American English is commonly perceived as a language of duplicity, the language of treaty violation, the voice of the master. English threatens to corrupt Chicana expression just as Anglo-American cultural values corrupt the Mexican American community. Cisneros writes mostly but not exclusively in a hybrid English that is required to accommodate Spanish words and phrases. She describes in a witty bilingual fashion the choice she made to write in English as resulting from her lack of familiarity with the nuances of a Spanish-language culture:

I never write in Spanish, y no es que no quiero sino que I don't have that same palate in Spanish that I do in English. No tengo esa facilidad. I think the only way you get that palate is by living in a culture where you hear it, where the language is not something in a book or in your dreams. It's on the loaf of bread you buy, it's on the radio jingle, it's on the graffiti you see, it's on your ticket stub. It must be all encompassing.²⁵

But Cisneros's command of idiom is most striking. The narrative voice of The House on Mango Street captures the nuances of a child's expression, balanced against the demands of the vocabulary of adulthood into which Esperanza is entering. Cisneros favors the first-person mode of address, and it is this quasi-confessional, seemingly autobiographical style that lends her work (in fiction and poetry) such immediacy and such power.

Power is a word that recurs constantly when describing Sandra Cisneros's writing. She has described the Chicana writer as someone who is necessarily an obsessive. By virtue of who she is and the circumstances of her birth, the Chicana writer has no leisure to pursue the aesthetic just for its own sake. She is motivated not so much by inspiration but by the need to articulate pressing issues and to give expression to the ghosts that haunt her.²⁶"Night Madness Poem" describes this compulsion to seek relief in the crafting of words. The poem that seeks expression is likened to "A pea under twenty eiderdowns./Asadness in my heart like stone" (Loose Woman, 49, 2.3-4). As the poem continues, we realize that the words Cisneros wants to speak are to the absent lover she cannot telephone, but these are also the words of her poetry. Frustrated love and frustrated writing merge and are confused, so the poem ends with a challenge: "Choose your weapon. / Mine—the telephone, my tongue" (2.30-31). The struggle for language in which to represent the realities of her experience is the subject of poems such as "By Way of Explanation," in which she uses geography to describe her body: her knees, "devout Moroccans," her hands "twin comedies / from Pago Pago," "The breasts / to your surprise / Gaugin's Papeete" (Wicked Ways, 92, 2.23, 24-26, 30-31). Cisneros deliberately includes the physical body in her poetry in order to contest the assumption that bodily existence is not an appropriate subject for poetry and also to challenge the idea that the body and bodily functions ought not to be spoken of.

This silence is a form of ignorance that oppresses women in particular by keeping them from knowledge of the power they can access through their physical femininity and by promoting feelings of shame and guilt about their sexuality. In the essay "Guadalupe the Sex Goddess" Cisneros discusses her own inherited ignorance of her body and her sexuality. She exclaims,

No wonder, then, it was too terrible to think about a doctor—a man!—looking at you down there when you could never bring yourself to look at yourself. ¡Ay, nunca! How could I acknowledge my sexuality, let alone enjoy sex, with so much guilt? In the guise of modesty my culture locked me in a double chastity belt of ignorance and vergüenza, shame.²⁷

Many of the poems in My Wicked, Wicked Ways address and affirm the poet's transgressive sexuality: in poems about adultery (for example, "For All Tuesday Travellers" and "Amé, Amo, Amaré" ), about sexual obsession (such as "Drought" ), and about her sensuality and sexual attraction to men (in "Sensuality Plunging Barefoot into Thorns" ).

The 1992 preface to the reprinted collection is itself a poem that establishes the context for the poems and introduces the primary themes: the difficult choice to become a writer, the transgression of family and cultural expectation: "A woman like me / whose choice was rolling pin or factory / An absurd vice, this wicked wanton / writer's life" (Wicked Ways, x). The poem "His Story" develops this theme by presenting the father's view of his nonconformist daughter. He searches among family precedents for women who have trespassed across the borders of approved feminine behavior, trying to find an explanation for his sorrow. The poem concludes with the poet's reflection on her father's explorations: "An unlucky fate is mine / to be born woman in a family of men"; and her father's lament: "Six sons, my father groans, / all home. / And one female, / gone" (Wicked Ways, 38-39, 2.33-34, 35-38). The poems that follow this preface are then presented as the offspring of her union with the poetic muse: a brood of "colicky kids / who fussed and kept / me up the wicked nights" (Wicked Ways, xii). And in poems such as "The Poet Reflects on Her Solitary Fate," Cisneros describes the compulsion to write, the need to express her creativity: "The house is cold. / There is nothing on TV. / She must write poems" (Wicked Ways, 37, 2.13-15).

Though this poem, like all of Cisneros's work, is intensely personal she has discovered how to uncover the subtle and intricate web of connections that bind the personal with the cultural. Cisneros begins with personal experiences, feelings, and thoughts and suggests the complex ways in which these attributes of the private self have been shaped, prescribed, and monitored by cultural, racial, political, and economic forces. Her sense of responsibility as a writer is conceived in terms of these social and cultural influences. She explains that she is the first woman in her family to assume a public voice through writing, to take upon herself the power to speak and find that she is heard.²⁸ This privilege brings with it a responsibility to witness the lives and to register the worlds of those who remain invisible: the powerless, the silent. Cisneros tells of how she admires the poetry of Emily Dickinson and what she took to be Dickinson's ability to live both domestic and artistic lives simultaneously. Then Cisneros discovered Dickinson's housekeeper, the woman who performed the routine chores to keep the household running, freeing Dickinson to pursue her intellectual work. Cisneros describes how Emily Dickinson's housekeeper helped her to recognize the enormous contribution her own mother made to enable the young Sandra to read and write when instead she should have been washing dishes.²⁹

In a sense, then, Cisneros's work is dedicated to her mother and to Emily Dickinson's housekeeper, the women who are forgotten but who made possible the lives of other literary women. In her essay "Cactus Flowers" Cisneros describes the courage it takes to define oneself as a Chicana writer:

To admit you are a writer takes a great deal of audacity. To admit you are a feminist takes even greater courage. It is admirable then when Chicana writers elect to redefine and reinvent themselves through their writing.³⁰

To be a writer is, for Sandra Cisneros, to have the opportunity to do something for the silenced women and for all women by inventing new paradigms, by defining new Chicana voices, and by living as a liberated feminine subject of the story she has written for herself.

Notes

1. Pilar E. Rodríguez Aranda, "On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-three: An Interview with Writer Sandra Cisneros," Americas Review 18 (Spring 1990): 64.
2. See Sandra Cisneros, "Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession," Americas Review 15:1 (1987): 69-72.
3. Cherríe Moraga, jacket blurb, Sandra Cisneros, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987); rpt. (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1995).
4. Aranda, "Interview," 66.
5. Ibid.
6. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984); rpt. (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 10. Future page references are given in the text.
7. María Elena de Valdés, "The Critical Reception of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, "in Gender, Self, and Society Proceedings of IV International Conference on the Hispanic Cultures of the United States, ed. Renate von Bardelben (Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 1993), 293.
8. Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991); rpt. (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 69. Subsequent page references are given in the text.
9. Marcela Christine Lucero-Trujillo, "The Dilemma of the Modern Chicana Artist and Critic," in The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States, ed. Dexter Fisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1980), 330.
10. María Herrera-Sobek, "The Politics of Rape: Sexual Transgression in Chicana Fiction," in Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, ed. María Herrera-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes, special issue, Americas Review 15, no. 3, 4 (Fall-Winter 1987): 178.
11. Aranda, "Interview," 69.
12. Ibid., 68.
13. Ibid., 69.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 65.
16. Sandra Cisneros, "Cactus Flowers: In Search of Tejana Feminist Poetry," Third Woman 3:1,2 (1986): 74.
17. Ibid. 74.
18. Aranda, "Interview," 79.
19. Ibid., 71.
20. Erlinda González-Berry and Tey Diana Rebolledo, "Growing Up Chicano: Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros," Revista Chicano Requeña 13.3-4 (1985): 109-19.
21. Aranda, "Interview," 66.
22. Ibid., 75.
23. Ibid., 76.
24. See Sandra Cisneros, "Do You Know Me? I Wrote The House on Mango Street," Americas Review 15 (Spring 1987): 78.
25. Aranda, "Interview," 74.
26. See Cisneros, "Ghosts and Voices," 73.
27. Sandra Cisneros, "Guadalupe the Sex Goddess," in Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, ed. Ana Castillo (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 46.
28. See Sandra Cisneros, "Notes to a Young(er) Writer," Americas Review 15 (Spring 1987): 76.
29. Ibid., 75.
30. Cisneros, "Cactus Flowers," 79.

Primary Bibliography

Cisneros, Sandra. Bad Boys. Chicano Chapbook No. 8. 1980.

——. "Cactus Flowers: In Search of Tejana Feminist Poetry." Third Woman 3, nos. 1 and 2 (1986): 73-80.

——. "Do You Know Me? I Wrote The House on Mango Street." Americas Review 15 (Spring 1987): 77-79.

——. "From a Writer's Notebook. Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession." Americas Review 15 (Spring 1987): 69-73.

——. "Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession." Americas Review 15, no. 1 (1987): 69-72.

——. "Guadalupe the Sex Goddess." In Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe, edited by Ana Castillo, 46-51. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.

——. The House on Mango Street. 1984. 2d rev. ed. Houston: Arte Público, 1988.

——. "Living as a Writer: Choice and Circumstance." Feminist Writers Guild 10 (February 1987): 8-9.

——. Loose Woman. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994.

——. My Wicked, Wicked Ways. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1987.

——. "Notes to a Young(er) Writer." Americas Review 15 (Spring 1987): 74-76.

——. "Only Daughter." In Máscaras, edited by Lucha Corpi, 120-23. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1997.

——. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1991.

——. "A Writer's Voyages." Texas Observer, 25 September 1987, pp. 18-19.