[Sandra Cisneros © John Dyer 2008]
By Connie Ogle
cogle@miamiherald.com
Sandra Cisneros had not yet been introduced to the writings of Virginia Woolf when she began her remarkable novel A House on Mango Street, but she instinctively understood that desperate longing for a space, a place, a room of one's own.
''Not a flat. Not an apartment. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own.'' Cisneros wrote. ``With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after. Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.''
''Of course,'' says Cisneros, now 54 and chuckling at such youthful audacity. ``I didn't want a room of my own. I wanted a whole house.''
The dissatisfied, fearful and, yes, angry young woman who wrote Mango Street -- just released in a 25th-anniversary Vintage paperback -- is a slightly strange but not unpleasant memory to Cisneros, who will discuss the book and its impact on the literary world Tuesday at Coral Gables Congregational Church.
''I began the book at 21 and finished it in my 28th year,'' she says from a Minneapolis hotel room while she searches for an outlet to plug in an iron. (``This is what you do on tour -- look for outlets.'')
``Imagine if you looked at the yearbook of your 20s. Imagine the things you're thinking. But for me the book has aged well. I do see a lot of wisdom. I see myself asking the right questions. I'm pleased I asked those questions in my 20s.''
Back then, the Chicago-born Cisneros had doubts about ''the expectations society and Latino fathers had for women.'' Her father, she writes in a new introduction, didn't understand why she wanted her own apartment or wanted to be a writer: ''The father wants his daughter to be a weather girl on television, or to marry and have babies.'' Teaching impoverished students caused her to ponder art's role in social change -- ``I felt a sense of impotency at being an educator with a whole class of girls who couldn't live my life. I was privileged compared to them, and I just felt overwhelmed by my sense of powerlessness to change their lives.''
GROWING FURY
And, privately, her fury was growing over entitled, would-be writers she met -- ''privileged with trust funds -- I didn't even know what a trust fund was til I was in grad school!'' -- who could casually call themselves artists and presume to decide what counted as literature.
From these roiling thoughts and emotions emerged bright, observant Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana who lives with her family in a series of rented houses and apartments in Chicago. She longs for a real house, away from her neighborhood and her school where ``they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth.''
Readers responded enthusiastically to Esperanza and the colorful neighborhood figures to whom she introduced them: Cathy Queen of Cats, Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays, and Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin. A slim novel in 45 evocative vignettes, The House on Mango Street has sold more than four million copies in the United States and been translated into more than a dozen languages, most recently Greek, Thai and Serbo-Croatian. It is often the focus of community-reading initiatives in such places as Miami (in 2002), Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Fort Worth and El Paso, and this spring in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and Santa Ana, Calif.
''It's such an important book, because it's the first encounter many non-Latinos had with Latino culture,'' says Cristina Garcia, author of Dreaming in Cuban and The Handbook for Luck. ``This is one of those books that's a bridge to the culture, and there's a Latina girl at the heart of it, the most forgotten of characters. No one put them center stage literarily or otherwise. For Esperanza to be front and center of our consciousness, a tiny ambassador to the Latino world, with her wonderful humorous and very specific observations, is a great gift.''
UNIVERSAL APPEAL
But the book has a universal appeal as well, says Cisneros' friend, author and playwright Denise Chavez.
''Sandra captured the essence of young womanhood,'' Chavez says. ``The book is based in the tradition of Latina culture but also has become a universal coming-of-age story. The writing is beautiful, the images profound. . . . Sandra was able to tap into the lushness and fecundity and grace and beauty of being a young woman. I told her I wish I'd written the book!''
Mango Street is taught in high schools, middle schools and even elementary schools. Vintage publisher Anne Messitte says it's the bestselling title on her backlist and that the company used the book to kick off its Spanish-language imprint in 1994.
''Over the years it has proved itself,'' says Messitte, who adds that her third grader's class has the book on its curriculum for next year. ``It renews itself with new audiences, and that's the definition of a classic -- to do that year after year, decade after decade, finding that connection with readers across a wide age range.''
Sue Rodriguez, lead teacher for the International Baccalaureate diploma program at Ferguson High in south Miami-Dade, taught Mango Street at Coral Gables and Coral Reef high schools throughout the late 1980s and '90s and says students always responded positively, especially at largely Hispanic Gables High.
''It's simple to read, though it's melodic and beautiful. But it's not a struggle for students, so they can think about it a lot,'' Rodriguez says. 'If I think back to what I was teaching in previous years before I read the book and started teaching more modern writers, we were still using that old lexicon of the so-called classics and yet not realizing that a lot of those books did not appeal to kids. As the world changed, and as technology burst onto the scene, we weren't going to get kids' attention with those books. The House on Mango Street has saved many an English teacher's sanity.''
Miami novelist Diana Abu-Jaber taught Mango Street at the college level in Oregon.
''There's magic in its brevity,'' she says. ``It's a little crystal of a book, and you can read through these fragments, these pieces, and get such a big, big story. . . . Its simplicity is deceptive. The child is able to look at hard, complex issues -- poverty, abuse -- and render them in this incredibly innocent, beautifully nonjudgmental form. I guess that's what a lot of us are looking for, to talk about the hard stuff in a really clear, simple way.''
MOSTLY A POET
Cisneros had viewed herself mostly as a poet when she started work on Mango Street, and her exquisite mastery of language is apparent in Esperanza's budding feminist voice. She is now author of the poetry collections Bad Boys, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Woman; a story collection, Woman Hollering Creek; and the hefty novel Caramelo, about a Mexican-American family much like hers. But as a young woman at the Iowa Writer's Workshop -- she had previously earned an English degree at Loyola University -- Cisneros at times foundered.
''I was stumbling and bumbling around,'' she says. 'I didn't know about feminist Latina authors. I was hacking my way through thickets, thinking, `I know there's a path here somewhere.' What helped is when I realized there were no other working-class people, especially Latina or Americans of color, telling the story I needed. Emotion got me through. I was depressed. I got angry. . . . We saw a flood of viewpoints from people with power, and people who wrote other kinds of stories were made to feel as if they didn't count and made to feel inferior. So I wrote the book I wanted to read.''
Other writers were emboldened by her trailblazing.
''Twenty-five years ago there was no Latina literature,'' says novelist and memoirist Esmeralda Santiago. Mango Street 'was something we were looking for. I didn't know I was a writer then, but I was certainly looking for that story, that experience that was so particular to my life and the lives of people that I knew and loved. I grew up in public schools in New York, and we read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Carson McCullers and To Kill a Mockingbird, and those are wonderful books. However, they were at a remove from my experience. Sandra was able to show us that our stories, our lives, our experiences, were worthy of literature. Many writers like myself all of a sudden said, `OK, yeah! My life is interesting! I don't have to live in the Deep South to write!' ''
These days Cisneros, who lives in San Antonio with (at last count) six rescued dogs -- you can see them on her website, www.sandracisneros.com -- finds that assisting fledgling writers is paramount. She's writer in residence at Our Lady of the Lake University and president and founder of the Macondo Foundation, a group of writers, journalists and artists with an eye toward community-building and social change. The organization, incorporated in 2006, started in Cisneros' kitchen.
INTEREST IN ACTIVISM
Cisneros' attention may be drawn to new voices -- ''I want to use my energies now that I'm older to work with writers who are engaged in community building and activism'' -- but circumstances indicate readers will remain enchanted with Mango Street for years to come.
''It speaks to such a common experience for immigrants but also for people in general,'' says Haitian-born Miami author Edwidge Danticat. ``She writes about the Virginia Woolf premise taken to everyday life, people wanting their own roof over their heads. In this time when all we hear about is foreclosure and growing homelessness, and people living in cars, her book is even more poignant. It's more relevant than ever, given the climate. It's going to have another 25 years, at least. Each time you can read it differently, depending what stage you're at in your life. I read it when I was almost 20, and now I can imagine reading it to my daughters. All these little milestones in it are milestones in a young girl's life.''
For Cisneros, the fact that Mango Street continues to inspire and entertain is gratifying, but still she marvels at its effect.
''This book empowers readers,'' she says. ``And I wrote it from such a powerless place! That it has done that is amazing to me.''
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