A Chat With Sandra Cisneros, Beloved Author & Patron Saint of Chingonas
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For Latinas of Mexican descent, a few women have reached saint-like status. There’s Selena, obviously, but for the bookish among us, Sandra Cisneros is the Patron Saint of Chingonas. Widely known as the author of The House on Mango Street, which tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Mexican girl growing up in Chicago, Cisneros’s was a needed voice—and her success surprising, given the whiteness of the literary world.
But the Chicago-born, Chicana writer was—and has always been—a fierce talent. No one writes like Cisneros, and for a long time, no one told the stories she did so masterfully in her poems and novels, the stories of Mexican people, of working class people. Perhaps most importantly, she wrote her life, a life many of us didn’t know was an option as “nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife.”
My first introduction to Cisneros came by way of Jessica Rodriguez, a big-haired, loud-mouthed, bespectacled Latina I met in middle school. She had the greatest cackle and left me long voicemails on my family phone, sometimes relaying her school day, sometimes belting out “Paloma Negra” in a way that would make Chavela Vargas proud. My friend of almost 20 years—and Cisneros herself—were my introductions to a feminism that wasn’t white.
Loose Woman was the first book I ever held in my hands by a Latina. I had no idea Latinas could write books, that they could be, as Cisneros says, women of letters. I didn’t know Spanish could so seamlessly be woven into literature, the way my father went back and forth in a single conversation or depending on who he was speaking to. I didn’t know I would ever get to read writing that so accurately reflected what it was like to be the only daughter of a traditional Mexican man. I didn’t know we could own our sexuality. I didn’t know there were poems written by brown women about being a brown woman. When I read “You Bring Out the Mexican in Me,” it was fucking over. My life changed forever, and I’m not the only one.
When I spoke to Cisneros this summer, she told me she never planned any of this, and there was no way to anticipate it. To this day, she has no idea where she got the idea to be a writer because she never met one growing up. But here she is, an international success, recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the founder of two organizations that serve writers, the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. She has also changed the literary landscape and—borrowing from Laverne Cox—become a “possibility model” to generations of Latinas who, for the first time, recognize their families and hear their own voices in the pages of books.
The author’s latest, A House of My Own: Stories From My Life, reads very much like a love letter to Latinas, though Cisneros says this wasn’t intentional. From how we dress (“Huipiles”) and how we mourn (“Vivan los Muertos”) to leaving the family home without a husband, A House of My Own is a compilation of true stories and non-fiction pieces that form a “jigsaw autobiography” of the author’s life. The thread that connects each story is the idea of home and all that means: building your own for the first time, belonging to two countries, and how our childhood homes shape us.
Cisneros is kind and warm and honest, everything you hope your literary hero will be. In August, she talked to me about how her feminism took shape, making Mexico her permanent home, and entering a new phase of her life.
In A House of My Own, you discussed how your “Chicana feminism” began with Norma Alarcón and that you arranged and diminished events in Mango Street as you came into your feminism. Tell me about your feminism. How did it take shape, what informed it?
I feel like the message of feminism has never been clear and part of the reason for that is because it’s filtered through media. Look at who is in the media, writing the stories. It’s filtered to such a degree that it’s not reflective of the real issues at hand. The feminism that people see today is from a white feminist mirror.
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